Free Radio New Orleans

Another show-biz report from The Times-Picayune’s Dave Walker, lacking in any critical analysis of the local media market whatsoever:

Radio station WGSO switches to north shore talk

WGSO AM-990 has changed owners and formats. Out is William Metcalf Jr.’s MC Media. In is Northshore Radio LLC, a consortium of investors who primarily reside and do business on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

The new owners have installed a news-talk format targeted at north shore listeners who’ve largely been overlooked by New Orleans broadcast media, said Michael Starr, a local broadcasting veteran who is the new station’s general manager.

The station’s studios are in Slidell. Its tower and transmitter are atop an office building on Canal Street in New Orleans. Though targeting St. Tammany, its programming may appeal to Jefferson and Orleans listeners as well.

“Some of the topics we’re talking about are topics without borders,” Starr said. “We might be having a problem in St. Tammany Parish that’s universal. The Road Home is a common problem for everybody. In addition to that, (north shore) residents work in other parts of the metro area.

“Whether people are driving to work or play or whatever, they can keep in touch with what’s going on (at home).”

In the station’s new talk-host lineup is Hugh Dillard, who many local listeners will remember as rock-radio’s Captain Humble.

Dillard, a marquee jock at album-rock WRNO FM-99.5 in its air-guitar-windmilling prime, has recently been running a po-boy shop in Slidell, and intends to do his noon-2 p.m. show from there most days.

Other hosts include Jeff Crouere, Ed Clancy, Bernie Cyrus, Ken Trahan and John Marie.

“You know how you kind of say your prayers and at the end of them say something you know is pretty spectacular? ‘I want to win the Powerball’ or something?” Dillard said. “I always used to say, ‘I’d sure like to be back on the radio.’”

The north shore has different issues which are given shortshrift by dominance of media aimed at New Orleans. They certainly deserve their own outlet, and frankly, New Orleans needs its own outlet for original conversations which engage our own citizens in conversation, instead of the ignorant ideologues who live out in Jefferson Parish and the north shore. It’s a mutually advantageous outcome for the north shore to get its own talk radio station … except …

Except that the cause of localism for New Orleans still isn’t be served. The station will have its studio on the north shore, but the transmitter on the South Shore, where it might interfere with any other potential broadcasters.

Moreover, I might be mistaken, but with hosts like Jeff Crouere (his he a north shore boy, or just a media whore?), the metropolitan area is getting yet another pro-Republican formatted radio station. I don’t think a radio station should have a partisan tendency one way or another. If hosts are partisan, at least the lineup of hosts should be balanced. But we now have right-wing radio on 670 AM, 870 AM, 990 AM, 1350 AM, Clear Channel’s unfair and unbalanced Fox affiliate 99.5 FM, and 105.3 FM. Of course, almost identical content is being broadcast on 870, 1350, and 105.3 — which ought to be cause to have two of those licenses reclaimed by the FCC for other uses — a true community talk radio format, for example — which is my other problem with the new 990 AM north shore format.

Where in any of this are the unfiltered voices of the community, of plain folks who can certainly speak more eloquently then idjuts like Spud McConnell, and who are so much better informed about what’s happening in the rebuilding of New Orleans? Where can citizens turn for real localism around the clock? Consider what I heard tonight, simulcast on 870 AM and 105.3 FM — the local Entercom DJ was posing the following topics for discussion: 1) Was Paris Hilton being given special consideration by being released from jail?, and 2) How many remote controls do you have, who’s in charge of them, and where was the last place you lost one?

FCC, anyone? Is this not the worst natural disaster in American history? Can we simply ask that the FCC give us one of those wasted channels now being used by Entercom and Clear Channel for more substantive conversations led by citizens who actually know something?