BlatherWatch

KIROFM shares no. 1 one in the market

Bitch as we will about Dori, Don, and Luke, but something's working over at KIRO.

The September Arbitron ratings show that Bonneville's KIROFM has reached up to share (with rocker KISW) the no. 1 spot in the market. It's the first time in our memory that it's been higher than no. 3. This is definitely the highest ratings any talker has gotten in this market in the PPM era. 

KOMO comes in at fourth place, which ain't bad- especially without Mariners baseball which it had in previous years when it’s surged, according to Radio-Info's Tom Taylor.

Public radio talker KUOW is at 11th place as usual.

Rush Limbaugh's KTTH (also owned by Bonneville) is still scraping along at 24th place but they're beating CBS's KPTK progressive talk which is in the tank at 30th.

As always, these are the most general of all ratings- the only ones publicly available- of those age 6 and older. The most valuable demo is the age 25-54 (folks who allegedly buy most stuff that might be advertised) and the aged 35-64, the group that apparently are the second most liable to buy stuff they hear advertised on the radio.

Here's a fair explanation of radio ratings.

Rent's due at public radio

24/7 blah-blah for money prevails on KUOW... and there's no respite: KPLU is running their pledge drive simultaneously. Send 'em some dough.

Listeners can bitch about these silly panhandlings, but consider this: commercial radio begs for money for nearly 50% of nearly every broadcast hour.

With the Foxification of KIRO, the fade-to-blanding of KOMO, the annihilation of KVI and the over-syndication of KTTH or KPTK, Northwesterners need public radio. (As does the thriving tote-bag industry).

Public radio lets us off easy, they do this but twice a year. What's more, they'll shut up if we send our money to them faster!

Why we aren't at the KUOW event at the neptune theater, today

Weekday with Steve Scher's live performance with Stephen Tobolowsky Friday sounded pretty good.

Tobolowsky is the self-satisfied b-actor/a-grade storyteller who finally wormed his smarmy way into our collective Sunday afternoon (KUOW 1-2p) hearts with his tales of Hollywood and Texas.

KUOW said the tickets would be $4. That sounded great, so we went up to the Neptune's site, where we were more than off-put that a $4 ticket actually costs $9! The unexplained "convenience fee" ($2) plus the "order process fee" ($3) more than doubled the price of the ticket. 

KIROFM presents: refried weekends

Gone is the KOMO-fied wallpaper that was KIRO’s NW Weekends. Larry Rice is long gone, his replacement Josh Kerns gets to sleep in. 

They won’t be paying any live hosts on weekends starting Saturday. KIRO announced the changes Wednesday calling the new weekend fare: “Learn. Laugh. Relax.” We would add, "Drink." That is, if you had any expectation of any new or live content.

What’s new?

An hour each of morning news anchors Bill Radke (Sat. 6-7a, noon-1p; Sun. 2-3p) and Linda Thomas’ (Sat. 8-9a, Sun. 3-4p) conglommed news bits from the week past.
The same (Sat 1-2p Sunday 4-5p) for Rachel Belle’s fetching little feetches, Ring My Belle (or I’ll kill you, foo’) will be amagamated from the previous week's Ron & Don Show.

Folksingers mar KUOW event

Feliks Banel of HistoryMediaHistory made this video backstage at the live show of Weekday with Steve Scher (KUOW m-f, 9a-12p) on Friday last at Town Hall. If you're interested in what these people look like, take a look, it's a happy place.

BlatherWatch avoided this show - it's been only a month since we went to the last one, and frankly, the thrill was, if not gone, sated - at least for a few years. 

But we listened-in while we were getting our pedicure, and there was dear, old book babe Nancy Pearl, who so adorably tells a Little Joke in Feliks' video.

She was great, but then... there were folksingers.

It must have been someone's idea of "creative radio." They'd found a band of folksingers: real ones... the womenfolk with laced bodices and long hair; the men in tunics and stringed instrumentalia.

They sang their "ditties," that was bad enough, but then producers got them a-interruptin' the talk-talk during the 2nd hour news discussion with baffling, yet stupid, musical interjections.

We know, we know, folksingers are expected to make stupid, musical interjections, but these folksingers, - we fucking kid you not - insisted on singing, in 3 or 4 separate and lengthy interruptions, their interpretations of 3 or 4 separate and lengthy chapters (Ch. 9 & 10; 12-13) of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present, a fabulous basic text for us liberals but fucking maddening when sung into the middle of a discussion of Seattle's tunnel project and the debt ceiling!

If these public radio dopes ever had to defend liberalism like we do every damn day, they wouldn't be offering up slowballs for wingers to hit out of the park such as folksingers singing Howard Zinn on public radio! It's as stereotypical as inviting the NAACP to an on-air watermelon-eating contest.

We love when Weekday tries new tricks, remember their "radio mimes?" This one, however, sent us scurrying for Dave & Luke (KIROFM m-f, 9a-12p).

(We have been known to occasionally be a-pluckin' a plectrum with a clawhammer... however, we do it in private, our children don't even know we know all the words to Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Folksingers should be seen, not heard. On second thought- we don't want to look at them either).

Cliff mass returns to radio!

  After his inauspicious ending on Seattle's public radio KUOW, windy weatherman Cliff Mass has been acquired (we don't know if he's being paid this time) by Tacoma's KPLU. ("NPR News and all that jazz").

His 5-minute segment will follow Birdnote in the 9 o'clock hour starting September 2.

No more live radio free-form to get him in off-topic and in trouble: Cliff will have a weekly 5 minutes on tape and with a minder, Keith Seinfeld, a veteran (Seattle Times, News Trib) science journalist who's no doubt happy to get the gig. No politics, just science. Scripted, edited, pre-recorded. 

KUOW's weekday goes downtown

(photo: Steve Scher, Knute Berger, Eli Sanders, Joni Balter)

The trees were leafed out on 8th Avenue, the sun spreckled through the First Hill shade. It was a comfy morning at Seattle's Town Hall... at least for us.

That's because we're an aged, middle-class, liberal, white male in the very henhouse of Seattle progressive sensibilities: a live-show audience of KUOW's Weekday with Steve Scher.

We're pretty cool, but here's a real 1st amendment hero

  BlatherWatch has skittered bravely along the ragged edges of our blessed First Amendment, but we ain't shit compared to Antonio Vargas, 30, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who came out this week as an undocumented immigrant in a detailed story to be published on Sunday in a New York Times Magazine piece. His attorneys told him it was a "legal suicide." His grandmother wept. He's transformed from journalist to activist. Listen to Michelle Norris' NPR interview.

Corrections dep't: ken vincent was not fired from KUOW!

Sorry we said he was. 

Actually Ken quit, and rather abruptly at that. It took the powers that be (and the powers that aren't) quite by surprise when he did so.

We talked to the mildly outraged Ken recently and he's amused at the recent Cliff Mass Kerfuffle. "He always was a pompous blowhard," he says, "a little man with a big ego."

Vincent left KUOW in 2007 after 23 years at the station during which he did about everything there is to do over there: announcer, news editor, and engineer. Among other things, he was the very sound of KUOW day time with his mastery of the KUOW music archives providing the perfect bumper music to match whatever the topic at hand- and that's saying something -as we wrote at the time: "considering the broad, and arcane subject matter that is local public radio fare." 

He quit over the embarrassing wages paid by the station:

"It's pathetic that KUOW management won't pay it's award-winning, nationally acclaimed airstaff -- who've made it the top radio station in our market -- anything better than industry-median salaries while it socks millions of airstaff-raised dollars into reserve accounts."

He recommends KUOW join Seattle's other public radio station, KPLU, and organize into a union shop.

"It seems the only way left to deal with management that will no longer even acknowledge staff concerns, let alone consider them."

When he quit we wrote:

Public radio broadcasters seem to stay around- for life, it'd seem- so when one leaves, it's more like a death than mere disruption of a daily listening regime.

Losing Ken Vincent is [more] like a messy divorce rather than one of those cold-blooded corporate separations the likes of which we just witnessed at KIRO.

KUOW circled the wagons, and forbade employees talk to news media (particularly  BlatherWatch).

This was a she-bang much larger than the Cliff Mass kerfuffle, and it blew over rather quickly once Ken was off the air. We suspect the Mass's day is done as well

Ken moved to the Palm Springs area, and never worked in public radio again. He's now happily ensconced at RR Broadcasting where he reports, writes, produces & anchors news on KPSI-AM conservative newstalk; mixed music KPSI-FM; oldies KDES ; and progressive newstalk KPTR-AM.

 

 

Cliff mass: it's come to this...

It was a spectacle such as spectacles go on Channel 13's on the 10 o'clock news.

There, amongst the murderers in their felony pajamas, the abused pets with their pleading eyes, auto accident scenes wrapped in yellow tape, (and, ironically, a frenetic weather report delivered with eye-popping digitation) was UW climatology professor Cliff Mass lecturing to the masses about math ed.