Talkers magazine last year in its second annual Sports Talk Heavy Hundred rankings inexplicably left out Matt Chernoff and Chuck Oliver, the most popular sports talk show in Atlanta.
The editors must have listened because Chuck & Chernoff this year popped up at No. 15, the highest ranked Atlanta-based sports talk station measured by the magazine.
Oliver, in a quick interview, said it's nice but he cares more about being on the "top 4 list of [boss] David Dickey," adding, "I get all the positive feedback I can get every 15 days when I get a paycheck. I am thankful and humbled I have this job."
The list left out 92.9/The Game's most popular show featuring Rick Kamla and Jamie Dukes mid-days. The only Game show that made the cut was the morning show featuring Marc James and Randy Cross at No. 47.
Two other 680/The Fan shows landed on the list: the Rude Awakening (Christopher Rude, Chris Dimino, Perry Laurentino) at No. 37 (about the same as last year's 36) and John Kincade and Buck Belue at No. 76. The mid-morning show's Front Row featuring Steak Shapiro, Sandra Golden and Brian Finneran was missing as well.
How the magazine can compare shows across markets is a bit murky to me. While a few of the shows are syndicated, most sports talk shows are local. This differs from the regular Heavy 100, which features a heavy dose of political talk show hosts with syndication deals. Here's how the magazine explains its methodology:
This list ranks sports talk hosts, duos or ensembles from 1 to 100, based upon a set of criteria that includes a combination of hard and soft factors. The genre of sports talk radio has evolved greatly and grown exponentially over the past 10 years to go from being a fringe format to an important sub-genre of spoken-word radio programming. With this in mind, the editors of TALKERS debuted the Heavy Hundred of Sports Talk in 2012 to acknowledge the hard-working air personalities on sports talk radio. The results of this list are, admittedly, subjective. Being true to the realities of the media business, ratings and revenue are two of the major factors – some would say they are the only factors worth considering – but the editors also took into account other qualities that help create a list that is reflective of the industry's diversity and total flavor and still give credit where credit is due. Those qualities include: courage, effort, impact, recognition, service, talent and uniqueness. The other concrete qualification for inclusion is hosts must be working – that is, have a regularly scheduled professional show on the air at a minimum of one terrestrial or satellite radio station – at the time of publication.
The top 5 are Mike Francesca (The Fan in New York), Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton (also the Fan in New York), Jim Rome (CBS Sports), Dan Patrick (Fox Sports Talk) and Mike Valenti & Terry Foster (WXYT-FM, Detroit).
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