Thursday In-Box Clear Out

Just some random stuff we've been sitting on for a while...

FLYING ND: We catch up with a lot of news about Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC/3 without even having to contact anyone - by way of station senior director Frank Macek's "Director's Cut" blog.

This time, Frank checks in with former WKYC news director Dick Moore, who left the station for a teaching job in the journalism school at the University of South Carolina.

Moore is on a break from that teaching gig to fly around the country in a fuel-injected single engine plane, fulfilling a dream of many years. (Though we're not sure how we feel about really small planes, the overall idea sounds very, very interesting to us.)

In case you want to catch up with the former top guy at "Channel 3 News", Mr. Moore is - well, blogging his trip.

The blog carries a rather extensive account of the trip, which, yes, will include a stop in Cleveland...

WHILE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT FORMER WKYC NEWS BOSSES: OMW hears that the most recent news director at Channel 3, Mike McCormick, is interviewing for the vacant news director position at WWL/4 New Orleans, the Louisiana market's CBS affiliate.

OK, so we "hear" it from a regular OMW source who passed along word posted on the popular news/gossip site "NewsBlues", so it's probably not news to anyone who actually works in a local TV newsroom.

But we harken back to this quote from one of our earlier items on McCormick's departure, which had us bouncing off a quote the ex-WKYC ND gave the Plain Dealer's Julie Washington:

McCormick tells Washington he was "tiring" of commuting between Cleveland and Jacksonville FL to "see his family", and denies that he was being thrown under the bus due to lower ratings at the local NBC affiliate.

So, if McCormick gets the New Orleans job, he'd still be commuting to see his Jacksonville family - though that commute would be 546 miles, or about 8 hours (thanks to Google Maps for that figure).

At least it's somewhat closer than Cleveland to Jacksonville...

THE BIG JUAN: OMW doesn't have much to say about Clear Channel talk WLW/700 Cincinnati's latest successful attempt to get itself free publicity in the local media.

But in case you missed it, WLW has been garnering controversy (and free newspaper/TV mentions) for its latest billboard campaign, which started out with a visual of the Mexican flag, and ended with the picture of a man with the caption "The Big Juan", a play on the station's long time "Big One" slogan.

A notice posted on the WLW website isn't enough for local leaders of Cincinnati's Hispanic community, who are calling for a written apology for the billboard campaign.

(By the way, the station says all of the "Big Juan" billboards are now history. And there's no word on if an apology to Lawrence Welk is in there anywhere.)

More on the controversy can be found on the blog of Cincinnati Enquirer TV/radio guru John Kiesewetter.

Again, not a lot to say here. Clear Channel talkers in general, and WLW in particular, have honed this into a fine art. Get some group against something your station aired, get them to protest, and you can't beat the publicity that you can't buy for any price.

As we hinted above, it reminds us of fictional Cincinnati radio station WKRP corralling elderly protesters underneath the station's logo, so the TV cameras could catch them protesting the end of the station's "beautiful music" format.

And somewhere at Kenwood, WLW and CC Cincinnati AM operations chief Darryl Parks is laughing...

AND WHILE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT MR. PARKS: The man in charge of running WLW's programming and operations is, as many know, also the station's Saturday midday talk show host.

"Midday with Darryl Parks" has run for some time from 9 AM to noon on Saturdays, the Saturday companion to long-time weekday "Midday" host Mike McConnell's now-syndicated show.

Well, it DID run from 9 AM to noon.

The Enquirer's Kiesewetter reported in his blog recently that Parks' show has been trimmed an hour - presumably at his own bidding - so WLW can run the syndicated financial infomercial "The Mutual Fund Hour With Adam Bold" from 11 AM to noon.

Yep, that's the same piece of radio goodness (cough, gag) aired by other Clear Channel talkers on Saturdays, including WTAM/1100 up in this part of the state.

We have no opinion on whether Mr. Bold's show provides any useful information - even beyond any sales pitches for his company. But its mere presence in the daytime lineup, even weekends, on major talk radio stations like WLW and WTAM, causes us much indigestion and concern.

We suspect Parks didn't have much choice but to go along with making the one-hour reduction in his own show. The kind of money likely offered probably made his general manager salivate.

And we suspect we don't have to remind a talented programmer like Mr. Parks that talk radio P1 listeners go away when a boring (yes, boring) paid commercial for a mutual fund company takes over the airwaves.

Here at OMW World Headquarters, we've often missed hours of WTAM's programming by the mere act of turning off the radio at noon on Saturdays, and forgetting to turn it back on later...