Friday, August 18, 2006

Two Late Week Items

Still waiting for those shoes to drop, and at least one of them may drop sooner than expected. But we can't just sit here waiting for footwear to hit the floor:

MARATHON AND BRUCE: The sports talk radio website SportsTalkCleveland.com is holding its third-annual "Up All Night Marathon" over the weekend, in a fundraising effort.

The marathon starts Saturday at 5 PM and runs through Sunday at 1 PM. It benefits the Carol Morris Scholarship Fund at Bowling Green State University, a fund aimed at paying for the education of those going into the special education field.

A complete schedule is located here...as with last year, you'll see a number of guests sprinkled into the mix, and an oddity - STC head honcho Paul Belfi plays an hour and a half of Rick Springfield music. (We didn't know there WAS an hour and a half of Springfield's music.)

But there's an eyecatcher at the very end of the schedule, Sunday at 12 PM:

12:00 Noon: Interview with Bruce Drennan, SportsTalkCleveland.com host and program director about the 2006 baseball season

To walk around the elephant in the room gently, we don't know if the interview was pre-recorded, or what Bruce's current physical address is.

But it's interesting that STC's schedule for this marathon still lists him as host and program director.

The STC "bios" page still lists the former WKNR and WTAM sports talker as program director and host...so at very least, whenever Drennan is able to return to regular work talking about sports, he would seem assured of STC being by his side...

NOD TO A FRIEND: This is actually outside the OMW coverage area, though at least one of the two signals involved makes its way across the Ohio/Pennsylvania border...and the person involved was once program director for about a cup of coffee at a certain Canton market top 40 station.

But a congratulations to long-time Friend of OMW Clarke Ingram for his promotion at a pair of suburban Pittsburgh AM outlets. Clarke has been upped from program director to operations manager at Broadcast Communications oldies/talk outlets WKHB/620 Irwin PA and WKFB/770 Jeannette PA.

Clarke tells us that he'll also keep his programming duties, and will continue to be heard on the stations spinning oldies tunes on weekends. During the week, the station mixes oldies with brokered talk programming.

We're probably biased, knowing Clarke for so long, but oldies stations would do well to listen to how he presents the format on his stations. Taking a cue from his entertaining, high-energy presentation would work well for a format that's hanging onto its relevance in the fast-changing radio world...

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does Clarke's stations have web sites? Do they stream? What is the URL?

Johnny Morgan said...

I don't think 620 KHB or 770 KFB have websites or streams yet--but I do know that Clarke is actively working on getting them.

Broadcast Communications, for the record, also owns a couple stations in Maryland and the BIG country station(s) in Waynesburg, PA--WANB AM & FM.

Ohio Media Watch said...

In addition to being a friend for many years, Clarke is also a regular reader of OMW. He's more than welcome to update us on the status of such things like streaming...

-OMW

Anonymous said...

Did 770 KFB change frequencies to 1530, as Radio-Locator would indicate? I was looking at the signal coverages, and WKFB turns up as 1530 AM, still licensed to Jeanette.

collegedj86

Ohio Media Watch said...

WKFB has been on 770, moving from 1530, for a good couple of years now.

And I hear from Clarke that there is no streaming audio in the works for either station at this time.

-OMW

Anonymous said...

...how about a website. Not having one of those is kinda embarrasing.

Johnny Morgan said...

That's a shame no stream is anticipated. He mentioned once in passing at "the other place" that streaming was something they were looking into. But I can understand the objections to it--not only from a technological standpoint, but also with the licensing fee agreement due to be revamped soon, and the existing one being pretty hard on smaller operators...there's just too many variables.

But I know one thing--on weekends, Pittsburgh sure has some great choices!!!

Rick Morris said...

OMW, thanks much for the mention of our benefit show this weekend. I really feel like it will be tremendous all-around sports talk enjoyment in a market certainly crying out for it and I'm gratified that my mother's memorial scholarship fund will be the beneficiary.

Quick note about the Bruce Drennan speculation: yes, our interview with him is live at Noon Sunday and yes, he's still very much a part of STC operations. He was broadcasting just this past week, actually, and he's still a show host and program director for the long haul at the station. Out of gratitude to Paul Belfi for his help with this event and to Bruce for giving us his time, I feel like I owe it to them to put that on the record.

I'm glad that STC can shine with an event like this also, because the people involved deserve to.

--Rick Morris

Anonymous said...

Nice to see that no matter how rotten Bruce Drennan is there are people that will still give this guy his 100th chance. Maybe Bruce should bag groceries for a living now to see how the other half lives

Anonymous said...

No, maybe Bruce can work at a restaurant when he gets out, considering all the experience he'll have with tossed salad.