FanPost

A's radio broadcast home up in the air again?

KFRC is changing format yet again, according to the Chronicle.  Next Monday, the oldies will be gone and 106.9 FM will simulcast KCBS-AM.     The Chron story doesn't address what happens to the A's broadcasts.   But it's ominous that both of the KFRC staffers quoted in the story ascribe their station's lack of ratings to the need to carry A's games.   

 

 

"We gave it all we had," said Harvill, who acknowledged that KFRC's ratings were weak but stressed that the move was motivated more by the desire "to give KCBS a bigger platform to reach a bigger audience. We're trying to get our content on every platform possible."

For NRAFs unfamiliar with the Bay Area radio scene. KCBS is an invaluable resource when you want traffic and weather together every ten minutes.  It is also useful when you desire to hear a one-minute story about something that happened at the Board of Supervisors last night, taped on a 25-year-old cassette recorder and filed over a cell phone.   Whenever you want to know whether your windows were rattled by a very small earthquake or a very large truck, tune to KCBS, and soon you will be hearing someone in Livermore describing the way their chandelier rocked back and forth.  If you think any story involving BART, no matter how incidentally, ought to begin with the sound of a BART train moving into the station and going "boop-boop", you will enjoy KCBS.  If two minutes is an agonizingly long amount of time for you to think about any one subject, KCBS is your station for news.  In other words, it has its uses, but frankly I don't think the platform is the problem, the content is the problem.    

I'm sorry for the hosts at KFRC, some of whom were quite good -- I liked Ben Fong-Torres' and John MacFlanagan's weekend programs a lot.   But now I'm really concerned about where the A's broadcasts end up.  Are we back to 1550 AM only?