Great find reared.
Very applicable parts from the piece:
Quote:
Listeners are finding Grantland podcasts if they want to hear someone talk about basketball in an educated fashion, not tuning into someone whose grasp of their free hot-dog lunch is firmer than his grasp of the NBA salary cap.
Yup. I have Grantland, Cubs-specific and sports gambling podcasts subscribed to but no WSCR/WMVP ones.
Quote:
Bruce Drennan, who has been in Cleveland sports talk for 46 years and is now on Fox Sports Ohio, had, and still has, a fiery personality of sorts. "What bugs me about sports radio these days is they are nothing but talking heads, they don't really take many calls much, and they just babble at each other without saying much," he says.
100%
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The stations run press conferences live even if nothing is said. As 92.3 The Fan afternoon host Adam the Bull says, "You have to run them just in case they do say something important." The problem with that is simple: Players and coaches almost never say anything. Time filler itself then becomes fodder for more time filler as everyone discusses the nothing that was said.
The worst
Quote:
And for a flagship station, one that trumpets its coverage of Cleveland's most popular team, it's embarrassing that 92.3 doesn't even send a reporter on the road with the Browns unless the game's in Pittsburgh or Cincinnati. (WKNR, meanwhile, sends Tony Grossi just about everywhere, including the owner's meetings.) As one host told Scene, "It's not anything a podcaster couldn't do sitting at home." Home of the Browns, indeed
Quote:
It isn't that sports talk has to be intellectual vibrant or always doing something important. But thinking that all your listeners are brain dead, that they don't care what you serve them up, is not a good way to program content that tries to gain listeners, not push them away. Not being serious intellectually does not mean one has to be intellectually vapid either. We get enough of that through social media.
Hmmm