Yes, Our Report Was No...Uh...Bull

When stations are in the throes of format changes, and are stunting, OMW can't resist.

We piled into the newly-tagged OMW Mobile this afternoon and headed for Ashtabula, where we confirmed our earlier listener report of WYBL/98.3's stunting. The station abandoned its temporary oldies format, and is now running a continuous loop of country songs with the word "country" in them. (We're no country music experts at OMW, but it sounds like they're all from the same artist.)

And new since our last report - the station is actually using "The Bull" on air to refer to its upcoming format, and proclaims that "The Bull ride starts Tuesday morning at 6".

From the song clips they've been using, it sounds like "The Bull" is going to be a modern/hot country station, perhaps somewhat more so than the other country outlet in the region, Geneva's WKKY/104.7. As noted here in OMW before, WKKY spends a lot of time serving Lake County, even to the point of running Lake County Captains baseball games on Saturday evenings.

A full-bore effort at a contemporary country format by Clear Channel Ashtabula may ensure that WKKY spends even less time paying attention to areas east of Geneva. Of course, anyone who knows the area will tell you that there's more money in Lake County, anyway...but WYBL's signal doesn't serve much of Lake County, which they'd assuredly leave to Clear Channel Cleveland big sister station WGAR/99.5.

By the way, OMW has recorded some clips of this stunting. At some point, as soon as we can figure out where to put it, we'll start linking audio we've recorded on the road...