If so, WRKO’s recent failure to pry Jim Braude away from WTKK must have been especially galling. According to sources with knowledge of the situation, WRKO wanted to hire Braude — who’s one half of WTKK’s Eagan and Braude program, and who also hosts the NewsNight and Wired programs on New England Cable News — as Finneran’s co-host. (WRKO also considered hiring Eagan in another capacity, but she would have ceased being Braude’s broadcast partner.) Had he been hired, Braude could have played the radio veteran to Finneran’s broadcasting neophyte, much like John Dennis does for Gerry Callahan on WEEI. He would also have been the progressive yin to Finneran’s yang, giving listeners a program akin to the Pat Whitley/Marjorie Claprood tag-team of years past. Ultimately, though, Braude spurned WRKO’s advances — and saw his loyalty rewarded when Greater Media, WTKK’s parent company, expanded Eagan and Braude’s time slot earlier this month from one to three hours.
The failure to land Braude makes WRKO’s Finneran gamble look all the more risky. Two weeks ago, I argued that Finneran’s intellect and social conservatism would make him a fine talk-show host — and a willing critic of the Massachusetts legislature, which has tacked to the left ideologically since Finneran led the House. Entercom must agree: according to one source, the company’s Boston higher-ups (including vice-president of AM programming and operations Jason Wolfe and vice-president and market manager Julie Kahn) wanted Finneran even if he was found guilty of a felony in connection with the legislature’s 2001 redistricting plan, as long as he wasn’t incarcerated. (Finneran pled guilty to obstruction of justice on January 5; four days later, the Massachusetts Biotech Council, where Finneran had been president since his departure from the legislature, announced that he was resigning. For more on the redistricting case, see “Back to the Drawing Board?”, November 7, 2003.)
But not everyone shares the belief, expressed by Wolfe when Finneran’s hiring was formalized, that the ex-Speaker will be an “engaging and extremely compelling personality” on the air. “The Finneran hiring is full of potential,” Harrison argues, “but the jury is still out on whether he’s any good on talk radio.” Fybush sounds more pessimistic. “I don’t know about Finneran as a talk-show host,” he says. “They’re banking on his headline appeal right now, but I don’t know how that’s going to play out over the long term.” As for the ex-Speaker’s willingness to criticize his former legislative colleagues, one long-time Finneran watcher notes that his willingness to screw people behind the scenes on Beacon Hill was matched by disinclination to publicly speak ill of anyone. That may have been an asset in the State House, but it’s not a recipe for good radio.
Sox it to ’em
Finneran’s future is one of two huge variables facing WRKO today. The other is how valuable, exactly, WRKO’s status as the primary radio home of the Boston Red Sox is going to be. Entercom paid a shocking amount of money for the right to broadcast the Sox last year — reportedly around $150 million for 10 years, barely beating out Greater Media — because those broadcast rights are incredibly valuable assets when it comes to attracting advertisers and boosting ratings. (The deal also gives the Sox the option of purchasing a partial stake in WRKO.)
