For more than an hour Tuesday, social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were inaccessible to users.
Many in the news media world took to X to share their displeasure with the development, while others joked they were worried their pages had been hacked.
X owner Elon Musk joked that the reason users could read what he was publishing was because “our servers are working.”
710 WOR has debuted a new weekend show hosted by former Westchester County Executive and current Newsmax host Rob Astorino to its Saturday lineup.
The Rob Astorino Show will be heard on Saturdays at 4 PM ET. The program airs after his Saturday Agenda show he hosts on Newsmax from 1-3 PM ET.
Astorino has a long radio history, both in New York and nationally. He served as the first Program Director of SiriusXM’s The Catholic Channel after previously serving as the Executive Producer of The Michael Kay Show at ESPN New York when the station was on the AM dial.
In addition to his radio endeavors, Rob Astorino spent two terms as a Westchester County Executive from 2010-2017. He also ran for Governor as a Republican in the Empire State in 2014, losing to incumbent Andrew Cuomo by a 54%-40% margin.
104.5 The Zone in Nashville and owner Cumulus Media have re-signed midday host Buck Reising to a multi-year extension. As first reported by BSM, Reising will continue as host of The Buck Reising Show, which airs Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. Reising can also be heard on demand, as host of the NFL podcast “The Install Live.”
Allison Warren, Vice President/Market Manager, Cumulus Nashville, said in a release: “In the heart of Middle Tennessee, where sports pulse through our veins, we proudly announce the contract extension for our dynamic midday host, Buck Reising. Our airwaves resonate with the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and the unwavering passion of fans. As the must-listen sports station, we’re more than a frequency; we’re the heartbeat of every game, every play, and every championship.”
Paul Mason, Program Director, 104.5 The Zone, added: “We are pumped to announce that on-air host, Buck Reising, has agreed to a multi-year deal keeping him on-air weekdays on 104.5 The Zone and Zone TV. Buck is a dynamic and engaging host who always captivates the audience with his charisma and talent. He is also a great team player who fits well into our entire line-up. Buck is equal parts polarizing and likable, which makes him a unique and unforgettable host. We are thrilled to have him continue 104.5 The Zone – Zone TV – Zone Podcasts with us.”
Buck Reising commented: “I’m so grateful to The Zone and Cumulus for believing in and investing in Lucas, Jackson and me. We could not be happier to continue to do the show for such an incredibly supportive audience and the city that we love. We’re just getting started.”
Reising began at 104.5 The Zone in March, 2021. He has been covering the Tennessee Titans since 2017.
The state of the radio industry is unstable, but no one can blame any company doing what is best for its business. Large or small, every business has a responsibility to make the best decisions for its stake-holders. If that business is a nationally syndicated radio network, the best thing for everyone involved is to get your programming on as many stations across the country as possible.
What is best for the network isn’t always what’s best for the individual markets it serves though. While iHeartMedia may be celebrating Cumulus’s Nash FM 106.1 in New Orleans flipping to FOX Sports Radio, I wonder if sports fans in the Crescent City feel the same way.
Most Louisianans care more about LSU than Morgan Wallen, so I don’t think the majority of people that can hear the station are booing, but I wonder how many that tuned in on day one will still make the new 106.1 The Ticket a regular destination in 90 days.
iHeartMedia is a business and any business has to do right by its investors. For those people, what is best is for iHeart to be able to tell its Progressive, Coors Light and other advertisers that FOX Sports Radio is on in another top 60 market. I totally get it and I am not insinuating that the company is doing anything wrong. I am just not sure that this trend is helping anything.
Hell, this isn’t even an iHeart station. If anyone is doing anything wrong here, it’s Cumulus.
FOX isn’t alone. Plenty of sports stations around the country have launched as straight, uninterrupted feeds of ESPN Radio, VSiN and CBS Sports Radio too. The goal is always the same – tell advertisers you have added more ears. If I were an advertiser though, I might wonder how many of those ears new ears will actually be hearing my message.
Sports radio is the format most reliant on local identity. That could mean listener interaction or it could be as simple as talking about the local teams. On an the Monday after an NFL weekend, most national shows will be talking about Patrick Mahomes or the Dallas Cowboys. The people of New Orleans will be looking for conversations about the Saints. Would 106.1 The Ticket be able to hold their attention for very long?
It’s hard to remember a more volatile time for businesses that chase advertising revenue. There is just less money to go around for media outlets of all kinds. Every radio station or network is competing with each other, TV, the internet, and anything else that could hold the audience’s attention for fifteen minutes. It would be irresponsible to not do something that could make you more appealing to the agencies and businesses trying to figure out where to spend their money.
This new station is just the latest incarnation of 106.1 The Ticket. The station existed from 2012 until 2015 when it flipped to Alternative and then dropped that format for Country in 2017. This will be the sixth format change for the station since 2000.
Maybe Cumulus has looked at the footprint of 106.1’s signal and decided that there isn’t a case for significant investment. It doesn’t serve New Orleans so much as it does the Mississippi/Louisiana border. Historically, it’s had trouble supporting any format.
Some stations are going to be in that situation. I get it. I just don’t know that those stations turning on a syndicated sports format is worth celebrating.
By this time next year, I could be eating my words. Perhaps an uninterrupted stream of the FOX Sports Radio schedule is just step one and local shows are coming. Cumulus could have its eyes on becoming the radio home of LSU, the Saints and the Pelicans but have decided to crawl before it runs. I hope that is what happens.
While there are more outlets than ever for people that want to talk about sports, there are fewer paychecks and in a lot of cases, the paychecks that do exist in the markets outside of the top 50 are pretty small.
I’m glad that New Orleans, Hartford and Jacksonville are adding new sports talk stations, but I will save the celebration for when they start adding and supporting local content. That’s when the audience will care.
True Crime has grown in popularity in recent years due to several popular podcasts on the genre. In fact, according to the latest rankings from Podtrac, true crime podcasts account for five of the top 20 shows in the medium. However, true crime remains steady in television, too, with NewsNation host Ashleigh Banfield being one of the genre’s leaders.
Banfield began her stint at NewsNation in January 2021. After nearly two years hosting her self-titled program on the upstart cable news outlet, she shifted away from the traditional cable news show model and instead turned her focus to her true passion: true crime.
The results show the decision was a wise one. According to Nielsen, Banfield ratings have risen 250% in the 25-54 demographic and is up more than 400% in total viewers since its debut.
While some might suggest deciding to completely change your show’s format is a gigantic leap of faith, Ashleigh Banfield never saw it that way.
“It wasn’t difficult for me at all,” Banfield told Barrett News Media. “I have such a long and rich history working in this space. I’ve spent five years at Court TV. I did a crime and justice show on HLN and I did a show on CNN. So for the last 19 years, I’ve only exclusively been focused on on this kind of journalism. It was a no-brainer for me to focus exclusively on law, justice, and true crime at 10 PM on NewsNation. It’s where I am most knowledgeable.”
She added that working alongside Yale Law School Professor Jack Ford while at Court TV gave her an incredible insight into the legal space while joking that despite all she learned from Ford, she wouldn’t be able to pass the bar exam due to her “terrible memory.”
However, that memory does hold some of the negatives that come with spending the majority of your professional career covering the true crime genre.
“I still have a really tough time with autopsy photos and crime scene evidence. It’s sanitized for the viewers, but it’s not sanitized for our staff and our teams,” admitted Banfield. “There was a case just two weeks ago that really set me off and I had to take a moment and gather my wits. It was the case of a 34-year-old woman who was an autistic woman who was neglected by her own parents, and was left to atrophy and literally rot to death on a sofa. The responding medical professionals who answered the 911 call, were so shocked and horrified by what they encountered, they had to step outside themselves. Those autopsy photos will stick with me forever.”
The popularity of the true crime genre has coincided with the rise of Banfield’s ratings at NewsNation. She recently struck a multi-year extension to remain with the cable outlet, and said she’s encouraged by the growth of her program.
“I have carved out this magical little space at 10 PM Eastern on NewsNation and we’ve really honed in on true crime and have built a very loyal audience in this space. It is extremely popular right now,” she said. “I’m just seeing how connected people are now to this particular kind of coverage. I have a great little team and we are very focused on the work that we do, the product that we create every day, and so it’ll be great to be able to continue that project.”
When asked what makes the true crime space so different from other cable news programs, Ashleigh Banfield shined a light on the thought process of so many fans of the genre.
“I think, honestly, people have been able to become a part of the crime sleuth community. Now with the advent of all of these groups on the internet, people are very engaged in helping solve these crimes. And they many times are successful,” she said, while noting there’s a downside with irresponsible people that have incorrectly identified the wrong people while investigating crimes.
She continued by saying true crime fans feel a deeper connection to the subject matter.
“I think people have really felt like they can have they can make a difference. They can help solve these crimes. In another sense, I think people are gripped by movie mysteries on the big screen and then walk out of the theater and realize it’s happening all around us. These things are real and, oftentimes, the true details are more gripping than the drama.”
In addition to her primetime program on NewsNation, Ashleigh Banfield has added a new program on The CW called Crime Nation, which airs Tuesdays at 8 PM ET. She called the program a “natural progression” of her cable show.
“We do the headlines on many of these stories every night. But after many years pass, people forget a lot of details,” she said. “And new information tends to emerge from people involved in these stories. They tend to loosen up and say things they’ve ever said before when you return to the big stories and start putting them all together as one long and comprehensive narrative. And that’s what we’ve discovered. The stories that we’re doing for Crime Nation is that we have found new, exclusive information people who’ve never spoken before are speaking out and dropping some pretty jaw-dropping details on these crimes.”
It would be easy to think covering true crime — which often involves the worst day of someone’s life — would be a constant downer. However, Ashleigh Banfield shared there can also be a positive side to the coverage she’s devoted her professional career to.
“I’m able to give (family members of victims) guidance and connect them to other crime victims’ family members in high-profile crimes, and that’s been very helpful,” she said. “Connecting some of these people makes them realize they’re all alone. It helps them a little bit with the guidebook of how to navigate the circumstances they found themselves in. And I’m always very thankful that I can play a role in any way.
“It’s not always welcomed, and I don’t offer it was welcomed,” she concluded. “I think anything that can help to minimize the suffering and the confusion that these victims’ families go through, if I can provide a small part of that, I’m happy to do that.”
After a decades long run at WEEI, including hosting and calling Boston Celtics games, Glenn Ordway announced his retirement in June of 2021. He and his wife are snowbirds now spending most of the year in Scottsdale, returning to Boston for the summer. He’s been able to travel, which is something that he could not do hosting a show five days a week.
Ordway is also spending more time with family, but there’s still fire inside when it comes to talking about sports.
“There’s no question that there’s days that I wake up and I can feel the juices when sports stories are breaking and I’m sitting there going man I wish I was involved in that right now,” said Ordway.
At first, Ordway didn’t miss the grind of sports radio on a daily basis. For the first five or six months, there was a combination of travelling and scheduling upcoming trips. However, he would get to the point when getting on planes made him yearn to do talk sports again.
There have been chances, but to this point, his connection to talking to sports has been limited to X/Twitter.
“I do miss it,” admitted Ordway. “I’ve had some opportunities over the last couple of years because people have called me who are from my past who have said hey I’m doing this and hey we’re doing this do you have any interest and I’ve kind of turned them all down.”
Ordway certainly has the itch to get back in the business in some way. The technology in the industry may be just what he’s looking for. Podcasts could be the venue that gets the radio legend back in the game.
He wants to do it and he has the ability to do it.
“I think I would like to do something because I’ve got all my faculties,” said Ordway. “I haven’t become Joe Biden yet. I’m at the point now where I really can do it. I don’t think I would ever do it again five or six days a week. There are some projects now that I’m interested in and I’m thinking about.”
Ordway enjoyed a storied run at WEEI that included hosting “The Big Show” in afternoon drive. His first stint at WEEI ended in 2013 under some frustrating circumstances. That drove Ordway to a platform that wasn’t necessarily big back then, but is huge now.
“I got fired for being in second place and I started doing a daily podcast,” said Ordway.
And that’s how “The Big Show Unfiltered” was born on SportsTalkBoston.com.
When WEEI brought him back in 2015, Ordway decided to end his podcast, a move that he regrets now.
“I look back at it and it was rough,” said Ordway. “It wasn’t rough doing it but it was rough trying to monetize it because I was way ahead of the curve. I should have continued to do that and should have understood that eventually the marketplace was going to open up to podcasts and it was going to become an important part of our landscape. I should have stayed with it because I think by now it probably would have had a pretty good following. That was a mistake.”
Now, Ordway is ready to dip his toes into the sports radio waters once again, but not full-time. He still wants to travel and still wants to have the freedom that comes with retirement. However, returning to a chair in front of a microphone is something that he’s very interested in.
Retirement has given him the opportunity to become more invested in watching games and sharing information with his fans.
“I watch more NBA basketball now than I ever have at any time in my life,” said Ordway. I’m on the west coast so I can watch the Celtics at 4 and then I can watch the Lakers, the Clippers and the Suns at 7. I’m able to do more research now that I’ve ever been able to do. The problem is I can’t really use that information anywhere because I’m not spouting out to anybody other than Twitter.”
Other than Twitter, Ordway hasn’t discussed the biggest sports story in Boston, the fall of the New England Patriots dynasty. First, quarterback Tom Brady moved on to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers where he won another Super Bowl. And now, Bill Belichick is out as Patriots Head Coach.
“I’m amazed, just from my reaction of going back and forth with people on Twitter, that people were so caught off guard by it,” said Ordway. “What did you think was going to happen? I think a lot of the fans up in New England are spoiled. In the last couple of years, they didn’t know how to deal with this.”
While Ordway waits to find the right opportunity to get back into sports radio, he has been able to pay attention to how the landscape of the business has changed since he has retired. Social media has played a huge role in how the industry has evolved, not all of which has been good.
Ordway wonders if small clips of shows posted on social media has hurt the ability of hosts to be genuine and to be at their best.
“We’re picking up comments now because of social media that somebody makes in a small forum and suddenly we want them cancelled from their job at ESPN or in some major platform,” said Ordway. “I think that’s a little scary. You’ve got a lot of people who are a little bit frightened when they sit there with their microphone so we’re not being spontaneous enough. We’re fearful that we’re going to say the wrong thing and sometimes you don’t even realize when you say it that there are some people who are offended by it.”
Glenn Ordway is living the good life now in retirement, but still has that itch to talk to sports fans in some capacity. Once he finds that venue, and he does have some options, there will certainly be a great reaction from Boston sports fans who have missed his voice and his presence in the New England sports radio community.
