From an installment of the TV-Radio notebook by the Houston Chronicle's David Barron:
"You want both, more listeners and more time spent listening," Topper said. (Richard Topper, GM for KGOW 1560 AM — ed.) “But if I had my druthers, I’d rather have a small group of people who are passionate about the station.”
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of radio people shared those sentiments, as the people who are passionate about the station will stick with it through the hard times...but here's the thing. If you want those passionate listeners you have to cultivate and nurture the station's identity, and I always thought a big way to do that was with the deejays and other on-air personalities. I first started listening to KILT-FM, Houston's 100,000-watt heritage country station, when I moved to Bryan-College Station from Northeast Texas in late 1998, and I listened on a daily basis until circumstances forced me to leave the area almost two years later. When I made it to this part of Texas (just a few months after I left College Station) and turned it on 100.3 again and heard all the familiar voices — Hudson and Harrigan, Robert B. McEntire, T.J. Callahan, Dan Gallo, Rowdy Yates — it was almost like coming back home, or getting back in touch with some old friends I hadn't seen or heard from in what seemed like years. Familiarity, like an old favorite t-shirt or something like that. And when I made it back down here for good in August of 2001, just like I did when I was in College Station, I started listening every day when I could, static be damned. But it seems like one by one, all those folks are being let go. Dan Gallo, who used to do mid-days on the station, is now at Country Legends 97.1 after being let go from KILT a couple of years back, and R.B. and T.J. are both recently gone due to financial considerations. I understand that money has to be cut somewhere and that things like this are bound to happen now and then, but even so I think it'd be interesting to find out where the break-even point is, where the erosion of the brand and of loyalty to it are worth the money saved by letting go of the people who make the station what it is. From what I remember reading it was precisely these actions that torpedoed KIKK — once the king of country in Houston — back in the late 1990s, even though the motives, again, from what I gather, were different. Whatever the reasons, they don't make the moves suck any less, at least from this radio listener's perspective. Satellite radio's looking better and better all the time...
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