How Baton Rouge got AAR and How you can get it in your town too!

Pirate Smile

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Tue Jul-12-05 07:29 PM
Original message

How Baton Rouge got AAR and How you can get it in your town too!

Edited on Tue Jul-12-05 07:52 PM by Pirate Smile

From hbyronk on DailyKos:

UPDATE: Air America in Bush Country - How it was done
by hbyronk
Tue Jul 12th, 2005 at 14:15:15 PDT
In an earlier post, I explained that a group of interested citizens, led by a Baton Rouge woman named Vicki Lancaster, had convinced Clear Channel to put Air America Radio on one of its broadcast properties in Louisiana's capitol city.

Ms. Lancaster responded by leaving a comment on my blog, where the story was cross-posted. She explained how she and her associates went about it.

This could serve as a template for Progressives around the country in convincing radio broadcasters to make Air America available on their airwaves.

Diaries :: hbyronk's diary :: ::
Ms. Lancaster writes:

e had a lot of good advice with regard to our efforts to bring progressive talk to BR. We first found all the commercial radio stations in BR and got their Arbitron ratings. We found a Clear Channel station that was floundering and changing formats with no success. So we went to the regional VP of Clear Channel armed with marketing info about Air America and articles on the success of progressive talk radio and we asked CC what would it take for them to switch one of their stations to progressive talk. We were told - get 1000 names and contact info - we did it and put the info in an Excel data base - and CC kept their word. Don't ever let anyone tell you a few committed individuals cannot make a difference. We are now working on getting Democracy Now (independent news) aired in BR.
Don't ever let anyone tell you a few committed individuals cannot make a difference.

And, by "a few committed individuals," Ms. Lancaster means, literally, a few. Six people circulated the petition, gathering 1,500 signatures, to convince Clear Channel to place Air America on its low-rated AM country station in Baton Rouge. They understood that, no matter the political leanings of its top management, Clear Channel is business to make money. If they believe that there is an audience for Progressive talk, they will take a chance on it. They would rather do this than continue to lose money running country music on an AM station that nobody is listening to. It is just common sense.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough the potential this has to serve as a model for similar actions in radio markets across this country. Not only can it work, the Baton Rouge 6 have demonstrated that it WILL work.

I know it's kind of tacky, but I am asking for "Recommends" for this post so that more people will have a chance to read Ms. Lancaster's comments and understand that we have the ability, through purely constructive means, to crack the stronghold that conservatives have had on talk radio for the past 20 years. Think about how important talk radio has been to the GOP message machine. Then, think about what we can accomplish when our superior ideas get the same kind of exposure.

UncommonSense

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/12/171516/153

edit to add (thanks to JacksonBlogs) - You can find the Arbitron ratings among all listeners aged 12 and up for each radio market, along with a history going back a couple of ratings periods, at the Radio and Records site here http://www.radioandrecords.com/RRRatings/