Rush Limbaugh shifted stations from his New Orleans home of 18 years. To make sure all the dittoheads in town don't miss him, his show is now running 24/7.
In 1969, New Orleans radio station WRNO-FM signed on playing what was then the cutting-edge album rock format. After a few musical format changes during the '90's, the station settled into the classic rock format, playing the same tunes as 30 years before.
But the station now belongs to Clear Channel, and in November 2006 WRNO became "The New 99.5 FM," consisting mainly of local hosts--of course conservative types. (The final rock track was, appropriately enough, The Doors' "The End.") The syndication anchor was Sean Hannity, whose previous station had been dumped by ABC Radio.
Over the following months, the local hosts left one by one for various reasons and the station, desperate for filling time, resorted to running Hannity almost half the time--no exaggeration. That was bad enough, but then WRNO finally bagged the prize they'd sought all along--Rush Limbaugh came over from WWL-AM, where he'd been for 18 years. The changeover came on April 1, so WRNO pulled what seemed like an April Fool's prank. To make sure all the local dittoheads knew where to find Rush, the station saturated the market with billboards with its new brand "Rush Radio." Pretty standard so far, but after Rush signed off at 2 pm Central Tuesday afternoon, WRNO ran the show again... and again... until 11 am the next morning, when Comedian (as Keith Olbermann calls him) started a new show. As of 4 pm Friday afternoon, it's still going on.
Besides the billboards, the changeover was reported in the Times-Picayune, but apparently Rush's audience doesn't read the papers. So WRNO decided to accommodate the dittoheads desperately searching for Rush up and down their radio dials by never taking him off.
Here's the punchline: it probably won't work. Rush's former home of WWL-AM, on the air since 1925, along with its namesake TV station, dominates the local market like few in the country. That's due largely to a strong local presence--now that Limbaugh is gone, WWL broadcasts no syndicated programming until late night. At the time of the changeover, their ratings were about quadruple WRNO's. Sure Comedian will take some listeners with him, but WWL will march on.
Times-Picayune media writer Dave Walker quoted a Clear Channel suit thusly:
As we move further down that process line ... we want to broaden our scope," he said. "The all-(city)-council-all-the-time, the all-(local)-politics-all-the-time -- when you drill down at that level, we begin to see that New Orleans people at large numbers get tired of that.
Once again proving that outsiders just don't understand the New Orleans market, as the ratings are likely to show.