Yesterday, we wrote about Mike McConnell's departure from 700 WLW-AM/Cincinnati, and noted that the speculation had been that he was headed for Tribune's WGN-AM 720/Chicago.
"Speculation" has now become "confirmation" for the second time in the last 18 hours.
Tom Taylor at Radio-Info writes in his Taylor on Radio-Info newsletter (and in a news post here) this very morning that he got hold of a presser from Tribune late last night, confirming that McConnell WILL be headed to the Chicago flamethrower, starting August 9th. (It, like WLW-AM here, is a 50,000 watt signal that blasts across the eastern United States easily after dark.) His new airshift hasn't been announced by Tribune as of yet.
Unclear also is something that our friends at OMW happened to mention: McConnell's syndication weekend middays and its future. The closest market we definitively have information for is Rushville in west-central Illinois...closer to Quincy. (Any Chicagoans out there...do you know if he's syndicated in the Windy City on weekends?) He very well COULD lose the entire program if Clear Channel makes that choice with Premiere being his syndicator.
We haven't gotten our hands on the official word from Tribune yet...as we're just now reading from the aforementioned Tom Taylor's newsletter ourselves this morning. When and if we do, we'll put it up here.
Chicago, as has been said, is a dream market for many talents wanting to hit the big cities... and that's certainly the case right here.
As we noted, McConnell has been with WLW since sometime in the mid-80's, around the time yours truly was born. (In fact, he joined the station IN 1985.) So he's been around as long as yours truly can remember. We can't recall a time when McConnell WASN'T on middays, let's put it that way.
Anyway, congratulations to Mr. McConnell on this next step in his career...he's a true professional in every sense of the word...here's hoping Chicago provides him with a really good platform...
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