Full disclosure before getting into this column – from 2017 to 2019, I worked for Audacy in Kansas City as a GSM and ran the sports sales team before spending the next two years with the company in St. Louis. Now that that is out of the way, I want to congratulate the company and their staff in the KC market on the big announcement that 610 Sports will become 96.5 The Fan next week. Huge is the word I keep using because that is all I can think of to describe this. It is a huge move.
Kansas City was always a great market for Entercom. While it doesn’t have nearly the impact on Audacy overall with the additions of all the big markets, it is still a strong cluster, and they take a lot of advertising dollars out of the market. When they took the Kansas City Chiefs away from Cumulus and 810 WHB (who was a partner to Cumulus in their Chiefs agreement and aired a lot of exclusive Chiefs content), it solidified their position.
Now, with an FM signal, the Chiefs, the Royals, Kansas State and Mizzou (which was airing on Audacy News/Talk KMBZ-FM), it should be set up to move into another stratosphere.
The history of sports radio in the market is an interesting one. For years and years SportsRadio 810 WHB was sports radio in the market. 610 Sports came in and clearly was in second position. WHB was everywhere. They had the Chiefs partnership and KU (which they still have), they had big deals with companies like Miller which would keep 610 out of certain places. They had strong talent and a big head start.
610 has had a lot of big names come through like Damon Amendolara, Nick Wright and Danny Parkins, but they all left, so each time the station had to come up with another new show.
There have been several PD’s who have come through 610 who tried to improve the station. Frankly, the problem I saw was not enough resources being put into programming, so how was the station expected to get better? You could have had someone with the skills of Mark Chernoff, Spike Eskin and Jason Barrett rolled into one running the place, but without what was really needed, it wasn’t going to change much.
The Royals turnaround was certainly a nice boon for the station. Then came the Chiefs. Then came the Chiefs being the biggest thing on the planet. Now comes an FM station.
I’m so happy for the sports programming staff in Kansas City and my friends on the sales side, but a part of me keeps wondering why this didn’t happen sooner. Especially because Audacy had already seen, in the very same market, a talk station move from AM to FM and become massive. 98.1 KMBZ-FM is a monster, it does very well financially and is very highly regarded in the market.
While I was working in Kansas City, two of the FM stations in the cluster weren’t doing that well. It seemed to make a lot of sense that if the company ever wanted to really become the dominant sports player in the market, it would have to do something drastic. Like move it to an FM signal.
WHB has solid programming, but what it really has is a connection with the city. My friend Sandy Cohen and the staff at Union Broadcasting do a magnificent job with client relations and retention. They still hang out with their clients and entertain, they take road trips with clients, they really mastered the art of a client “community.”
But now, Audacy has finally taken the big drastic step. This is the move that needed to be made. I would be very surprised if this wasn’t anything but a very successful move for the company. It’s the something that WHB can’t compete against, at least not next week.
I think Audacy KC has a lot of the right people in place in PD Steven Spector and with Bob Fescoe and Carrington Harrison holding down the two drive-time slots. Cody Tapp and Alex Gold also do an excellent job together in middays. I hope ‘Spec’ gets the opportunity to grow his programming team and they really do it right.
My what a time it has been for Kansas City in the last decade or so. And now Audacy has given the market yet another feather in its cap – its first ever FM sports radio station.
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The Best Thing I’ve Heard/Watched Recently
Normally in this space, I write about things I ‘ve seen or heard recently that I enjoyed, but this week I’m throwing a curve ball and am going to tell you about something I didn’t like. Last week, Michael McCarthy, the Senior Writer at Front Office Sports who covers sports business, media and marketing wrote this sentence in a column: “According to my sources, FS1 executives believe First Things First star Nick Wright is the future of the network.” In the piece he also names several other talent the network likes that are already in-house as well as mentioning Danny Parkins from 670 The Score in Chicago who recently had filled in for Colin Cowherd.
On his What’s Wright with Nick Wright podcast, after giving his thoughts on and a big cap tip to Skip Bayless, he went on a rant about how disrespectful the report of him being the future of the network was towards Cowherd and Wright’s partners on First Things First, Chris Broussard and Kevin Wildes.
He also spent time saying that reporters should have reached out to him about this, right before saying he has ignored those same reporters when they’ve reached out in the past.
McCarthy said, “future of the network” and he also noted that Cowherd’s contract was up soon, so it wasn’t like he was ignoring that Cowherd is the current alpha dog at the network.
As for Wright’s partners on FTF, McCarthy probably didn’t write about them because his sources talked about Wright and not the whole cast. Wright talked about wanting to be known as the absolute best sports talker in the business. So, it was all a little conflicting between the ego to think you can become the absolute best at something with the ‘don’t single me out’ mentality.
Wright did use the term “uncomfortable” a lot to describe how it made him feel and that part is understandable. But this should have all been a big positive for Wright.
I think he would have been better off just taking the win.
You can listen to the full episode of the podcast by clicking here.
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In Case You Missed It
I always enjoy reading my colleague John Molori’s columns. This week, however, I think he did one of his best. John profiles Rich Eisen, who I have always been a big fan of. He’s just so good, so likeable, so relatable.
Early in the column, Molori says that Eisen and longtime ESPN on-air partner Stuart Scott were like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. He then later wrote:
“What Eisen really has done is made that leap from a popular and successful sports TV personality to an icon in his field. He is the on-air figurehead at NFL Network, the foundation and ringleader. It all stems from Eisen. And he is still Larry Bird, dishing out elegant on-air passes and making countless colleagues better.”
It is a terrific column about a terrific broadcaster, and you can read it by clicking here.
