exit 670

Hi there!

New host. Penguin Web Hosting The Clearing rip , who is mega cheap compared to the old guys, plus I get more features: digitalroute66.com

Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust ipod

The Russell Girl dvd is actually at that site now instead of the url redirecting you to “digitalroute66.exit670.com.” So yay.

The new server did task me for a while though. I had to upload the 66 site twice before I realized that Penguin was being testy about file permissions. I guess added security is nothing to be too upset about. Not to mention less $$$$$. Me likes the bling.

• I HAVE CARDINALS TICKETS AND YOU DO NOT. Memorial Day. Enrons. Fun! Expensive, too. And totally worth it.

There’s a LOT of Trackback spam on this website I never noticed before. Tonight I get to sift through my export .cgi file and edit it all out. FUN.

• Children of Dune dvdrip

My XM Radio was purchased in December of 2004, and I’ve listened to virtually no FM stations since. A little NPR here, some oldies on a Southern Illinois signal there, but nothing of the big boys out of St. Louis. I have my XM.

AM? That’s a different story. Lots of AM. More than before, even.

What gives?

I love satrad, and would fight you with knives and chopsticks to retain its services, but nothing beats local radio. Not for information, not for entertainment. Nothing XM or Sirius can offer tops a well-done local station.

Which explains why KTRS’s ratings are falling. And KMOX is soon to follow.

I doubt this is what the Cardinals had in mind when they purchased 50% of Mound City’s number two (oops, almost number three now) talk station. A historic signal – the Big 550 – it sat ignored by most Saint Louisans, a AAA affiliate of KMOX to use an appropriate baseball analogy. Talent went there to die, or came to the Mighty Mox after being developed there.

My earliest memory of the station was as a 24-hour rebroadcast of CNN’s Headline News, at least until a group of KMOX employees jumped ship and the station’s call letters were changed from the classic KSD to brand new KTRS (Talk Radio St. Louis.) Big press. Top story on the nightly news. KMOX gets competition!

No one noticed. No one cared.

As crappy as most of KTRS’s lineup was (especially after they lost their chief talent, Paul Harris, to KMOX,) it was at least live, local and hardly confrontational. Enter the Cardinals.

I jumped for joy at the idea of the Cardinals leaving KMOX for the Big 550, partly to shake up stodgy old 1120, which had been sliding downhill the past few years, and also to shake up the Redbirds radiocast, which was stuck in the 1960s. While the Cubs and Sox to the north put on first rate broadcasts, the Cardinals pre and postgame were boring and lacking of content; small town thousand-watt sticks can throw out high school bowing contests with better sounding coverage than this.

The Robe Forget the broadcast quality (which the station and Cardinals eventually did, leaving it just as lackluster as it has always been.) The bigger opportunity was to rebrand and rebuild the station as a true St. Louis talker, a signal that served the community rather than regurgitating whatever crap New York wanted Market 20 to hear.

Then the switch actually happened.

The Redbirds brought in new management, and virtually everyone on-air was fired. Some had it coming; the station had been underperforming for years. Others, like veteran sportscaster Randy Karraker, didn’t deserve such shoddy treatment. Worse, though, than the massive, Christmas-time firings was the end result:

Bringing in a bunch of out-of-towners who know little about St. Louis and, worst of all, have little broadcasting talent. They don’t know what they’re doing or how to do it, and they certainly know nothing about St. Louis.

The irony of corporate radio’s opposition to satellite radio is that the former holds a distinctive advantage over their orbiting competition that they steadfastly refuse to utilize: they can be local. XM and Sirius must appeal to the nation at large, and they have a limited amount of bandwidth to do this (not to mention FCC restrictions against spotcasting that almost stopped them from doing their meager weather and traffic offerings.) Meanwhile, CBS, Clear Channel, Entercom and all their multimarket brethren have more resources and frequencies, giving them the ability to localize their content. We’re not talking about just giving more reliable traffic reports or local headlines on the hour, but giving your listeners a sound that reflects your community and engages the area’s listeners with more than rambling claptrap.

Just so few of them do it.

WGN Radio is the best radio station in the land, bar none, and this is so because they not only broadcast from Chicago, but also reflect and simultaneously influence the town. Yes, they are a talk station, and skew older; most high schoolers don’t sneak headphones into class to listen to Kathy and Judy. Still, their demographics cover a wide range of Chicagoland, not only because they are 100% local but because of how they broadcast locally.

Every program on WGN is produced at Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue, including their top-of-the-hour news, which they anchor themselves rather than pitching it a national network for four minutes (if a national story is important, it leads, but if a local story takes precedence, then you get to it first.) The programs themselves are a sterling example of radio, a perfect balance of serious talk (without becoming boring or over-politicized) and lightweight chatter (without entering the realm of immaturity or inanity.) Whatever is in the news is often discussed in a way to stimulate feedback from the listening audience, without the host lecturing or talking down to guests or, especially, the station’s audience. WGN is powerful – their broadcasts help shape the opinions of much of Chicagoland – but not because of the judgments they make, but how they allow Chicago to collectively make them. This isn’t to say that 720 walks the line to perfection, but rarely do you hear such an inviting, non-confrontational broadcast that both sides of an issue can contribute to. (And this is not to imply that only important issues are discussed; the majority of the broadcasts are lighter interviews or discussion of lighter popular culture, again without drooping into anything that damages your IQ.)

WGN is pretty much talk radio perfection. Which brings us back to our two leading St. Louis talkers.

CBS’s KMOX has moved further and further away from this type of local utopia, the type it pioneered back in the 1960s. They started to stray in the mid 90’s with the addition of Rush Limbaugh to the lineup; prior to this, 1120 was live from One Memorial Drive all day long, with national issues discussed by St. Louisans, not Bob the Trucker in Dallas. Recently, after it lost GM Tom Langmeyer (oddly enough to WGN; he’s improved the station, proving that CBS was micromanaging their St. Louis property,) KMOX added another syndicated program for two hours at night, again cutting into the time that this 50,000 watt blowtorch actually serves the Mound City community. Even worse, the host, Jay Severin, is loud and confrontational, a style of talk that really doesn’t work well in the Midwest, especially St. Louis. CBS execs stuck in New York don’t realize this.

The KTRS execs in St. Louis don’t either.

The mass firings at the Big 550 brought in new talent, none of which appeals to the city’s Midwestern mentality. Successful talk radio in St. Louis tends to be laid back and discussion-oriented, not loud-mouthed and accusatory. This goes double for sports talk. Someone forgot to tell KTRS and its new hosts, as all of them think that volume is a reasonable substitute for content, and that making fun of people is a good way to gain loyal listeners, as if the hosts are the new kid at school ridiculing the class nerds in a desperate attempt to gain acceptance from the in-crowd.

Sunday morning I turned on one of the last remnants of the old, classic KMOX, Sports on a Sunday hosted by Ron Jacober, the grand old man of St. Louis Sports. As usual, he had a casual, friendly program filled with lots of guests and reports, and it was interesting and entertaining.

Meanwhile, over on KTRS, Monty, 550’s top sports guy, yelled and screamed.

Why would I want to be yelled at? Even worse, while KMOX smartly focused mostly on baseball (the day before Opening Day,) KTRS kept branching out towards the Rams.

No one – NO ONE – in St. Louis cares about the Rams right now. At this rate, no one cares about KTRS, either.

I’m not saying what WGN does is easy. Quite the opposite. It takes years to develop audience loyalty and to find hosts that can gauge the community and form a broadcast that reflects it. KTRS deserves a minor amount of credit for trying, and there are early signs that they’re learning from some of their mistakes. They’ve a long way to go, however, and the distressing news is that KMOX is moving in the other direction.

Sirius and XM are here to stay, and anyone with a generic Top 40 music station should run and hide. Like Clear Channel, who has such a property, KSLZ, in St. Louis (ratings: even year-to-date.) CC has less to worry about in Cincinnati where they have WLW, a local talker that resembles WGN in its dedication to content and the community (even if they’re not quite on Radio 720’s level.) Even without Reds baseball, WLW kills everyone in the Tri-State, and will continue to do so as long as they keep it live and local. As far as KMOX and struggling KTRS goes, well, at least I can get WGN (and on good days, WLW) on my awesome AM radio.