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August 15, 2014 1:02 PM  #1


Kool / K-Fun

What the heck is going on at these two stations? Stacey Thompson is gone? She has been there for years. How does that effect Dan Delorme (Stacey's husband)? And Brian Bourke who has been there a lifetime plus Larry Silver, a veteran news guy and a couple of others. How are these changes going to make these stations better? If Kool & K-Fun were in trouble before (Kool did have good results in the last ratings) they are going to be unsavable after this.  

 

August 15, 2014 3:11 PM  #2


Re: Kool / K-Fun

Well I don't think it's a surprise that the predictable corporate bloodbath happened.  That was discussed on Quad Cities ver. 1.  A couple of Corus staff were let go as well one of them being Kathy Wall (she is gone from the Beat 91.5 page).  Major slashing in radio always seems to come at this time because apparently this is year end for the major players. 

As to trying to figure out why these people were chosen, why speculate?  The decisions made in boardrooms are based on a kind of "voodoo logic" that even skilled computer cryptology hackers couldn't figure out. And I hope we don't hear the "they'll land on their feet" because that's no longer the case for some of them.  On a larger scale all of this is about a corporate culture clash where creative folks (who are often quirky) are expected to fit in to a corporate culture which is often the opposite. The old square peg, round hole. 

Long term I think both KOOL and KFUN were more victims of music trends otherwise.  KFUN was classic hits & the whole arena of older rock music is on it's last legs. KOOL FM was a "Rock AC" and (as I pointed out years ago) had a musically limited future. There is lots of good rock music today but the radio format would never pull in the numbers that KOOL did at one time.  New rock music is niche programming now.  And as there is no mainstream now, in the future there may well not be any "superstations" like CHYM.  When the CHYM demo gets too old to sell too, they'll need a new format.  There won't be a format that will pull in the numbers they have now.  And it will be torn into pieces just like KOOL will be.  

You could get granular and dissect the downsizing at KOOL/KFUN.  But I suspect this is a part of a larger trend in music radio.  The death of rock music. None of this is the fault of a bunch of employees just doing their jobs.  
 

 

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