More Sports/Less Rock, Curley out-Ross In, Hubbard buys in Seattle, Rivers retires

January 2, 2013 – Bob Condotta/TIMES
Can Seattle support three all-sports radio stations? Carey Curelop, the program director at 1090 The Fan, is betting on it. The station became the latest to join the sports radio fray in Seattle on Wednesday when it changed formats from progressive talk to sports talk. “There is a large audience available in Seattle for sports-talk radio,” Curelop said. “And we want to get a piece of it.”
Owned by CBS, the station became one of about 50 of the company’s stations nationally that went to an all-sports format on Wednesday. For now, the station largely features programming from the new CBS sports talk network. The only local programming is the 3-6 p.m. shift featuring Steve Sandmeyer and Bill Swartz, each longtime local voices in the business. The rest of the day will be devoted to shows from the CBS national sports-talk network. Curelop said the move to switch from progressive talk to all-sports had been in the works for a while.

January 11, 2013 – Erik Lacitis/TIMES
KIRO Radio calls Dave Ross to the early a.m. rescue – Station turns to its longtime talk-show host after ratings plunge Morning drive time. Now, after management asked him, Ross is switching from the midmorning show he co-hosted with Luke Burbank to begin work at 6 a.m.
Ross’s shift to early a.m. is KIRO’s attempt to fix what it acknowledges was a programming mistake. In late October, the station put John Curley, the quirky talk-show host, in morning drive time. He had done well in an evening slot at the station, but listeners didn’t care for his style in the mornings. The station got 500 emails complaining about the format change, and ratings in KIRO-FM’s morning drive time tanked from No. 10 to 19 in the advertiser-sought 25-54 age group. Last Friday, Curley finished his show and was called into a meeting with Carl Gardner, the station’s general manager. Curley says Gardner kept it simple, “He told me, ‘It isn’t working. I thought that it would, but it’s not. On Monday, we’re gonna have Dave Ross take over the shows.’ I said, ‘OK.’ That was basically it.”
He says it wasn’t so much that listeners disliked Curley, who “is a great conversationalist who likes to work in a longer form, but that while driving to work, listeners simply wanted to get up to speed with the news.”
Ross is co-hosting the morning drive-time show with veteran Linda Thomas, because, Gardner says, “We wanted to make a clear statement to our listeners that we understand that they want news, and we went looking for the strongest news voices and personalities that we have in our arsenal. Who do listeners know and trust? That’d be Dave Ross and Linda Thomas.”
Ross had been doing a 9-to-noon weekday show with Burbank, who had teamed up with Ross in October 2010. Ross will continue to co-host with Burbank from 9-10 a.m., with Burbank going solo from 10 to noon.
Ross says it was his idea to team up with Burbank, after focus groups showed that listeners were tuning out when the station had more call-ins. Listeners, he says, found too many of the callers boring.
Larry Gifford, KIRO Radio’s program director, says he wants to find space for Curley. Before he went to mornings, Curley was successful in a 7-to-10-p.m. slot at KIRO, a time better suited to his longer stories about his life’s events, stories that ran five or 10 minutes, an eternity in radio. In the evenings, Curley’s listeners had the time to hang around. “We’re considering all sorts of options right now,” says Gifford.

The dominant news and talk station in the morning is KUOW-FM, the Seattle NPR affiliate, which in December came in at No. 2. As for those two-thirds of other listeners, they want music or, if it’s talk, “The Danny Bonaduce Show” or “The Bob Rivers Show.” On Wednesday’s Bonaduce show, one topic discussed was “coming up with the term for what appears when guys wear their pants too tight.”

July 2013 (AP) – ST. PAUL, Minn. — Twin Cities-based Hubbard Radio has agreed to buy Sandusky Radio’s 10 stations in Phoenix and Seattle for $85.5 million. The Seattle stations are: KQMV 92.5 FM (pop contemporary hits), KLCK 98.9 FM (modern contemporary), KRWM 106.9 FM (soft contemporary), KIXI 880 AM (standards) and KKNW 1150 AM (alternative talk).

The deal was announced Tuesday and requires regulatory approval. Both Hubbard and Sandusky are private family-owned companies. The sale ends Sandusky’s 36-year history as a radio broadcasting company. Sandusky Newspapers of Sandusky, Ohio, says the sale will allow the company to concentrate on the digital transformation of its local print and online newspaper and marketing franchises.

St. Paul-based Hubbard owns 16 radio stations in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis and Cincinnati, and 10 television stations in New Mexico, upstate New York and Minnesota. Hubbard Radio chair Ginny Morris says she expects no programming or personnel changes at any of the radio stations acquired in the transaction.

July 29, 2013 – Nicole Brodeur/TIMES
He messed up the call letters to the radio station. His voice cracked. And for a moment, it sounded like Bob Rivers — who has filled morning-drive radio time in Seattle for 25 years — was at a loss for words.
“It’s been a long time and a lot of rock ’n’ roll,” Rivers said from his seat at KJR-FM at 7:45 Monday morning. “I am stepping away from the microphone.” In other words, he’s retiring.
Rivers, 58, made the announcement on the air Monday morning while KING 5 reporter Mimi Jung stood beside him doing a live broadcast.
“I did want to retire before I got stale,” he joked to his listeners. “But that was 20 years ago.” Ba-dum-bump.
His last day on the air will be Aug. 8 — 25 years to the day after he first signed on with Clear Channel Communications.