Blunder 107.3 ties worst AQH share ever; WGRD expands lead over WLAV

[Trophyhead]

The Painted Horse is right up the street with me, (11 hr. rotation better than 10 or 9 for "burn control") personally appreciating that I may be an outlier as an Alt listener and office commuter. Merry Christmas to Noah Kahan and those at 94.5, as it's my first preset push for GR-based stations.

[Greg Buben]

I was corrected that it was Citadel who dropped oldies from 107.3 FM and moved WKLQ to that frequency. I forgot about
the ownership at the time but I thought it was a terrible move because WODJ had somewhat of a following with "All Oldies
All Of The Time". When Cumulus did buy the Citadel stations of G.R. they continued to switch stations and call letters that
the only station that remained the same was WLAV with classic rock. That's the only station that they can be proud of in
G.R. I still think they could use some classic rock competition but only WLHT has the power to compete with classic rock
and I don't foresee that anytime soon. Another format that Cumulus could consider for 107.3 FM could be an active rock
station to compete with WGRD but with less classic rock in the format so that it wouldn't take away from WLAV. They
could play more rock from the 80's, 90's, and 2000's with very little from the 60's and 70's.

[originalzzmfmjock]

Actually, the towel was thrown in on WODJ when Citadel let Len O'Kelly go in 2002. After that it was just a bunch of non-descript program directors with little or no effort from management.

[originalzzmfmjock]

Well, I was working there between 1999-2003, but MW I believe you are right and Len was let go sometime in early 2001. After that it was Jeff Kelly as PD, then Scott Walker came in from Philadelphia. He was supposedly a big time guy, but never really fit in the Grand Rapids market and lasted only 9 months. After that it was Mike Benson who became the PD.

[ChrisWL1980]

I guess I wasn't the only one who stopped listening after Len O'Kelly's ousting. Toward the end of my time at Aquinas (I graduated in 2002), I recall the station tightening up its playlist, dropping a lot of the pre-Beatles music they had played, getting rid of features like the Top 5 at 5 (where they counted down the Top 5 songs from the Billboard chart from that week in a particular year) and simulcasting the Rich Michaels morning show from Lansing. Pretty much everything that made the station unique was gutted. It honestly wasn't a big loss at the end; the station I loved had already disappeared.
If I'm not mistaken, didn't WFGR flip to Oldies at pretty much the same time WKLQ moved to 107.3?

[48125er]

Yes. 98.7 flipped to Oldies to fill the void caused by the loss of WODJ. With Regent Broadcasting already having purchased WFGR, I was surprised Classical survived as long as it did.

Oldies 98.7 used satellite programming in most dayparts initially. It even took several weeks for the audio processing settings to be adjusted, if I remember correctly.

After a couple years I want to say, Oldies 98.7 became Classic Hits 98.7 and began playing a lot more 70s era classic rock.

Oldies became classic hits in the summer of 2009. Right when X96 and KLQ flipped.

[originalzzmfmjock]

I believe it was 2004 or maybe 2005 when 98.7 went to the oldies format. Robb Stewart was the program director and morning personality. In 2007 the aforementioned Len O'Kelly came back to Grand Rapids from Chicago and was the program director. He hired me to do the mid day shift starting in March of 2007. I lasted until August of 2008 and even though the mid day show was the highest rated show on the station. (#2 in the target demo with an 11.6 share, trailing only Rush Limbaugh on WOOD-AM), I was let go in a salary dump. It was sometime in early 2009 that they moved to the classic hits format. Len stuck around for a few months in that format, but later in 2009 made the move to Grand Valley to start Real Oldies 1480 and 850.