You know it's bad in Syracuse...

[BobRoss]

...when Nova 105.1 morning host Rachel Marisay (a/k/a Y94FM midday host "Rachel") now appears to be pulling TRIPLE DUTY, as an anchor on WSYR-570. She did the 7pm top of the hour update on Tuesday. I didn't happen to be near a radio any other adjoining hours, but this is at least the second time in the past few weeks I've heard her anchoring.

How much cheaper can CC get? And the more important question... which hours are tracked and which ones are live? You would really really HOPE that a morning show and newscasts are two things that are still done live, even in the cheapest of markets. Or even if not live, at least close to it (news voicetracked within the past 30 minutes). But how can that be possible with an on-air day that spans at least 14 hours?

Also, whatever happened to keeping jocks and news anchors separate? You never know when you could wind up with a conflict of interest, if a client endorsed by the personality as a "jock" winds up being the company caught in a big scandal in the news. Or if said jock offers opinions about certain things while ad-libbing on the FM side... how do you trust their "news judgement" when they appear on the AM side? Or how about the fact that she's an OK jock, but she's a horrible news reader.

At this point, WSYR would be better off just doing what WIBX does. When the real news people are off-duty at night, let network take the entire 6 minutes. If WSYR wants to have local news 24/7, then they should be staffing it with real news people 24/7. Otherwise, WSYR is setting itself up for another big egg-on-the-face next time there's a local disaster (like the major northeast power outage a few years ago) and they wind up airing outdated news from 3 hours ago.

 

[dustintv]

Wow that is bad! And 7PM is when the Jim Reith ends right? Talk about your penny-pinching. At least this hasn't happened to WHAM-AM yet...

 

[SirRoxalot]

Deep Cuts

It sounds to me that Clear Channel feels that they have no competition to worry about. We KNOW that they're in serious cost-cutting mode.

It's too bad that nobody else in the market is prepared to challenge them.

 

[ThePickleReport]

...when Nova 105.1 morning host Rachel Marisay (a/k/a Y94FM midday host "Rachel") now appears to be pulling TRIPLE DUTY, as an anchor on WSYR-570.

You also know it's bad when I haven't heard s**t about Nova 105.1. When did they switch to that format?

 

[BobRoss]

The switch from "The Dog" to "Nova" was a couple of years ago, give or take a few months. It's actually now part of that "Aloha Stations Trust" that CC set up, so that the privately-owned CC would comply with FCC market ownership limits (which the existing, original CC was exempt from, since Nova was already under the umbrella before the latest rules change).

Even though Nova is still in the building and "realistically" it's business as usual with CC running the show... on paper, they're separately owned by the Aloha Trust.

 

[SirRoxalot]

Worse is Yet to Come

"Aloha Trust". Heh. I guess the Mays family figures that they'll be able to afford a nice Hawaii vacation when they sell "Nova 105.1" to some unsuspecting sucker.

Actually, the Aloha Trust will own both radio and TV stations in several states once the Clear Channel privatization deal is approved. The Utica/Rome stations that were sold to Galaxy were also listed among stations that were allocated for the Aloha Trust. WWDG is the only Syracuse-area station left in the trust. Wanna bet that it will be sold as a stand-alone to a religious broadcaster?

 

[ThePickleReport]

The switch from "The Dog" to "Nova" was a couple of years ago, give or take a few months.

July 21, 2006 it says on R&R. I very vaguely remember that happening now.