{"id":1093,"date":"2007-07-25T05:22:56","date_gmt":"2007-07-25T10:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1093"},"modified":"2007-07-25T05:22:56","modified_gmt":"2007-07-25T10:22:56","slug":"rumors-of-its-demise-were-exaggerated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1093","title":{"rendered":"Rumors Of Its Demise Were Exaggerated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, quite a number of talk radio programming execs &#8211; including those at both of the Twin Cities&#8217; big talk stations, Hubbard&#8217;s KSTP-AM and (later, in 2006) Clear Channel&#8217;s KTLK-FM &#8211; greeted the latest news from &#8220;the consultants&#8221;.\u00a0 Although &#8220;The Consultants&#8221;\u00a0have gotten nearly every trend in talk radio throughout the medium&#8217;s history utterly wrong, <em>this time<\/em> the prediction &#8211; that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/archives\/006370.html\">conservative political talk radio was dead<\/a> &#8211; was going to be right.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Of course, it was right after the &#8217;04 elections, when talk ratings had noplace to go <em>but <\/em>down; exactly as they had after <em>every <\/em>election cycle since conservative talk had risen to dominate the format.<\/p>\n<p>This past winter, after the &#8217;06 elections, talk in general &#8211; and conservative talk in particular &#8211; took another hit in the ratings.\u00a0 And the consultants &#8211; many of whom date back to the business&#8217; pre-Limbaugh days, many of whom really <em>really <\/em>don&#8217;t like conservative talk, to say nothing of conservatism itself &#8211; cried &#8220;the witch is dead&#8221; yet again.<\/p>\n<p>And, yet again, <a href=\"http:\/\/radioequalizer.blogspot.com\/2007\/07\/wabc-new-york-city-spring-ratings-2007.html\">it seems they celebrated too soon<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Where it really counts, Limbaugh \/ Hannity affiliate WABC scored big gains, moving from a 3.5 overall share of the audience to 3.9. That was good for fifth place among listeners 12 and older, higher than we&#8217;ve recently seen for the format in the Big Apple.<\/p>\n<p>Though ratings are tracked monthly, the four quarterly &#8220;books&#8221; are what actually count. From those, the spring and fall surveys are most critical for setting future advertising rates, as well as sheer bragging rights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No word on the NARN&#8217;s numbers, yet.\u00a0 But\u00a0 you can bet we&#8217;re kicking whatever hamster KTLK is putting up against us in the utterly make-or-break\u00a0Saturday Afternoon time slot\u00a0&#8211; and that Air America Minnesota might as well broadcast static for all the good tackling us will do &#8217;em.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, quite a number of talk radio programming execs &#8211; including those at both of the Twin Cities&#8217; big talk stations, Hubbard&#8217;s KSTP-AM and (later, in 2006) Clear Channel&#8217;s KTLK-FM &#8211; greeted the latest news from &#8220;the consultants&#8221;.\u00a0 Although &#8220;The Consultants&#8221;\u00a0have gotten nearly every trend in talk radio throughout the medium&#8217;s history [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-narn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}