Idaho Radio News Etc.

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They’ll be out today – find them here…

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Rachel Marisay is now voice tracking nights at KCIX. She’s part of the KASE-FM Austin TX morning show (a country station). She replaces somebody who repalced somebody else…. who, well you get it. I still miss Cale Jay at night on K-106 long ago.

Also welcome to Joe Boxer… I think he voice-tracks… but I can’t tell yet. I’ll have to listen.

Crystal Faught (or “Claire Day”, or “Riley”) is exiting her various duties around town – traffic reporter for IdaWest (and by association KBCI and Clear Channel stations) and weekend VTer for CC. She’s headed to Wisconsin. Reach out to her at missclaireday@hotmail.com. Best of luck

KQXR has a PSA that they run in Loveline just about every night that makes me laugh. It’s John Laroquette for RADD – telling people not to drink and drive. No, I’m not laughing at that part. It’s the fact that he says “Happy Holidays” at the end of the spot that amuses me. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, Mr. Night Court wants me to have a good holiday.

AND: KZMG runs a local insert during the Hollywood Hamilton Weekend Top 30 program that says ‘he, check out the rhythym version of the Countdown at 12am on Saturday, and the pop version at 9 on Sunday.’ ‘Cept that’s not when the shows air – it used to be — like more than a year ago.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone FROM the stations listens TO the stations.

I’ve watched the KBOI on KTRV morning show each morning this week. It’s pretty good – nice local topical stuff – better than a Roseanne repeat from 1992.

The audio and video are still terrible. The morning announcements at the local high schools have better production. Today you could hear 103.3 KISS FM in the background of the audio. This was when the audio actually worked (the first two minutes of Deb Courson’s news update were silent).

It’s a little weird to hear them talk about the debate on channel 7 when they are on channel 12….

KTIK.COM has a whole new look – put together by a local company called WebMajik.com. The site is powered by FiberPipe, as it was before.

Lots of good sports news on the site thus far

Lite108.com has the Lite 108 logo in the header, but a big 1079litefm.com logo in the content area. 1079litefm.com is still a dead link

Bob Curtis, the longtime voice of UI Vandal athletics is stepping down. He started doing play-by-play in 1957 – and will now spend more time focusing on his real estate business.

I’m not sure what I expected. Idaho Talks Live on KBOI/KTRV wasn’t terrible – in fact, the concept works. But the execution is not great. The cameras are dark (Paul’s camera has that web video feel to it), the audio is bad (they aren’t just talking a raw feed from KBOI, which causes some mixing problems), and there is a terrible glitch that jumps through the screen every 30 seconds.

Oh, and the best part – the guests don’t know they are on camera after the radio mics go down. The guests for the morning were KTRV anchors Rich Wright and Shannon Patterson. After a long segment on “questions you would ask the mayoral candidates” was over, Rich goes “we really should be writing these down.”

We’ll see what it looks like in week 10.

The show starts Monday at 9. We hear the show will be a 5 camera shoot – and be modeled after Imus on MSNBC.

Interesting idea!

In a September 12th artical in the the Salt Lake Deseret News says the Bonneville acquisition of Simmons Media stations is stalled.

Simmons was to shed their seven stations (as well as a number of Utah stations) to LDS church-owned Bonneville.

The Des News and Bonneville are co-owned.

It sounds like the crickets are chirping in the Pocatello/IF area.

As you probably know, Simmons Media Group is supposedly selling it’s stations to Bonneville (a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the Mormon Church, and the owner of KSL-TV in Salt Lake.)

But the sale hasn’t happened yet – which is causing some anxiety and making the troops a bit restless. Common practice when a station is sold is to LMA it right away – the new owner gets control while they wait for the deal to go through. That’s not the case here, so a company that has already decided to sell a group of stations still has control.

(Thanks Kelly)

Starting Monday morning, Paul J. and the crew will be on KTRV FOX 12.

The KBOI morning show will be one camera and an audio feed from the station. It replace a pair of sit-coms on the station.

The move comes as KTRV changes their main anchor team. Claudia Weathermon leaves the station Thursday, while former KTRV anchor Rich Wright joins current Friday anchor Shannon Patterson on the desk starting Monday.

The Evansville Courier has a story about the about the University of Evansville radio station jazzing up it’s jazz programming. Why do you care?

Well, here’s the part I don’t get:
WUEV’s jazz programming is amazingly consistent, though the programming from 1 a.m. until noon normally is beamed by satellite from a studio in Boise, Idaho.

Is AM 730 syndicating their programming somehow? So lost…

I hate the fact that this blog is organized with the newest at the top. I could change it – but then it would look like I never updated it.

With that said, I poked fun at Mix 106’s cash promotion last week.

They do have a really cool promotion though. Listeners are being enticed to send in pictures of their ugly rooms. Five will be picked, listeners get to vote on the best – then the station and sponsors will put the winner up in a hotel for 5 days while Kustom Interiors remakes the room. Pretty cool!

Oh, and KCIX updates their website (see this post)

Dirk Kempthorne is now writing leters to major market newspapers. Man, AOL got a lot of mileage out of one little “slip-up.”

OK, I sat down to write about KXLT-FM’s new name and logo. The first thing I did was hit the station’s website to see if I could post the logo for everyone to see. No dice. Lite108.com still has the old logo.

Onward: The station made a branding adjustment – becoming 107.9 Lite-FM. The new logo is quite different, and uses a lightbulb (how clever… you can just see the… lightbulb… going off over the marketing people’s head). They are now using the “Turn on the light” tag as part of the logo (I guess continuous lite favorites is out.)

I thought I might point out that Lite 108’s logo/name was the last of Clear Channel’s Boise properties to have the same logo/name as when it was acquired. The Kip Guth days are long gone now…

(Oh, and Clear Channel registered the domain 1079litefm.com on September 15th – it’s not active yet.)

OK, are you tired of me talking about the same four stations over and over and over? I’ll just state, quite simply, that I’m not a country fan – so news out of the country stations in town will be painful for me. But hey, I like Rascal Flatts… does that count for anything?

So I would love your help. I have an e-mail box – boisemedia@hotmail.com… I’m looking for tips on Eastern/Northern Idaho stuff – and even stuff lurking in the Boise market. I probably should call this site Boise Radio… but that whole State of Ada thing and all…

More changes in the air at KZMG. On my way back from McCall this evening, I noticed former morning intern Bambi making a bunch of references to “the way Jayar” used to do it. He never actually said it, but my hunch was that Jayar was teaming up with Erica Fox for mornings. As I hit the computer this evening, I had a note confirming that to be the case. He is now teaming up with Erica Fox in the morning. We’ll be all… uh… ears.

One other note: Magic is planning an upcoming stunt – involving a DJ’s arms, some ink and a needle. Stand by.

The radio station with the longest name in Boise radio (ESPN Radio 1350 KTIK The Ticket) has a new logo. But why (and this seems to be a recurring question around here) is this not reflected on their website?

The logo has a really nice look, and handles the long title quite nicely.

…has it that Dave Tester is headed north to the University of Idaho… as part of the post-Mike Bohn era. Hmmm.

Every station in town is doing their Monday Night Football party. And by the end of the season, the promos that run for 4 months can seem pretty tired. KZMG has a nice idea, by putting an insert in the promo that’s different each week. One week PD Jim Allen’s son was talking about how great the Essence of Romance prizes were (the kid was just a toddler) – the next week PD Jim had to replay the announcement in Pig Latin. This week, KZMG voice of God Jeff Berlin (who even referenced himself by name) said he screwed up his Pig Latin the previous week… and so on.

It’s a nice way to freshen a promo each week.

My goal isn’t to rip on stations… or operating companies. And I pledge to especially not berate individuals.

That being said – I heard nearly the funniest thing I have ever had float through my ears and in to my head. A promo mention on KCIX-FM today talked about the “Big Money Cash Call.” Listeners are supposed to say something about how great Mike and Kate are whenever the answer the phone. Great gimmick – used often. Here’s the problem: The “Big Money” starts at ten bucks. Each day that someone doesn’t win, it goes up by a buck. That’s right – one hundred big fat pennies.

Now, it sounds incredibly strange to entice listeners to try and win twelve greenbacks. Especially since so many listeners have no clue that those million dollar contests run on CC stations all over the country. CC says they do the big contests because it pools their resources and offers bigger prizes. It’s a valid point, you never used to hear about a million dollar radio contest before the world of consolidation – even if no one has a chance in hell of winning in market 120+.

So the odds may go way way up for local winners – but the prize is way way down. I think listeners at home have to be chuckling at this. Can you imagine someone screaming or getting excited if they won twelve dollars? Wouldn’t that make the winning listener just look cheap. What if they told their friends…

Winner: I just won that big cash giveaway on the radio!!!
Friend: Oh yeah, how much did you win
Winner: 12 big ones!
Friend: 12 thousand dollars?!?!
Winner: No, um… actually it’s just twelve bucks.
Friend: Oh. Congrats. Maybe you can buy me a big mac or a small coke with your… uh… winnings.