Quick Hit Time + BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING (Really Bad) -- 104.1 RIP

Nothing much Tickety on my mind lately.  A few observations to freshen up the thread:

(1)  Becca the New Traffic Twist does a pretty nice job.  I could do without traffic reports entirely, but they seem to be a staple of local radio, so there you go.  A couple of unusual pronunciations aside ("Jagwire," "tellpipe"), she seems pretty sound.  Always interesting to see whether a Traffic Twist will become a target (Barb Smith) or a tread-lightly-around tigress (Alexis Smith) or kinda one of the guys (Tara Artho) or hardly there at all (Julie Mac).    A belated welcome to her.

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(2) With all the Breaking Bad talk I thought it might be a good idea to check out The Fan.  Someday I need to do some kind of piece about Ben & Skin, but this isn't it.

I guess they are famous for knowing lots of athletes well enough to get them for interviews, which is really great if athletes are interesting interviews, not so much if they aren't.  Fortunately, some are -- Dirk -- but many, many are not.  Upon punching up 105.3, I hear them interviewing Derek Holland.  Now maybe Derek Holland is a really good guy to talk to, but he must have gotten beat up about his many bits, and brought low by the conclusion to the Rangers' season.  It was agonizing to hear, poor guy had nothing to say.  I confess that I did punch out on him for awhile, so maybe it got a lot better and if it did I apologize for what follows, but I punched back in in time to hear them begging him to be their color next-day interview for all Stars and -- was it Mavs or Cowboys? Sorry, I forget -- games, or maybe just home games.  (After extracting a promise from him not to speak with any other local sports radio stations, which he delivered.)  And he said OK and you'd have thought the Ben & Skin show had just won the lottery.   I have to assume they were not serious about this, but it was hard to tell.   If they were, then they just promised a lot of don't-listen segments.

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(3)  I find the growing Sean Bass controversy interesting.  I'm delighted he's pushed back in these pages.  More than one Confessor has criticized him over the past year or so, citing a dismissive attitude toward persons, including colleagues, who do not share his views on one thing or another.  Personally, I hadn't really noticed it, at least not to the degree that it would be off-putting.  So I listened for it, and I still didn't get a snotty vibe from Sean, no more than one gets from other of the more youthful hosts.  (He and I do disagree about the proper coverage of sites like this one, but that's OK, too.)  And he got a strong defense from a Confessor on the last thread who said hey, Sean and Jake know their baseball and hardly anyone else does, so good for them.  

I don't mind some intra-Ticket tension.  In fact, as little as I know about sports, even I can tell that some of the hosts don't think deeply about the sports they cover.  And The Shake Joint always has some really good, carefully-considered analyses.  I'm hopeful that The Pan-American Catman will pair Sean with some of his targets on a panel somewhere along the line.  

That would be innarestin radio.

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(4)  Spoilers aside, here's the problem with all the Breaking Bad talk.  This is a point I've been wanting to make and a Confessor beat me to it a couple of days back on the last thread:  This Breaking Bad obsession makes these guys look so  .  .  .  so  .  .  .  dull and common and fannish, and not in a fun sportsy way, but in a pedestrian Tiger Beat way.  Like they've got nothing going on, nothing else interesting to observe and comment on.  

Let's put it this way:  After the Breaking Bad binge we've all tolerated for the past couple of years, reaching near-Rolling-Stones levels as the series drew to a close, The Ticket boys should never, ever again make fun of Ty Walker for his Star Wars enthusiasm.

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BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING

Craig Miller just announced that 104.1 FM would stop broadcasting The Ticket effective close-of-day this Sunday.  Cumulus must have gotten its FCC issues squared away, which means both the death of 104.1 and the inauguration of Cumulus's management of 103.3's programming.

This is very bad news for Your Plainsman, Western Civilization, and  quite possibly My Ticket Confession.  Almost every minute of my listening of The Ticket since 2004 has been via 104.1.  I am listening to it now at a location that does not receive one hertz of 1310 AM.  The SportsDay app and iHeart are not good alternatives for me for a large part of my listening day, nor is the Internet stream.  

So look for lots more cheap reprints of good Confessor comments as main posts.

Oh, I can hear 1310 most of the time.  But it's just such an f-y by the CTO -- assuming they don't improve the Ticket signal in any way -- that I'm starting to wonder if it's time to stop rewarding the Dickeys' contempt for the Cumulus audience.

ThePlainsman1310@gmail.com

@Plainsman1310

Kinda Worried

Maybe a little more than kinda.

I never thought the ESPN deal would result in anyone moving from The Ticket to 103.3.  Didn't make sense for Cumulus to pirate a single one of its top-rated to counter-program 1310.

No, my worry is about what seems to be the related sale of 104.1.

I don't know if we have any definitive ruling on whether the ESPN deal, whereby Cumulus will program, but not own, 103.3, required the divestiture of 104.1.  Doesn't really matter for what's worrying me.

When accounts of the 104.1 sale appeared, the word was that it would continue to simulcast 1310 until the intermediary -- apparently, the sale was made to a nominee, a media property broker who was going to flip to another operator when one could be found.   (The broker is Whitley Media, a broker with Media Services Group.)  I haven't found any further information on any deal closing, so as of now, 104.1 is effectively unflipped, and it's still chirping out Sportsradio 1310, The Ticket.

And what will happen when someone is found to take over the Sanger Blowtorch?

Your Plainsman rises early; chores, you know.  I travel to the skyscrapers of Dallas, Texas, where I park and scurry to my assigned seat and turn on the radio.  Most days -- not all, but most -- 104.1 may be heard on the radio set.  1310, no.  Even after the sun rises and 1310 makes recognizably human sounds, it still goes in and out, and but 104.1 generally remains stalwart to downtown and in the towers.

I get the impression that most Confessors listen to 1310.  But I listen almost exclusively to 104.1.  Could I listen to 1310 if 104.1 disappeared?  Yes, but not for as long, and not as comfortably.  iHeart and the new Ticket app and the website stream are not ideal substitutes for me for a number of reasons.

So do we know what Cumulus has in mind?  I suppose it should be plain after all these years that no one knows what Cumulus has in mind.  But I was troubled by this passage from this Barry Horn article:

"Although prominent sports talk radio stations in New York, Philadelphia and Boston have secured FM outlets, Cumulus’ [COO John] Dickey said that is not the current plan for the The Ticket.

"Cumulus has aired Ticket programming on weak-signaled KTDK-FM (104.1), but the sale of the station is pending. Might The Ticket find another more powerful home on the FM dial?

'We believe you don’t fix something that’s not broken,' Dickey said.

But he added, 'You never say never about anything.'"

This isn't exactly the same as saying "we're not going to replace the 104.1 signal, and will just go with the Bic-Lighter 1310 signal, and good fracking luck to you all," but it's pretty close.  Of course, it does confirm that Cumulus does not believe that the Ticket signal is deficient in any way that matters, which ought not come as a shock to Confessors.  And it also confirms that John Dickey really has pretty much no idea of what's going to happen -- or at least nothing he's willing to share, which is not necessarily a bad posture to take with a reporter.

So I'll enjoy the crystal clarity of the Sanger Blowtorch for now, and hope that Whitley Media's potential customers find 104.1 as worthless as Cumulus does.

KTDK Coverage Map

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ThePlainsman1310@gmail.com

@Plainsman1310