Clear Channel, Day 3 Wrapup

A couple final CC notes...

== Paul Daugherty, Enquirer sportswriter and (now former) WLW-AM SportsTalk host, writes about being canned here.

== And second...oops.

Turns out we were almost totally in the dark, and it was only after a little investigation (plus a helpful correction from OMW), that we got this little piece of information regarding the new feed arrangement between CC/Cincinnati's newsroom and CC/Boston's stations.

It turns out, Cincinnati really doesn't have a whole lot to offer Boston, if anything.

Boston's Clear Channel cluster includes two Spanish-language AM stations. We can't see Cincinnati providing Spanish newscasts to those.

That leaves Boston's FM stations...and all of them are music stations, which means of course none of them have any talk component whatsoever.

Our best guess as to what service CC/Cincinnati will provide Boston? Morning newscasts for the FM's, and MAYBE a quick PM drive news hit or two.

That is, unless CC/Boston is thinking of a format flip to take one of their stations to news/talk, to compete with WBZ-AM. Could they perhaps flip the Spanish AM's to talk (even though for a couple years [2004-2006] they were liberal talk)? Or maybe try flipping one of the FM's?

Although, Cumulus tried that FM talk experiment here with WFTK-FM, and we all know how THAT turned out...and they have WTKK-FM there in Boston, which is owned by Greater Media and has been there since 1999. You could not find two more contrasting examples of the FM Talk format, and how each one played out. In Cincinnati, it lasted just over 1 year. In Boston, WTKK has been going strong for 10 years, and remains today as Boston's only FM talk station. The closest competition on the AM dial there besides WBZ-AM is WRKO-AM, which does not even have its own newsroom, relying instead on Metro Networks' operations...which is based from one of it's thirteen hubs, we're guessing located in NYC if not Boston itself. We were looking to find that information in an OMW item from back in 2008, but as luck would have it, the article can't be found from that link...