By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed Wednesday, December 8, 2015
Former "Yo! MTV Raps" host Ed Lover has arrived in Atlanta to join a syndicated morning show with Monie Love, who will remain in Philadelphia. He has been doing the show from Radio One headquarters in downtown Atlanta, where fellow syndicated host Rickey Smiley also works.
The new Ed Lover show debuted this week on the Boom 107.9 classic hip hop station in Philadelphia and will go nationwide on an unspecified number of stations on January 11, 2016 from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. weekdays.
UDPATE 12/11: Tim Davies, who runs Radio One Atlanta, said local Boom 102.9 is going to air Lover's show starting that same day. The old-school station, which debuted a year ago, currently has one jock: DJ Nabs in the afternoons. Otherwise, it just plays music.
Lover, 52, a New York native and iconic figure in the hip-hop world going back to the late 1980s, has been doing a show on Sirius/XM for many years on its Backspin station. He left Sirius/XM last month.
The classic hip-hop craze came to Atlanta radio just over a year ago when three stations with the same format debuted within days of each other.
Radio One's Boom 102.9 has been consistently between generating a 0.6 to 0.8 share in recent months compared to 1.2 to 1.3 for rival Cumulus operation OG 97.9. (A third Old School 99.3, run by Steve Hegwood, was having signal conflicts with another station and was taken off the air in July by the Federal Communications Commission.)
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