Sports talk station 790/the Zone is going all syndication with ESPN, effectively throwing in the towel against two much stronger competitors.
The station's website now just shows the ESPN Radio lineup. Staff was told the bad news at 10:30 a.m. this morning.
This means the local morning show with JP Peterson and Alge Crumpler is out and so is afternoon host Mike Bell, the remaining link to the good old days, and his on-air partner Dave Archer. (Bell's contract was good for at least another year.) John Michaels is a casualty as well.
In many ways, the arrival of 92.9/The Game in October 2012 was the beginning of the end for 790/The Zone.
Or you can go back to 2010, when Steak Shapiro and Andrew Saltzman sold the station to Lincoln Financial.
Either way, it's been a sad, steady decline for the Zone.
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
Back in the early 2000s, 790/The Zone was the dominant sports talk station over 680/The Fan, despite a weaker signal. Saltzman "sold the crap out of that radio station," said Norm Schrutt, the local talent agent who represents Bell, as well as John Kincade, Cindy and Jimmy and the 2 Live Stews, among others.
680/The Fan owner David Dickey lauded Saltzman and Shapiro for "tackling a challenged signal and making it economically viable. It took a lot of hard work and bootstrapping. They did very well with it."
But Dickey and the Fan gradually pecked away at the Zone, taking their talent and building a brand that eventually overtook the Zone.
In the mid-2000s, Shapiro and Saltzman dumped millions into an ill-fated purchase of stations in St. Louis that eventually forced them to sell off the Zone in 2010. Things were never quite the same for the Zone.
"It seems like 790 The Zone started its decline not long after Steak and Saltzman bought those stations in St. Louis," wrote long-time Zone fan Greg Pyron to me. "When 790 allowed Matt Chernoff and Chuck Oliver to go the 680 The Fan several years ago, I had a feeling that maybe things weren't going well financially and it seems to have snowballed from there. The inability to address the issue of signal strength, particularly back in the early 2000s when the station was doing well, never made sense to me."
Then the Game arrived with a much stronger FM signal in 2012. The Fan added an FM translator at 93.7. The Zone? It has been stuck on the dying AM side and has been a third-place player for the past year. In April, the station drew a 0.5 rating with Archer & Bell receiving the best numbers with a 0.8.
In comparison, the Game drew a 0.9. (Its best daypart was mid-days with Jamie Dukes & Rick Kamla with a 1.2.) UPDATE: The Fan does not subscribe to Nielsen and I was informed that I can't identify their ratings so I've removed the number, but it's fair to say the ratings are higher than the Game and the Zone combined. Its strongest show is Chuck Oliver & Matt Chernoff.
When Mayhem in the AM was blown up last June after that ill-fated Steve Gleason bit went viral, the guts of the station's personalities were shown the door: Shapiro, Nick Cellini and Chris Dimino. Shapiro and Dimino are now full time at the Fan and Cellini subbed in on Sunday morning there.
Although the Zone is still committed to the Atlanta Falcons for at least another season, it will no longer have daily local talk shows to promote the team.
The Zone will air the following ESPN shows for its weekday schedule: “Mike and Mike,” “The Herd with Colin Cowherd,” “SVP & Russillo,” “The Dan Le Batard Show,” “Sedano & Stink” and the “Freddie Coleman Show."
Rick Mack, general manager, tried his best to spin this capitulation positively in a press release: "We are excited to launch a new schedule that provides Atlanta-area listeners with an even more robust slate of sports programming."
Beau Bock, who helped start the station in 1997 and still did weekends there, called the end "terrible. It's tragic for the sports fans, not that we were doing it right at the end when Lincoln Financial took over. Management did not care. They really botched things up."
I.J. Rosenberg, who runs sports marketing company Score Atlanta and had a relationship with the station in the past, called it "a real sad day for radio. The Zone was an institution. It was a very unique concept, one of the first in the country to work like it did."
Dickey said the Zone was no longer much of a factor anymore: "We might have some incremental gains but lately, there hasn't been a lot of overlap in terms of listeners or clients," he said.
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