{"id":3892,"date":"2008-12-30T08:29:31","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T13:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3892"},"modified":"2008-12-30T12:56:04","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T17:56:04","slug":"back-to-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3892","title":{"rendered":"Back To The Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

In its ongoing quest to be all things to all people, KSTP is bringing in Pat Reusse<\/a>\u00a0to try to jumpstart the station’s long-dormant (as in “forever-dormant”) morning drive:<\/p>\n

“Somewhere between wacky and MPR, there’s a morning radio show to be done, and that’s what I hope to be part of Monday through Friday on KSTP,’ Reusse said. “The goal is for us to put together a morning show that I would listen to.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which should be an interesting bit of work, considering Reusse’s on-air persona; how do you make a morning show that an omnivorous dyspeptic like Reusse will like?<\/p>\n

I digress:<\/p>\n

One of the Twin Cities\u2019 most well-known media personalities, Reusse has written four-to-five columns per week for the Star Tribune over the past two decades. He will continue in his role as a sports columnist, writing two columns per week after his new morning show is unveiled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hiring Reusse is not a dumb move, in and of itself.\u00a0 Reusse has\u00a0almost three decades of track record with KSTP’s audience.\u00a0 He can do radio (although I can certainly see a Reusse show ending up as “all of the curmudgeonly dyspepsia of the Soucheray show, with none of the humor”).\u00a0 And KSTP’s management isn’t completely <\/em>tone deaf; while conservative talk is among the\u00a0only formats making any money anywhere in radio, sports seems to be doing adequately as well.\u00a0 KFAN has\u00a0eked out a decent niche in Twin Cities radio;\u00a0it’s not a dumb <\/em>idea for KSTP to try to stake out\u00a0 piece of that turf, especially given the huge investment they made in the Twins.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0the longer term, though, KSTP-AM’s ongoing drive to be the new WCCO – to be “broadcasters” in the marketing as well as technological sense of the term – seems grossly misguided.\u00a0 The audence – heck, all <\/em>audiences –<\/em> has been splintering for decades.\u00a0 Narrowcasting – in particular, providing a destination, even a sense of “community” (shaddap, Soucheray) for a fairly tightly-focused group of listeners – is where the money is, provided the focus isn’t music (the IPod has been flensing music radio).<\/p>\n

For all of its mistakes, Clear Channel in the Twin Cities has done a good job of marketing KFAN to a community of sports nuts-who-dabble-in-news.\u00a0<\/p>\n

KSTP’s problem isn’t that Reusse won’t do a decent job on the mornings, especially given help from the listenable Jay Kolls and Kenny Olson – although I’m tempted to ponder that having Jeremy “Kodiak” Kienitz would be a huge help (presuming Kodiak hadn’t fallen on the outs with Reusse over the previous decade or so).\u00a0 The problem (yes, I’m monday-morning quarterbacking, here) is that a single personality isn’t going to turn back a huge systemic problem.<\/p>\n

KSTP could rebuild its entire format around Reusse and Soucheray, going mostly\/all sports like KFAN and using its 50 kilowatts of raw power to build a regional sports\/news-o-tainment\/goombah community powerhouse.\u00a0 They could hire a brace of firebrand conservatives to recapture their glory days.\u00a0 They could re-hire Mischke and scour the country for more stream-of-consciousness humorists.<\/p>\n

But KSTP is trying to broadcast in a world that’s becoming narrowcast.<\/p>\n

Brad Carlson also addresses the change<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In its ongoing quest to be all things to all people, KSTP is bringing in Pat Reusse\u00a0to try to jumpstart the station’s long-dormant (as in “forever-dormant”) morning drive: “Somewhere between wacky and MPR, there’s a morning radio show to be done, and that’s what I hope to be part of Monday through Friday on KSTP,’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talk-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892","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=3892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}