Well, Flinn Broadcasting has snatched Radio Pig away from us again, fans. You know that long-rumored political talk station that was supposed to show up in town? Well, it will premiere February 21 on 87.7 and 1210 AM (sorry, Standards fans, you lose too) and it's called THE POINT. I guess that stands for the heads of their potential listeners.
Flinn has turned it over to Mark Skoda (that's right, the Tea Party guy), so where you once heard Classic Rock (FM) or Standards (AM), you now get to hear Skoda or Steve Gill or Dennis Miller. I haven't been this excited since the Poinsett County Quilting Bee of 1969, I'll tell you.
I presume that this is brokered, and the Doc is getting his money up front. I'll tell you folks, if this had been done two years ago, BEFORE the advent of the Personal People Meter rating system, this would have looked like an unmitigated success because all these wackos would have written in WMPS-FM in their diaries and it would have looked like they were leading the pack.
However, with the advent of the PPMs, we will get a much better idea of just how this will work, even in a nominally right-wing town like Memphis. Don't believe me? Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are getting dropped left and right in markets large enough to use PPM; as the technology spreads to even the smallest markets, we will see how little right-wing talk radio really matters.
Like I said, I hope Doc Flinn is getting his money up front. I give it a year before the Pig returns.
1 comment:
Thing is, every time "The Pig" leaves and returns, the music is worse.
It takes some stability to build an audience and, as President Obama once said about John McCain, Dr. Flinn's programming decisions are erratic. He moves the stations to new "homes" on the dial and, before people can find and get used to it, he changes the format, whether by "tweaking" it or making drastic changes such as this one.
There are a lot of things I appreciate about what Dr Flinn tries to do in broadcasting and he's enough of a "rebel" (when it comes to broadcasting)that he could make radio fun again, but he seems not to have the patience to let things grow.
I kind of wonder, though, if the only idea behind the Pig wasn't to make Flinn's name more acceptable to the more liberal type of audience the Pig's programming would attract.
He sure wasn't shy about playing those little sound bites between every song that always mentioned his name, in spite of the fact that he's got a voice more suited for making the deacon's announcements at a Wednesday night prayer meeting than for radio.
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