This is significant to me because I grew up having to listen to 890 in the car. Now while Roe and Garry weren't all that bad once upon a time, I really resent the fact that I had to grow up around a station that carried Rush Limbaugh.
So I'm looking through radio-online and see that 890 is down to a 1.4 --
one-point-four! -- for the spring 2014 rating period,
down from 2.7 about a year ago. The Big 89 is now a small #24, trailing such luminaries as K-Hits, US 99, Power 92 (#1 in the streets!), the anodyne and directionless 100.3, the Mexican polka music on the old 'NUA, and in what must be the greatest indignity to right-wing radio, WBEZ. Of course, WBEZ is where NPR stands for "nice, polite, rich," so it's not exactly like Roe Conn's losing to Democracy Now or some shit, but still, ten years ago I
never would have imagined that a public radio station could beat a conservative AM blowtorch. The climate of radio, particularly public radio, just never would have allowed for that. But here we are.
Actually, looking at the stations that
aren't ahead of WLS, all I see are suburban stations, Spanish stations, and WFMT. So if I'm not mistaken, 890 is the worst-performing anglophone commercial station in the city of Chicago.
♫ DOUBLE-U-ELLLL-ESSSS!!!! ♫ I also bring this up because for all the talk about every little move WGN makes and how they're always about to be in serious trouble, their ratings actually indicate that conditions are pretty stable. Of course, a corpse's condition is also stable, and corpses seem to be WGN's target audience these days, but still, a 4.0 for spring (4.6 in May surely on the winds of Blackhawks playoffs) is not that bad for a station whose programming
is that bad. WLS, though, just as much a heritage AM station as WGN, they're just circling the drain here and comparatively speaking, no one's talking about it. So I figured maybe we could.
Ratings-wise, 890 is now the weakest performer in the Cumulus cluster, behind KQX, WLS-FM, and the Loop. We can't speak for billing yet because no solid numbers have come in on how KQX bills (nor the Loop under Cumulus), but I remember Feder did a piece on 2013 billing and 890 was down $2MM (or 13%) from 2012, and a 13% drop in billing certainly sounds precipitous to me. KQX is killin' it in the ratings, though. I hear it in public a lot.
As I said in one of the Mac threads (too many to keep straight, thx Beardown), it wouldn't surprise me if 890 goes sports. Cumulus handles distribution for
C-B-S-SPORTS-RA-DI-O!!!, which has minimal carriage in Chicago. I don't know whether CBS could block it; the very fact that two media conglomerates are in on this together still kinda boggles my mind. Also, it looked like they were trying to prime the pump for a move to sports by doing that awful "Sports Pregame Show" with Lou Canellis, Steve Stone, and a host who only seems to care about Dancing With The Stars.
Would you be happy with WLS going sports?
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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), so turning it into guy-talk/sports wouldn't be much of a migration. Do it right and they could pull the rug out from under the Game and their "liking sports without being defined by them" crap.
