Toronto Sports Media Morning Drive Lineups

Thats just Bruce… no chance that will happen at this time with the ratings the morning show is getting even thought they are not great but still better than TSNR…I do not see any changes at the Fan for at least a year with all the changes thay have done lately….

Dowbiggin’s boy is Mike Richards and no doubt he cares not to acknowledge that and he’ll do what he can to prop Richards up, although he’s been an abysmal failure so far in denting a market he claimed he’d dominate when he arrived.

If you recall, TSM noted Andrew Krystal and Dowbiggin were friends, and Dowbiggin sat in-studio, possibly paid to do so, and co-hosted with Krystal and then was very pro-Krystal in several profile pieces before he got fired, so Bruce is just being Bruce here.

I like Tim and Sid too. I’m not sure their format works or could ever work for mornings. It’s a bit too “jokey” and not a lot of big opinions to react too. I happen to think they’re both occasionally funny so it’s a relaxed listen mid-afternoon. But let’s not get carried away. Dough Boy’s logic is so all over the map that I’m shocked an editor didn’t call him on it.

Tim and Sid make good money, he theorizes. The Fan can’t afford them? Sure they can. Don’t forget, when Collins got there, he had to budget in huge payouts in severance to the likes of Landry, Stellick, Hogan, Jack Armstrong when their shows were canned, later on Krystal and Howard Berger and probably Doug Faraway too. Well, I’d guess the majority of those are now over and he’s clearly got money to spend.

Brady wouldn’t have come from 640 without a big pay bump and he wouldn’t have gone to mornings without another one, I’d guess. Look, I say it all the time. Can Brady & Lange be better? Sure they can. Maybe with less Lange even, but they’re according to TSM’s numbers from last fall either tripling or quadrupling Bruce’s best bud Richards in the key age group that matters to advertisers, so why mess with it? Plus then you pay out Brady I assume what is a guaranteed contract and he walks over to TSN and I could assume given they just handed a show to a complete unknown like Scott McArther (?) that they’d make room for him somewhere. Crazy.

Mario’s right. Think what you want about the shows and whether they’re good or bad on a given day, I’d be shocked if 590 does any tinkering for a long, long time. We all got used to a lot of change in a quick period of time with three radio stations (I guess I’d count Bill Watters Show in the mix and Leafs Lunch with Dreger) but it’s settled and now it is what it is. I would even doubt TSN can do anything with Mike Richards. If he came for as much money as rumoured, despite totally tanking so far, there’s no way out of a deal like that for TSN for a while. Consider it the Jason Blake of sports radio deals, without the 20 goal seasons.

Still, I’m not totally hammering Dowbiggin. I like media news and wish there was more of it, especially on the tv side. I’m actually shocked Sportsnet and TSN and their talent and contract issues don’t get mentioned more, as well as a possible jailbreak from CBC if they lose Hockey Night on Saturdays.

Becks,

Not impressed with Alter, but Jonas on TSN sounds way worse on the air. Can’t possibly listen to one of his segments all the way through.

Fair comment on Tim & Sid, but again, Dowbiggin didn’t say it should happen, it was more a “I wonder how this all works out in the long run”. McCown again sets the standard. 5-6 years is a long time in the business to be in a slot in sports talk or news talk, I’d guess, who knows what the industry standard is. But I also know you have to leave a show alone awhile to get it’s greatest audience. Many on here have said the Fan would have done that with Krystal had TSN Radio not been starting up. The Fan couldn’t take a chance on an “experiment”. Oh, and a lot of people hated Krystal. And as I’ve said before, morning shows are easily the most highly-criticized.

As for ratings, that’s what they have to go on, and it’s how people get paid. Look at the traffic on this board. The ratings probably don’t lie. McCown is easily the most popular show in the city and probably 7 or 8 times as many people comment on Brady’s show as his competition, then comes either Blair or Tim and Sid now, and then Cybulski and Bryan Hayes. To repeat for a 13th time, the stations and the bosses don’t care if you like the personalities a lot, they care if you listen. So the ratings reflect this blog’s message boards and the message boards seem to reflect the ratings, so there’s no basis to suggest the numbers are somehow wrong. Most popular morning guys among men in town are Blundell and Derringer, right? So say the numbers. The FM signal and hugely advertised stations help also. In my office, Derringer is on in the reception room and at my nearby gym. No surprise.

Julian makes a lot of good points. Personally, I don’t think I would be happy with anyone in the morning slot. I tend to be grumpy in the morning drive to work and so I alternate between enjoying the announcers and being rather cheesed off by them. Again, I don’t think there’s anyone who could satisfy me in the morning slot – but it’s a problem with the slot itself. The obvious desire/need in that slot is to give information/scores repeatedly in an entertaining way. Myself, I have a 90 minute morning commute on the days that I work, so it would drive me crazy to listen to the morning show for all of that time. The constant repeat of Leafs chatter would be mind-numbing. Brady and Lang are not perfect, but I don’t think there is an answer to the slot. I actually liked Landry and Stellick. I mean, it’s just a sports morning-drive show. If I want something substantial, I will turn to CBC.

That having been said, I really like listening to Tim and Sid on the drive home in the afternoon, where they are now. They are having a good time doing their job, they don’t take it too seriously, and they rather pick up my mood after a stressful morning. And I am so grateful that they don’t take phone-calls, which bore me to no end.

But here’s the point that I would really like to make: why is Dowbiggin the media critic at The Globe? As has been pointed out, he has clearly made attempts to get hired (just note his blurb under his Twitter handle) and has had numerous spats with other media personalities (re: Cox) with the result that his objectivity is deeply suspect. In fact, I really don’t know why they should even have a media member serving as the media critic. There are enough intelligent media savvy people (they don’t have to be scholars, but that wouldn’t be a bad idea) who are obsessed with sports media and who are not kissing up for jobs and who neither owe people favours nor hold grudges. Case in point – this blog.

And to conclude with one snide remark about Dowbiggin: how childish is it that he refers to himself as “Usual Suspects” and “we.” WTF? I really don’t think he is speaking on behalf of the entire paper. Every time I read him refer to himself this way, I am reminded of old novel by Kurt Vonnegut, where a character gives himself a boastful nickname, but the other characters decide that another nickname, and one that is less kind, is more fitting. Anyway, suffice it to say that I have my own nickname for Dowbiggin, and it certainly isn’t Usual Suspects.

I doubt we’ll see changes to The Fan for a while too. After a year and a half of changes, this seems to be the ‘finished product’. I think it’s pretty strong, actually.

There is one minor change I thought The Fan might be considering though. I did a recent survey and one of the questions was ‘what would you rather hear? A Jays/Leafs/Raptors’ half hour pregame show or McCown?

I remember TSM wrote that PTS almost got moved to 3:30 to 6:30. Maybe with Leaf rights coming up next year they’re considering that again.

I guess you could do Tim&Sid 12 – 3:30, PTS 3:30 – 6:30, and HockeyCentral (acting as a Leafs pregame kind of) 6:30-7?

Sorry Julian there is no way you or anyone else will convince me that a radio ratings system that monitors approx 20-200 listeners out of potentialy thousands is anywhere near accurate period end of story.

Some wonderful bitterness from bobcat toward cox at start of 1600 hour, with bonus brunt

It was Bob grousing about Cox skipping the show yesterday to do the Leafs pregame and his general absences from the radio.

paraphrasing “I don’t care if he is ever here.”

I”m one of the few Shannon fans (tolerators?) so I was happy he was on yesterday instead of Cox.

Bora – yeah, they did do 3 – 6 for a while, but apparently they nearly moved it to 3:30 to 6:30 instead of 4 to 7. I didn’t like the 3 to 6 either. Plus they just replayed the show from 6 to 7.

@Alex I’ll take Shannon over Cox, but I prefer neither, though I’m not sure what a better option is :\ I still think Eric Smith would have good chemistry with Bob (and he has had had good chemistry when he’s been on).