Posted by jigga on April 05, 2009 at 18:51:17:
In Reply to: Changes needed at WGN. posted by Sgt Flipper on April 05, 2009 at 18:50:44:
Doing business in radio is all about two things:
1. Ratings
2. Revenue
Having both is, of course, desirable. But if you have one, the other is irrelevant. You can have all the ratings in the world, but if you can't make money on it the numbers are useless.
On the other hand, if you can make a lot of money from a particular segment and/or format, ratings don't matter.
Farm programming is just that. People in downtown Chicago probably couldn't give a flying f**k about pork bellies and commodity futures. For that matter, most of the data is available now directly to the farmer they're targeting in real time while he's sitting in his tractor.
However, for the very few stations that carry farm programming and can do it well, there's still a LOT of money to be made. The money has dried up significantly in the last decade, but WGN is still one of those powerhouses that does pretty well carrying good 'ol "Big O" and Max Armstrong. If they didn't, WGN would give them the boot in a second.
Bottom line, you may not like it, but it makes money.