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| Fresnobee reports about life after Stern |
| "... There was no edge for KFRR (Fresno) when Stern was dropped. The fall 2000 Arbitron ratings showed Stern's listenership here had dropped to a 4.2 rating from a summer 2000 number of 5.3. That's the percentage of listeners 12 years old and older who tuned in to the show. The ratings numbers made Stern the eighth-ranked morning show in the local market. Those kinds of ratings numbers don't support the cost of buying an expensive syndicated show like Stern's; his show costs thousands of dollars. ..."
More>>>
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| Charleston, SC radio station drops Stern |
"It's business," says Dean Pearce, the station's general manager. "The
advertising wouldn't support the show." ...
Since Stern signed on in February 1998, the show has been a hard sell for
the station. "Many advertisers don't want to be associated with "The Howard
Stern Show" so they either buy at the station but not the Stern show, or
they don't buy at the station at all," says Walt Rosen, advertising sales
manager for WAVF. Between the cost of the syndication rights and the loss of ad revenue, keeping Stern on the air just became cost-prohibitive for Wave. ...
http://www.animaux.net/stern/charleston.html |
Greenville, North Carolina radio station becomes twentieth station
within the last 18 months to drop Stern's radio show |
(WXNR) 99.5 FM, Greenville, NC dropped Howard Stern's pornographic radio show earlier than most stations. New Rock, 99X (WXNR) aired Stern only since October 25, 2000
M ore>>> |
| Stern warning to the sleaze set |
(Washington Times) ... But sometimes the armies of vulgarization are forced to retreat. Sometimes that envelope pushes back, the effect of which we saw two weeks ago when the surpassingly foul "Howard Stern Radio Show" - a television program, its name notwithstanding - finally was canceled. ...
More>> |
| On CBS dumping Stern's Saturday night porno show |
(AgapePress) - A Michigan-based pro-family organization says it is a positive step that CBS recently announced it is canceling the Howard Stern television show -- but the notorious performer remains on cable and radio. ...
More>>> |
| Without question, letter writing still makes an incredible difference. We have heard from some of the largest corporations in the world, from Microsoft, General Motors, SAAB USA cars and, of course, many others. |
| Another station drops Stern |
"TORONTO (CP) -- A couple of jewels have fallen off the crown of the self-proclaimed King of All Media.
New York-based radio shock jock Howard Stern has lost his toehold on the Canadian airwaves with the decision by Toronto FM station Q107, owned by Corus Entertainment, to drop Stern's weekday morning program.
Friday's show was to be his last in Canada. CHOM-FM in Montreal dropped Stern in 1998.
The move comes just days after U.S. TV producer King World announced it would no longer be syndicating Stern's weekly TV show. The final instalment aired last weekend. ..."
http://www.canoe.ca/Jam/nov23_stern-cp.html |
| Toronto, Canada: Q107 (CILQ, 107.1 FM) |
| More>>> |
| Another station drops Stern - October 31, 2001 |
Phoenix, AZ: The Edge, KEDJ-FM (106.3) and KDDJ-FM (100.3)
More |
| CBS Cleans House, Ousts Stern |
"It took over three years of our labors along with the efforts of several other organizations and the prayers and the letter writing of many of you, but finally, CBS dropped Stern's Saturday night scourge of America's airwaves," said American Decency Association (ADA) President Bill Johnson. ...
More>>> |
| Stern/CBS Saturday night TV show off the air |
Reuters reports: "Howard Stern's weekly syndicated
latenight series ended its three-year run on Saturday,
a possible victim of falling ratings and racy content."
(11/15/01)
During the April 1998 press conference to announce
his nationally syndicated television show, Howard Stern
predicted great success for his show.
"I am the savior of the Tiffany Network!" ...
When my show hits the airwaves...people will flock to it
like maggots to fresh roadkill on a hot Texas day."
Stern's lofty predictions have not proven very accurate.
His show has been a dismal failure on all sides -
with bottom of the barrel ratings, loss of stations,
and few sponsors. In the fall of 1998, Stern's
Saturday night show was broadcast on 79 stations
nationwide. By the fall of 2000 that number had
dropped to less than 30.
Stern ranted on air Thursday, November 15, 2001
about CBS president Les Moonves and his show's cancellation.
Stern: Les is such a snake. ...
I called that creep last night to straighten him out.
Robin: Did you yell at him?
Stern: He avoided my phone calls. He ducked me.
Now I know why. I've got the whole thing pieced together.
He's such a snake. I hate him. I always have. ...
Big president of CBS. He'll fall." |
| Stern out in Phoenix. Or is he? |
(The Arizona Republic).... "We basically picked up the entire lineup with the exception of Howard Stern," said Scott Fey, general manager at KPTY, which also dropped the "party radio" moniker in favor of the Edge brand. ...
More |
| Newsday.com - Howard's Ratings Slip Once Again |
... But the more interesting stories concern Howard Stern's continuing weakness, even though his morning show is back at No. 1 (in New York City) ...
Stern's 6.3 share continues a long- term decline; he earned a 6.5 in the winter, and a 7.8 last summer. That slide was also reflected among the vital listeners 25 to 54, where his 8.6, still good enough for No. 1, was also down, from 10.3 last summer. And among listeners 18 to 34, the core of the core, Hot 97's Star and Buc Wild beat Stern 11.6 to 11.3.
More>>> |
| New York Post |
... Stern's total audience share for spring was down 13 percent from a year ago and a jaw-dropping 28 percent from the spring of 1998, according to Arbitron ratings released Friday. ...
More>>> |
| "King of All Media" Howard Stern forfeited his wake-up radio crown for the first time in seven years in his own home base - NEW YORK CITY |
| ( NYPOST.COM) April 21, 2001 -- "King of All Media" Howard Stern forfeited his wake-up radio crown for the first time in seven years. -- "King of All Media" Howard Stern forfeited his wake-up radio crown for the first time in seven years. Stern, whose K-Rock (92.3 FM) fan base started to diminish early last year, was topped by all-news station WINS (1010 AM) - the first time that's happened since spring 1994.
More>>>
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| Stern drops out of top ten in Chicago -- |
... while 'CKG's Howard Stern dropped from the top 10. (Stern also lost his top slot in New York City for the first time in years, a sign that even on his home turf his act is growing stale.)
Daily Herald, April 27, 2001 |
| Charlotte, NC, WXRC-FM DROPS STERN RADIO SHOW |
... "Howard is polarizing," says Tom Taylor, editor at industry newsletter The M Street Journal. "That means advertisers embrace him or they don't. That's always an issue." ...Despite strong ratings at WXRC, Stern has made few inroads with advertisers. ...
More>>> |
| New sheriff takes aim at shock radio |
(Detroit Free Press) ... Stern, who is continually cautioning guests and callers about being too graphic, seems increasingly schoolmarmish.
More |
| Indianapolis Star, April 5, 2000 |
| "... Stern was difficult to sell to advertisers, who were pressured to pull their commercials by people who thought his show was vulgar. It takes guts for an advertiser to stand up to public pressure, and most businesses want to avoid any controversy. So let's add it up: Stern's ratings weren't great. The station couldn't make enough money selling ads to pay for the show, which costs $750,000 or more a year. The number of people listening to rock radio had been declining.
I hate the result, too, but it's hard to argue with from a business standpoint. And radio is nothing if not a business. ..."
|
| Chicago Sun Times, 08.10.00 |
STERN WATCH
The Michigan-based American Decency Association's biggest target to date has been radio shock jock Howard Stern.
Since 1996, the conservative Christian group has monitored Stern's show in 19 markets, including New York City, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Detroit.
The group maintains a fierce letter-writing campaign to get advertisers to pull spots from the show and, ultimately, to pull Stern off the air.
The group says that out of the 14,339 businesses it has contacted over the years, more than 12,500 have withdrawn as advertisers, including Dunkin' Donuts, which had been a major sponsor in New York. |
| National Post, Toronto, 08.16.00 - by Murray Whyte |
'6 Guys to Do" says the largest of the half-dozen cover lines on the just-relaunched Mademoiselle.
It's the first issue of a magazine now aimed at women in their "me" years -- those carefree days, as defined by the magazine's editors, just after university and before such leg-shackling responsibilities as family and career concerns show up to spoil the fun.
Not exactly a demure way to announce yourself to the world, perhaps. But sex is an attention-grabber, and besides, if everyone else is doing it, why can't they?
Well, partly because a coalition of anti-pornography groups is mounting an increasingly effective campaign to break up the party. What's at stake is one of the best sales venues available to women's magazines -- crucial positioning at the checkout lines of supermarkets all over North America.
The American Decency Association, an advocacy group based in Fremont, Michigan, stepped into battle in a big way last week, buying a full-page ad in The New York Times -- financed with US$100,000 from an anonymous donor -- to decry what the ad called "morals-destroying filth."
And indeed, everyone is doing it: The ad's targets are a who's who of mass-circulation, high-profile women's publications. In addition to Mademoiselle, the ADA targeted Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Jane and Redbook -- not exactly the kind of stuff one would expect to find wrapped in brown paper.
But in case the aforementioned filth had slipped past viewers of the ad, the ADA was more than happy to remind them, reprinting the following: "How to Touch a Naked Man" (Cosmopolitan, April); "50 Tricks for Outstanding Orgasms" (Glamour, March); and, from the March issue of Jane, the coup-de-grace: "You push his head down there?!" The ad ran with a headline that read, "We Say It's an Outrage to Display Magazine Headlines Like These in Front Of Children!" And in the left-hand corner: "Shame On Supermarkets!''
Railing against what it believes to be trangressions of morality, the ADA has been waging war against radio host Howard Stern, known for no small degree of lewdness in his daily broadcasts, for the past four years.
Not surprisingly, it's no stranger to the war against print enemies, either -- Hustler, among others, comes to mind -- but women's magazines? It may seem odd at first, says Bill Johnson, the ADA's director, but in recent years, the lines have blurred.
"Some people try to tell me that these magazines have always been this way, but it's not true -- they just haven't," says Johnson, who tried to place ads in two other unnamed major newspapers, but was turned away.
Women's magazines are now the purveyors of "outrageous trash," he says, and while he'd prefer they'd just tone it down, he's open to compromise: Just get them away from the checkout counter, or at the very least, shield the covers with blinders -- just as is done with Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and other pornographic men's magazines.
While it may seem an extreme reaction, Johnson's observation of the content shift in women's magazine's isn't far off being correct, says Lynne Cunningham, who heads the magazine program at the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto.
"There's no question they're getting smuttier," she said. "A number of these magazines are trying to renew their readership with younger readers, and younger equals sex."
Indeed, in the case of Mademoiselle, the magazine's new mission, entrusted to newly appointed editor Mandi Norwood, was exactly that. Meanwhile, many of the magazine's competitors were already pursuing the same goal in full force -- and using much the same tactics.
At Glamour, which, after her brief stint at Cosmopolitan, was taken over in 1998 by Torontonian Bonnie Fuller, a radical shift took place. A New York Times story from last year noted that, with its January, 1999, issue, the magazine had abandoned its long-time staple "Women in Washington" column, which covered political activity concerning women's issues, and had added an in-depth horoscope.
More indicative of the forces at play, however, was the magazine's new fascination with sex, which had displaced the soft-feminist priorities of the magazine's previous editor, Ruth Whitney. And the shift was happening all over the industry. At Marie Claire, a U.S. version of the successful British title, a mild tone of female empowerment gave way recently to such articles as "Get a Better Body -- for Sex." (Tellingly, Marie Claire's circulation has more than doubled, to more than 800,000, since 1996). Jane, which launched in 1996, made its mark is much the same way. Faced with a sudden raft of imitators, Cosmopolitan -- for which sex is an old staple -- amped up its Cosmo-ness, according to editor Kate White, in order to further differentiate itself from its competitors.
"In part because of the way a lot of magazines are copying Cosmo and being more candid, we need to be more Cosmo than ever," she told The Wall Street Journal. Witness some recent evidence, a headline from Cosmo last year: "10 Make-Him-Throb Moves So Hot You'll Need a Firehose to Cool Down the Bed!"
Even Chatelaine, the normally staid Canadian women's magazine, entered the fray -- albeit timidly -- with its relaunch last year, for which it introduced a sex columnist. The relaunch, its editors explained, was meant to draw a younger reader.
So what's going on here? In part, it's an attempt to make more noise than the next girl in the ongoing struggle for reader attention in an ever-more-fragmented media universe. But, Cunningham says, the obvious motivation comes from the one-upmanship present not just in the women's magazine market, but the industry as a whole.
"It's indicative of some hot competition in that sector, certainly," she says, "but look at the industry recently: It's part of what I call the 'Maxim influence' " -- referring to the self-consciously smutty men's magazine, Maxim, which shot to the top of its category just a few years after its 1997 launch on the strength of such features as comparative babe surveys (and the photos to support it). "They've been pushing the limits since they began, and it's obvious, I think, that it spills over."
The irony in this, of course, is that in this race to attract a larger readership, women's magazines may be in the process of cutting off one of their best sales venues -- the supermarket checkout line. The effect for some, such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour, who draw more than half of their circulation (2.6 million and 2.2 million, respectively) from single-copy newsstand sales, could be devastating, given their once-prominent supermarket positioning.
Already, the ADA and other groups, such as Morality in Media in New York state, have succeeded in removing or blocking the offending material from some of the largest chains in the United States. Kroger's, for example, the biggest U.S. chain, with 2,200 stores, decided in December to shield the cover of Cosmopolitan with blinders. Food Lion, a 1,100- strong chain, has already begun shielding a number of women's magazines.
One of the coalition's largest victories, though, has been with Safeway, which runs about 1,700 U.S. stores (Canada Safeway did not return calls). In a June 5 response to a Morality in Media mailing, Safeway chairman, CEO and president Steven Burd said his company had notified the publishers of several magazines -- Cosmopolitan, Redbook and GQ among them -- that sexually explicit cover photos and headlines "may result in the removal of such issues from our checkstand displays."
With some pride, Burd notes: "You may be surprised to learn that the above three publications have toned down their covers, especially in the last four months, largely as a result of our demands.''
And yet, will this kind of tension really effect a shift? Cunningham doesn't think so.
"Sex sells," she says, laughing at the cliché. "I don't think anyone's going to change that." |
| Supermarkets News, 08.09.00 |
ADA Uses Times Ad to Squash Indecent Magazine Covers at Supermarkets
FREMONT, Mich. (August 9, 2000) -- The American Decency Association, based here, ran a full-page ad in Monday's edition of New York Times, pleading with supermarket chain presidents to conceal the covers of sexually explicit magazines showcased at checkout racks. This is the first national ad taken out by the ADA on the subject of sexual indecency on magazine covers, according to Bill Johnson, the director of the Christian-based organization. "From this national ad, we hope to bring this concern to the supermarket masses and hope [supermarkets] will begin to feel pressures from the public about this issue." Johnson went on to add that "our highest desire is that these magazines would be gone." Neither the Food Marketing Institute, Washington, D.C., nor the Magazine Publishers of America, New York, was immediately available for comment. -- Stephanie Loughran |
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