Ping: Sacramento Area Folks - re: KHTK

[Franklinnoble]

Anyone here listen to KHTK in the mornings?

[cartman]

If you watch KCRA in the mornings, one of my friends from high school is the 5 to 7am anchor.

[Franklinnoble]

That's nice. But I don't watch much TV, especially in the mornings.

Anyhow, one of the Rise Guys is no longer there.... wondering if anyone heard what the deal was.

[JonInMiddleGA]

I haven't seen anything official, just one bit of speculation that it might have been something along the lines of "couldn't agree on contract terms".

Another bit of rumorizing & speculation in the market concerns the syndicated Don & Mike show (which I gather airs on KHTK in the midday). Some say that show will be shifting to mornings at some point, as a replacement in some markets for Howard Stern. If that proves true, I could at least imagine a scenario where they might roll into mornings in non-Stern markets as well.

All that is rumor mill stuff of course, just bored radio guys speculating & guessing, so who knows, Whitey could be back tomorrow. In this business, anything is possible.

[Franklinnoble]

I haven't seen anything official, just one bit of speculation that it might have been something along the lines of "couldn't agree on contract terms".

Another bit of rumorizing & speculation in the market concerns the syndicated Don & Mike show (which I gather airs on KHTK in the midday). Some say that show will be shifting to mornings at some point, as a replacement in some markets for Howard Stern. If that proves true, I could at least imagine a scenario where they might roll into mornings in non-Stern markets as well.

All that is rumor mill stuff of course, just bored radio guys speculating & guessing, so who knows, Whitey could be back tomorrow. In this business, anything is possible.

Are you in the radio business? I can't imagine how else you'd know about it, and even if you are, I can't believe this is newsworthy in your neck of the woods...

We have Stern on an FM station here in Sac already. It's pathetic. They actually call the station "Howard 93.7" or some shit.

Anyhow, I e-mailed Mike Remy who's the program director there. He just wrote back saying that Whitey didn't sign a new contract.

Sounds pretty stupid if you asked me. Whitey's alright, but he's not all that. There's only one sports radio station in Sacramento (which I can't stand... I'd love to have some local competition around here), so, he doesn't really have much negotiating power unless he plans to move, and I don't see him cracking into a bigger market elsewhere.

[JonInMiddleGA]

franklin -- I'm an ex-radio guy turned advertising exec. A big part of my job is planning / placement of media, so keeping up with the comings & goings around radio is both part of my job & leftover interest in knowing who came/went from where (you'd be surprised just how small the actual radio universe is -- playing Six Degrees of Separation is really easy).

I don't normally follow Sacto, but checking it with my usual online sources didn't take but a few minutes, I figured if it was interesting enough to you to post about it, it was at least interesting enough for me to look around a little.

[Franklinnoble]

franklin -- I'm an ex-radio guy turned advertising exec. A big part of my job is planning / placement of media, so keeping up with the comings & goings around radio is both part of my job & leftover interest in knowing who came/went from where (you'd be surprised just how small the actual radio universe is -- playing Six Degrees of Separation is really easy).

I don't normally follow Sacto, but checking it with my usual online sources didn't take but a few minutes, I figured if it was interesting enough to you to post about it, it was at least interesting enough for me to look around a little.

What are your "usual online sources," if I may ask?

Is this a usual occurance? It seems there's been a lot of changes around that station the last few years, and I can't believe a jock would essentially quit his job over something like this. Does radio just not pay that well?

[JonInMiddleGA]

Eh, the same "usual sources" as most everybody else in the radio bidness --
www.radioandrecords.com
www.radio-online.com (mostly subscription stuff, much "borrowed" from the site above)
www.radio-info.com (mostly discussion, occasional gems, a lot of gossip, from people in/around radio, most of whom are much smaller players than they'd like to admit)

There's not much out of the ordinary about this as far as I can tell ... there's at least a half dozen to a dozen air talents around the country coming/going from jobs every day. And those are just the ones at stations big enough to make the listing at R&R.

Best I could tell, the missing guy was the 2nd/3rd banana on a station that doesn't appear to be setting the world on fire to begin with (best I can figure from the publically available 12+ ratings)... unless he had another role at the station that I don't know about, I'd be surprised if he were making much more than $25k base salary a year, and not particularly surprised if it was as low at $20k. There's an old figure that floated around back in the 90's from one survey or another, not sure if there's a newer version but it basically showed that 90% of the total salary earned by on-air talent was in the pocket of roughly 10% of the total on-air employees. In other words, there's a few people making "way up here" and a bunch of people making "way down there".

[Franklinnoble]

That about sums it up. Whitey is sort of the ringleader for the morning show, but he's definately second to Grant Napear, the afternoon guy.

KHTK's ratings are only a factor of their monopoly on the sports talk market in Sacramento. If they had any competition, they'd get crushed. I think a morning show featuring me and Hell Atlantic would probably demolish these guys.

If that's the average salary, then I'm not too surprised... I figured radio guys for around $40k a year... but if it's $25k, hell, he could manage a McDonald's and do better than that.

[JonInMiddleGA]

If that's the average salary, then I'm not too surprised... I figured radio guys for around $40k a year... but if it's $25k, hell, he could manage a McDonald's and do better than that.

An mildy interesting conversation on one of the radio-info boards (again, plenty of rumor & innuendo, occasional fact mixed in) centered on the salary of national sportstalk hosts & their pay -- early consensus was that the majority of them aren't pulling 6 figures.

[Franklinnoble]

An mildy interesting conversation on one of the radio-info boards (again, plenty of rumor & innuendo, occasional fact mixed in) centered on the salary of national sportstalk hosts & their pay -- early consensus was that the majority of them aren't pulling 6 figures.

I'll have to check that out... I signed up on there, and just posted in the Sacramento section... where is that thread at?

[JonInMiddleGA]

I'll have to check that out... I signed up on there, and just posted in the Sacramento section... where is that thread at?

I believe there's currently a short thread in the "Sports" sub-section of the "Formats" section (toward the bottom of the menu of boards on the left hand side). That thread doesn't have but 2-4 posts in it, but it mirrors several discussions I've seen in the past.

One of the things you'll notice if you go around those boards for a while, the same discussions usually end up around the same conclusions, regardless of which specific forum the topic was in. After a while, the discussion threads get kinda predictable, I basically use that site to read a little local commentary on station/talent changes in markets that I buy. Amidst the b.s., I can usually mine at least a couple of decent nuggets of info a week, which helps me do my job better.

[Franklinnoble]

I believe there's currently a short thread in the "Sports" sub-section of the "Formats" section (toward the bottom of the menu of boards on the left hand side). That thread doesn't have but 2-4 posts in it, but it mirrors several discussions I've seen in the past.

One of the things you'll notice if you go around those boards for a while, the same discussions usually end up around the same conclusions, regardless of which specific forum the topic was in. After a while, the discussion threads get kinda predictable, I basically use that site to read a little local commentary on station/talent changes in markets that I buy. Amidst the b.s., I can usually mine at least a couple of decent nuggets of info a week, which helps me do my job better.

So, basically, I should just ping you the next time I have a radio question.
;)

[JonInMiddleGA]

So, basically, I should just ping you the next time I have a radio question. ;)

Prolly ;)

Actually, for people "not in the biz" who find radio interesting, some of the stuff on boards like that can be pretty informative. Quite a few of the regular posters on some of the market-by-market forums are strictly fans, sometimes they seem to know their stuff more than some of the (alleged) pros.

The really limiting thing for me on that particular forum is that there's a fair amount of "noise" posted, sometimes just purely flame stuff, and it gets kinda predictable about who is gonna do it to whom (kinda like FOFC ;) ). And then there's quite a few "experts" and "insiders" who never seem to have their scoops pan out (kinda like ESPN;)), it takes a little while to figure out who is bluffing & who really has good info.

[clintl]

If you watch KCRA in the mornings, one of my friends from high school is the 5 to 7am anchor.

Which one, Walt or Deirdre?

[clintl]

Dola...

To answer your question, Franklin, no, I don't listen to KHTK, and had no idea about the personnel change.

[cartman]

Which one, Walt or Deirdre?

Deirdre.