Stirring words, but they should be viewed with skepticism. Maloney, who wrote this purple prose, is a former Entercom employee whose previous guest-host stints on WRKO failed to land him a job. (He’s also painfully hyperbolic; for example, he referred to Deval Patrick’s gubernatorial victory as “evil prevail[ing] on Election Day.”) Even so, the overheated rantings of the SaveWRKO crowd contain the germ of a legitimate question: when the dust settles, what exactly will the station’s identity be?
Whatever the answer, the consensus among radio-industry observers is that Entercom’s current gutting-and-renovation project wasn’t a matter of choice. “WRKO is a heritage station that has a glorious history,” says Talkers magazine editor Michael Harrison. “It’s had good times and bad times, just like a baseball team or a football team. And they’re at a point now where a lot of changes they’re making could in fact open the door to a new era.” “The Red Sox broadcasts are a major ingredient in the new sauce,” adds Tom Taylor of Inside Radio. (Inside Radio is owned by Clear Channel Communications, an Entercom competitor.) “The fact that they’re willing to move the games over from WEEI down to 680 tells me that they really have begun a vast rehabilitation effort, that they’re really going to spend a lot of intellectual capital and other capital to rehabilitate the station.” (WRKO management refused repeated requests for comment for this story.)
Why does WRKO need rehab, exactly? Consider the previous year of Arbitron ratings. In the winter ’06 period, Arbitron credited WRKO with a 4.2 Average Quarter-Hour (AQH) share for persons 12 and up, good for seventh place in the Boston market. (AQH share measures the percentage of listeners in a given market who tune in for at least five minutes in a 15-minute period.) In spring ’06, the station’s share fell to 3.8, still enough for seventh place. WRKO’s summer share was 3.7, dropping it to eighth place. And in the fall quarter — thanks, perhaps, to the governor’s race and the migration of WEEI listeners no longer checking out the Sox — WRKO rebounded to a 4.6 share and sixth place.
The value of these 12-plus numbers is debatable; that’s why Arbitron provides them for free, while charging for ratings fine-tuned by age and gender. Still, they do provide a sense of longer-term trends, especially when compared with similar data for competitors. In three of the last four cycles, for example, WBZ-AM, which offers a reliably nonpartisan diet of news and talk, topped Arbitron’s Boston rating. Last fall, when WBZ finished second, it had an AQH share of 6.3, well ahead of WRKO. More important, ratings at WTKK-FM — which shares WRKO’s conservative-slanted format but broadcasts on the superior FM spectrum — has seen its ratings grow steadily: 2.7 AQH share last winter, 2.9 in the spring, 3.0 in the summer, 3.6 in the fall. For WRKO and its corporate parent Entercom, this is a worrisome trend. “I think a lot of what WRKO’s been doing has to be seen as a reaction to the challenge they’re facing from WTKK,” says Fybush.
