Replies

I concur...Rock 103 had been on life support for years, and basically expired with the untimely demise of Bad Dogg. In fact, the Wake Up Crew lost something when they canned Bev Hart during the first round of cost-cutting a few years back.

And there’s a certain, sad irony in that. The Wake Up Crew played virtually no music and as Rock 103’s ratings began to go south, Clear Channel could have moved that program to WREC and it would have attracted more listeners than the morning news block. In fact, I’m guessing there isn’t much difference in the audience demos for the talk station and Rock 103 these days, since the core audience for classic rock is aging.

It’s also worth noting that Clear Channel has had a fair amount of success in “flipping” rock stations to conservative talk, most notably in Raleigh and New Orleans. So, the precedent is there, just a matter of making the call. But I’m not convinced that CC has any long-term commitment to WREC; they had a very successful talker in Birmingham (WERC) and essentially squandered it; the last I heard, that station had an automated rock format (on AM, no less). So Clear Channel knows how to screw up a news/talk outlet as well.

Personally, I’d like to see Cox enter the Memphis market; they have a very strong track record in news/talk, as evidenced by their success with WSB (Atlanta), WDBO (Orlando), WHIO (Dayton) and WOKV in Jacksonville. But I’m not sure if Cox is interested, or if CC is willing to sell.

One more thought: the history of conservative talk in Memphis is that of stations screwing up and other taking advantage of those mistakes. Rush’s original affiliate in Memphis was WMC-AM, which made a successful transition from country to news/talk. Then, someone decided that Rush was too expensive and they dropped him. WREC (and CC) snapped him up, they blew past WMC in the ratings, and that latter station switched back to country a few years later. It will be interesting to see if one of the FM talkers can parlay WREC’s mistakes into their own success.