The September ratings are out.
KNBR would like to thank the SF Giants. After baseball, the party will be over.
Entercom's Sports FM, "The Game", (95.7 FM), even with a much-pubbed programming change and the A's winning dropped a notch. (Hey guys, it's not just the signal, but when you can barely hear the product in many parts of the Bay Area, it doesn't help.)
KQED and KCBS, in particular, had steady and solid numbers.
KGO is on a precipitous ride down the slope to nowhere, but that's self-inflicted and something the new Bungey will have to deal with. Maybe they should run Bloomberg News 24/7. It's syndicated, they don't have to hire but one board op and Jared Hart can be the Program Director and Prime Minister of Greenland combined.
Oh, we have to always remind people that these ratings don't mean a hill of beans to the advertisers--they only care about demos and how many white kids from Walnut Creek eat ice cream and Fremont truck drivers and the like...
But the overalls do reflect certain trends. Coffee time.
I think after the bump up..THEGAME lost listeners when both Eric Davis left and PD Jason Barret mate it all white bread all day sports talk. Its overkill what white middle aged men's slant on sports. Tierney and Davis biggest argument is regular Dockers or flat fronts?. That show has dived.
ReplyDeleteKNBR..nobody listens to the talk..its fake callers and kill time hosts.
Crap is crap, no matter the color. The programming change for the Game was nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I don't care what color the Game guys are as long as they're good. Lund and Tierney no talent hacks. Urban is coma inducing. Towny's evening show was good. Now, Steinmetz just drags him down. The Rise Guys are really the only thing worth listening to. Will we even be talking about this station a year from now? At some point, Entercomm will have to realize it's not working with the current cast and either make sweeping changes or just change formats. Let's be honest, syndicated sports radio would probably get the same, if not higher, ratings.
DeleteThat's true 1035. My point is,Barret ignored what had been built on..the early months of various people of color hosts including Tim Kawakami..and the polar views of Davis and Tierney to Henry Wolford and the Guru on weekends...none got a promotion..and Rick Bucher-waspy WASP- just walked past everybody.
DeleteNot that people of color cant suck-Rod Brooks- but,for sucking he has lasted long..give others of color the chance to thrive or suck too!
Barrett doesn't know what he's doing. Never has. He has been lucky to have landed at radio stations where the management happened to spend a lot of money while he was there. Any close inspection of his career displays first hand that he has never truly been able to create talent because he doesn't know what talent is. Someone should ask Dan Patrick what he thinks of Jason Barrett. Oh wait, I know the answer to that question because I asked him myself, and the response was hilarious.
DeleteWhere he's been successful it's because money was spent. He has never created programming that matters. The current cast has some decent parts, but is absolutely awful as a whole. Barrett thinks he has all the answers and that's not going to change. I've worked with the guy so I know this first hand. He's fearful of hiring anyone smarter than him because he's insecure, and Tierney is a complete ass-kisser just hoping to remain on the job.
Truth be told, and this is a 100% fact, if Brandon Tierney gets a job offer to do talk radio in New York City he is leaving. This is a fact. Thing is, that offer isn't coming. Don't think he's not excited about the possibility of CBS/Cumulus and other sports radio networks starting up. Tierney isn't bad, but he's not good for the market. He'll leave the moment he has a chance to, regardless of how much he likes the Bay Area.
The boiling point at KNBR's morning Radnich Interrupt-a-Fest is close to being reached, after Gary's inept segment with Trent Balke this morning and Kate's frustration boiling over right afterwards...not to mention his ignoring the repeated traffic signal earlier because of some inane point he was "making."
ReplyDeleteLadies and Gentlemen, "The Grrrreat Gary Radnich," catch him while you can.
Radnich haters here are constantly predicting his imminent demise yet he continues to ride high at both KNBR and KRON.
DeleteThere is no objective indication that's going to change anytime soon.
I've never predicted or asked for his demise. I just have to counterpoint the garbage and ignorance he puts on KNBR. Other then AGREEING WITH HIM that yes-it pays to smoooze the bosses- as Radnich has said he has done to survive,I have plenty of material.
DeleteS
@12:54
DeleteYou never predicted or asked for his demise? Really?
What does "Ladies and Gentlemen, "The Grrrreat Gary Radnich," catch him while you can" mean?
Two different people writing the posts you are referring to, I wrote the first, not sure who "S" is...
DeleteThat said, "The Grrrrreat Gary Radnich" refers to Rad's penchant for dropping that kind of "Grrrreat" identifier on any person who he really feels is beneath him, just an inside wink to the listeners about who is really in charge.
As for the comment in other post about "riding high at KRON," I had to stifle a laugh...loathed by on air folks that he pulls the same shtick on ("Pam, who is the second best quarterback Cal has ever had?" "Jackie, has Donald Fehr been good for the NHL Players?"), unprepared at both jobs (unless half-reading the Chron sports page headlines counts), the demise of the execrable "Gary's World" where his ramblings were pitiful and the lack of prep REALLY showed, and leading the worst sports "department" (when Vern left, who remains with ol' Gar?) at the worst station on the West Coast...yeah, he's sure in the catbird's seat!
looks like KKSF did some plummeting, twice as much as kgo
ReplyDeleteI hardly consider a 0.1 drop a "plummet" - your headlines are starting to read like the Weekly World News
ReplyDeleteRich has a hard time writing objectively when it facts contradict his personal viewpoints.
DeleteA more accurate headline would be "KGO's Plummet Continues."
DeleteYou can't seriously argue that a decline of the sort that the previously #1 KGO's ratings have seen is anything other than a "plummet" (unless you'd rather use a term such as "freefall" or "collapse" or "crater" - the last probably not appropriate, because they haven't reached zero yet).
In all honesty, KGO was probably not #1 years ago. The diary method was so flawed that people just wrote down letters across the board when they never even listened. I'd say they've been a 2.5 for a long time even with the old format and I'd call this a correction instead of a plummet.
DeleteThey really didn't change that much - already did news morning, noon, and afternoons so basically they just changed nights and overnights which aren't relevant in ratings anyway
Number 1 is relative. In what demo(s)? Back then, both Average Quarter Hours and enormous cume from older demos combined to make KGO a powerhouse.
DeleteHowever, for the last 20 years at least, the 25-54 demo has been creeping away from AM and the demo of KGO kept reaching higher ... 35+. 44-64. 55+ tp where that demo is slowly dying off.
As a result, FM has become a stranglehold on AM listeners (now only 20% of the population) and the many media choices has exploded with iPods, iPads, iPhones, cable TV choices, mp3 players, smarthphones and more.
The tides have changed and KGO claiming it's former "diary" dominance is far different than what it is in this "PPM" world.
Mickey Luckoff saw the writing on the wall years ago before PPM was introduced and went ballistic when the technology came out and moved the needle for good.
KGO has always been challenged in the younger demo fold and didn't keep up with the times.
Only Jack Swanson knows for sure how those magic numbers translated as the demographic universe changed and KGO got hurt by it.
How is hatemonger Brian Sussman doing in his morning time slot?
ReplyDeleteSirius NFL is great. KNBR's local interviews with Coach Harbaugh and Baalke are not very informative. The "local" sports talk is awful. More like high school scrums after drinking a six pack. Rod Brooks' arrogance is legendary (see ya at 7-11 when Cumulus figures you out), and the little boy Radnich and his sidekick may make the younger demos laugh at their worn-out jokes, but they have driven away sports fans like me who actually buy things, which was a recent point of one of Rich's recent columns regarding the buying power of the 50-something demo. Sirius NFL may not always have local sports programming on, but I listen for LEAGUE-wide discussion. 49ers, Giants all the time is just boring. Like KNBR, but add childish to the two sets of morning hosts, arrogant and boring to the mid-afternoon crew and I haven't listened to late afternoon in ages, but I imagine it's just as bad.
ReplyDeleteBrian Sussman, the climate-change denier and Islamophobe, is doing great with hate-talk radio with his sidekick who is just as bad, if not worse. But, it sells. No matter if you have a drink or not after spewing such worthless hate, nothing justifies what Sussman and the sidekick say and do. It's not funny. It's hateful. It's base and prejudiced. Sorry, Rich; I know you like his sidekick. She's just as bad as Sussman.
ReplyDeleteWho is Brian Sussman's sidekick anyway? I take it that he is for good ol' Mitt Romney!!!
DeleteIt is Melanie Morgan, who use to be on with Lee Rogers, yes they are for Romney, because they have no other choice, but Sussman and Melanie would prefer someone much more conservative than Romney, they are not sure he is "a real conservative". They could be right.
DeleteKNBR may cover the Giants and 49ers, but I would really like to hear a little discussion of some of the other teams without having to listen to ESPN and Sirius. It would be nice to know that the local sports talk show hosts on KNBR know a few things about what is going on around the rest of the country. Good point by an earlier poster;
ReplyDeleteif you talk Giants and 49ers non-stop and just take callers who also only want to talk about the local teams, and if your station does only the obligatory softball interviews that KNBR's hosts do with their Niners and Giants guests, the listener is getting a very limited amount of information.
Rather, it's like you're getting a radio PR release.
While many of us who live in the bay area, love to hear about the success of our San Francisco teams, there's a limit to how much you can discuss them. After awhile it becomes repetitive and there's overkill.
KNBR also has the gall to call itself 'American's number one sports station!' when in fact it isn't. WFAN in NYC has been around longer as a sports station, they actually pioneered the concept, and they are a big step up in quality from KNBR
KNBR also has no business calling itself 'the sports leader,' when it barely covers anything concerning the A's and Raiders.
How can the top sports radio station in the region get away with barely even mentioning the Raiders and A's, two of the area's four MLB and NFL teams?
Jason Barrett and Lee Hammer are too examples of how crap floats to the top of the toilet bowl. Hammer better watch his step because the the new guy at KNBR sounds like a hopped up nut who's going to slash left and right, and he may get in the way and find himself out of work. I can't imagine anyone in his position who is as incompetent and toadying to management as Lee Hammer.
ReplyDeleteWhile KNBR is a joke with idiots such as 'Pauly Mac' cretin's like 'P-Con' and no talent hacks such as Kate Scott, what doesn't 'the Game' have that's really an y better? Drew Hoffer doing updates...give me a break? Loudmouth know it alls such as Lund and Tierney? And the other day they have Matt Steinmetz talking baseball? Matt Steinmetz is a basketball guy. But they also had Michal Urban talking NBA once, and he's a baseball guy. What's going on in Barrett's brain? Barrett's programming moves have been dismal. And The ratings show it. They can't even get a lousy, stinking 1.0 share.
Barrett hires no talent TV hacks from Comcast on the weekends (another local media outlet that no one is paying any attention to, unless a game involving one of our local teams is being carried.)
But Entercom is cheap and they can't fire Barrett because then they'd have to blow up what they already have and start again from scratch...not a good idea.
It's too bad, because bay area sports fans deserve better. Instead they have to listen to the likes of Fitz and Brooks, 'The Drive' and that bloated, red-faced yuck-fest maestro Gary Radnich.