Confirmed And Not

As per usual here at your Mighty Blog of Fun(tm), major activity involving local media personalities roughly coincides with our own inability to update this blog - due to absence, illness or work off the blog.

Here we go again.

MAXWELL, OUT: For those of you who haven't been following our Twitter feed - please look to the left, or visit the feed here directly - a recap...Clear Channel Cleveland rocker WMMS/100.7 has said goodbye to Maxwell, unable to reach contract renewal terms or a contract extension with the station's afternoon drive host.

For radio negotiations, this has all been out in the open...and then some.

Maxwell himself spoke on the air frequently about his mulling a new deal with the station. And earlier Tuesday, WMMS programmer Bo Matthews spread the word to everyone via his Twitter account:

FYI. No agreement could be reached with the mwl show. We really tried. No secrets. He has talked about it. The process played out.

In place of the Maxwell show on Monday? It was something called the "Dumb & Charlie Experiment", which appeared to be an extended comedy bit off of the station's morning drive show "Rover's Morning Glory" (they're both cast members).

Don't expect much more than a stunt from these two - who are probably somewhat more important attached to the morning drive Rover-fest than trying to resurrect afternoon drive as a "new act".

Quoting WMMS PD Matthews' Twitter account, again:

FYI. These guys are "trying out". - - Only took a couple minutes for Rover to come to the rescue with these guys. HAAAA.

And later,

life will move on. I hired mwl. I will produce something else u will be proud of.

But...what will be WMMS' permanent replacement for "The Maxwell Show"? Let's turn to Bo again, this time making his pitch on AllAccess.com's Net News scroll on Monday:

WMMS PD BO MATTHEWS is in full search mode for the next rock/talk afternoon show -- individuals or full shows. his is a high-personality, content-heavy position. If you think you can step in, and help continue the momentum/ratings success -- forward your mp3 (no larger than 5mb) and resume with references to (wmmsjob at gmail dot com).

So, from here, it looks like WMMS wants to continue with a talk-heavy rock-audience-oriented afternoon drive personality show...which makes sense, since the station tried to re-sign "The Maxwell Show" as recently as last week...

BUT, WHAT ABOUT MELISSA: She's young, and she hasn't been at Local TV Cleveland Fox affiliate WJW/8 "Fox 8" for all that long...but morning TV weather person Melissa Mack has apparently quite a devoted following in Cleveland now.

We know that, because the former Youngstown TV personality's apparent exit announcement has rocked our E-mail box in the past few days.

At this point, the "is Melissa leaving Fox 8" E-mails have overcome the "what happened to Maxwell" E-mails, though in fairness to the now-former WMMS afternoon driver, Melissa is somewhat better looking.

Simply put, we don't know yet why Ms. Mack is apparently leaving. Enough readers to make it semi-official tell us that she said "goodbye" on Sunday night's edition of "Fox 8 News at 10".

We've put out the signals, and we'll let you know what we find out about her future, and her exit from South Marginal Road...