The Final Post From Florence

As I begin to wind my efforts down, I do have a couple announcements that will be made at the conclusion.

First, let's wrap up the stuff that's been sitting around a few days...

Widmer Re-Trial Coverage: You'd practically have to be living underground to not know what's going on up north of town, in Warren County with the Ryan Widmer case.

We won't get into the legal stuff here, but will note that this is the third trial for the man accused of killing his wife up there.

What we'd like to note is that, much like the last two trials, all of the Cincinnati and Dayton area stations are going all out to cover this. We know there are live, blow-by-blow blogs on 3 of the four major affiliates in Cincinnati.

WLWT-TV 5 has brought back Travis Gettys' live blogging from the courtroom with something called Scribble, while WXIX-TV 19 appears to be going with the "Cover It Live" platform they use for their live chats. WCPO-TV 9 seems to have jumped into that platform too, with both feet. We don't see any evidence of WKRC 12 doing such a thing, but they have a reporter stationed up there now.

We're hearing national programs like Dateline are there, too.

So, if you live or work in Lebanon, expect the craziness surrounding this big case to continue...

Survivor Holding Auditions: This one's sort of late, although it's happening today.

WKRC-TV announced recently that the hit TV show "Survivor" would be holding auditions in Florence. Those auditions take place this evening, starting at 4 PM at Turfway Park. The first 200 people are guaranteed to be allowed to make an audition tape. It sounds like they're capping it around 350. That threshold might have already been reached, but you can most certainly head down there. (Turfway Park is located just off...what else....Turfway Road, near what used to be called St. Luke West Hospital, and near the old Bigg's store.)

John Kiesewetter has more on this story, including an email from someone who says they've been there since 11 PM last night. (The post was written about 8:30.)

Radio Ratings - Christmas Music CAN Help: As a general rule, we don't go into the ratings here.

But it's worth noting that Christmas music has helped stations in markets around the country, including in the home territory of our colleagues at Ohio Media Watch, where reportedly WMVX-FM 106.5 was in the top three. (They re-tooled as "106.5 The Lake" after Christmas.)

But in Cincinnati, it doesn't look like perennial Christmas music player WRRM-FM "Warm 98" 98.5 was able to take the top spot in ratings. WLW-AM 700 remained in the lead...but only just by .6 of a point!

WRRM doubled in the 3-book trend, going 4.8-6.3-9.4, just below WLW's 9.8-9.5-10.0.

It's proof that in these economic times, stations will go with what works...and this definitely worked for WRRM. (For WAKW "Star" 93.3, the other station that went all-Christmas...well it, too, doubled its ratings, but only 2.0-4.8-4.5.)

The Changes: Finally, let's finish this item out with the two major announcements.

First: Allow me to introduce you to Cindy Detro and Jerry Jicha, the couple that will take over this effort.

They are two friends of yours truly who expressed interest in taking this effort over. They're from Circleville, Ohio, which is south of Columbus and east of Cincinnati.

They also happen to be blind. (Yes, blind as in they can't see.) That doesn't mean they can't consume media just like everyone else does, and they do. They use voice technology to use computers - which is a good segue into the next change.

The official transfer will also result in a change to where this blog is hosted. Starting with Monday's posting, all future blogs will be hosted on Wordpress. We're working on that as we type this post.

The brand new, Wordpress version of TSMW will be here. We're working on getting the twitter account hooked up to that, too.

And, a note: The Blogger version will stay up for the foreseeable future. Neither myself, nor Cindy and Jerry, just not be posting to it anymore