Oldies Cat, It's nice to see you back in the Jax board. Little seems to happen here but I suppose this is big news and that's no doubt brought people from all over to our little corner of the world.
I don't think you can fault Mburg or anyone else for that matter for rooting for the underdog. The Renda operation is as close to mom and pop as you can get and in this day of corporate giants socking it to the little guy, there's always going to be those in the little guy camp. Nothing wrong with that.
I'm hearing how many people are surprised by all of this and I'm not surprised at all. The handwriting was on the wall for way too long. About the only thing that was surprsing was how long Renda Broadcasting took to fix the problems.
The bottom line is many of the problems should never have occurred in the first place. But as has been discussed to death on this board is the fact that they blew opportunity after opportunity to position themselves and give the station an identity.
Here's what my gut is telling me. When Cox abandoned oldies, Renda saw what they thought was a quick fix to do something with Arrow. It would almost appear that they thought playing a lot of the same music Cool 96.9 played would somehow get a good portion of those listeners to find them and stay with them. Very naive. It was doomed from the start. With virtually no promotional/marketing budget, automated the majority of the time, a half-ass mixing of way too many styles of music and the lack of good quality syndicated programming, they certainly earned the basement ratings they got.
And they certainly didn't antipcate just how successful Eagle would become. While no one was expecting a lower-power station to be a significant challenger - they still had the opportunity to do better than they performed.
But on the cheap, you get what you get. And for those who say the format is dead, I half-agree. The way oldies stations were programmed a few years ago is no more but they have evolved and I've heard some good examples of that around the country. That was not the case in Jax.
Once the old GM was gone and all that appeared to happen was a slight tightening of the playlist, it was obvious a flip was in the future.
But you have to say this. This time, they made sure the execution was flawless and the overall sound of the station shows consistency. I'm certain they will fare better with this Movin' thing than where they were and Gary Spurgeon at the helm is a plus too.
I have a lot of very fond memories of WKQL and the great talent of yesteryear who graced its' microphones. It's time to finally move on. I can only hope that when people recall WKQL in the future that they remember just how great the station was and not what was allowed to happen to her over the past couple of years.
