Hey there, boys and girls! It's reader participation time once again.
Yes, I'm taking questions from readers or, in case readers didn't bother to actually ask anything, from myself. As always, the questions may be made up but the answers are real.
Q: Whatever happened to morning hosts Tony and Kris?
A: They've got a new gig, but you can't hear them on the air in San Diego at the moment. As you may recall, Tony Randall (yes, that's his name) and Kris Rochester were a longtime country-music morning team. They worked at KSON and then for its rival, the station now known as New Country 95.7, until they left 95.7 last year. According to a media report, the duo returned to Radio World this week with a syndicated show that's heard on six stations owned by the Cumulus radio chain. The stations are in smaller cities such as Huntsville, Ala., and Green Bay, Wis.
Q: OK, so what about Jeff and Jer? Are they ever going to be on the radio again?
A: This is a burning question for many listeners, considering the morning team's huge popularity. (The "Jeff & Jer Showgram" left Star 94.1 last summer.) At the moment, there's nothing to report about the morning team's prospects for a job at another station. For Jeff and Jer to return to the airwaves, two things have to happen: A station has to want them, and a station has to be able to afford them. But wait, wouldn't any station want a morning team that gets high ratings? Not necessarily. Each radio station targets a particular demographic, and Jeff and Jer won't be a good fit for everyone.
Q: San Diego has two Spanish-language music stations that are based on this side of the border. How come they aren't showing up in the ratings anymore?
A: KLNV ("La Nueva") and KLQV ("Recuerdo") are both owned by Univision, and the company is no fan of Arbitron's new portable people meter technology. Univision is so miffed that it's refused to even take part in the Arbitron ratings anymore in San Diego and a few other places. This is quite a bold stance. Radio stations rely on the ratings to figure out how much to charge advertisers. If they have lots of listeners, the ad rates go up. What's at stake here is the future of radio stations that target minority audiences.
Univision and other companies contend that Arbitron is failing to properly track minority listeners. It's even reaching out to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to lower the boom on Arbitron. Both Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have reportedly launched investigations.
It works like this: Arbitron recruits listeners to wear a pagerlike device. The device picks up hidden signals embedded in radio programming and sends details about the stations you hear to Arbitron.
The problem, say critics, isn't the technology itself as much as Arbitron's failure to include enough minorities in its sample. Univision is so mad it won't even embed its programming with the signals that Arbitron's devices detect.
"A critical part of our nation's media and cultural landscape is at stake," wrote a Univision executive in a recent commentary. "Millions of Americans are counting on them to get this right, so that they don't lose the radio content upon which they rely."
On the other side, Arbitron and its defenders say the new system, which went into effect in San Diego earlier this year, is more accurate. So how are these two San Diego stations ---- including KLNV, which used to get high ratings in the past ---- surviving without ratings? Good question, and I hope to get an answer on that one soon. The brass at the local stations referred me to the Univision headquarters, and I haven't had a chance to reach them yet.
Q: The 46th anniversary of the JFK assassination is this weekend. How did radio in San Diego cover it back then?
A: When the 40th anniversary came in 2003, I checked in with veteran radio newsman Reid Carroll, who was on the air that day, Nov. 22, 1963. At the time, he worked for XTRA-AM, which broadcast news to all of Southern California from a studio in Tijuana, near its transmitter.
The news of the attack on Kennedy came at 10:34 a.m., and Carroll didn't leave the studio for three days, stuck in Mexico (thanks to a border shutdown) and hobbled by a phone blackout (the TV and wire machines still worked, thankfully).
"For the next 74 hours, there were four of us who carried on the broadcasting and kept the station on the air. We slept on desks, and we had a janitor whose wife prepared meals for us," he recalled. "There was no protocol book, no guidelines to tell us how to handle this. Everything was by the seat of our pants."
And through it all, he had to avoid showing emotion.
Randy Dotinga likes to think he's a "critical part of our nation's media and cultural landscape." E-mail him at NCTimesRadio@aol.com.
