AAR Lands on Akron's WARF/1350?

Credit the Eagle Ears of Radio-Info.com Cleveland board regular nate81 for this one...

Nate reports that he's heard liberal talk WARF/1350 Akron ("Radio Free Ohio") running a wide variety of Air America radio programming over the holiday weekend. Among the offerings out of AAR's weekend schedule he's heard on WARF so far: Repeats of network stars Al Franken and Randi Rhodes, some "Morning Sedition" repeats, and weekender Laura Flanders with a holiday repeat.

This is something we suggested might happen when it was announced that WJMP/1520 Kent, up until now the area's AAR affiliate, would be changing format to Fox Sports Radio on Tuesday.

It would seem likely, though we have no confirmation, that AAR's Al Franken will end up in his live 12-3 PM clearance, bumping Thom Hartmann out of that slot in the schedule. AAR's Randi Rhodes would also seem likely - judging from other Clear Channel-owned liberal talk stations' schedules - to take part or all of the 6-10 PM slot after Jones' Ed Schultz. It'd theoretically be possible that AAR's Janeane Garofolo could get squeezed in somewhere there as well.

That would mean quite a bit of preemptions the rest of the summer for Randi due to the Akron Aeros schedule, but she's likely to get a dependable 45 minutes a night up to the Aeros pre-game, and at least one or two shots of an entire show per week, at least in the next month or so, until the season ends in September. The Aeros typically have one or two off/travel days in the schedule a week, which happens most of this coming month, plus a daytime game or two thrown in there. Unfortunately for Randi fans, August seems packed with evening games and little travel off time.

But for Randi and whoever else WARF picks up from the AAR schedule, it beats not being heard in the market at all...or perhaps part of the market, due to their soon-to-be-former affiliate's bad signal. And the AAR weekend programming nicely fills the massive holes in WARF's weekend schedule, which aside from NASCAR, Aeros and other sports events, has until now basically consisted of playing Ed Schultz's show in a marathon mode...