The Industry Dot Biz: Well I was going to offer some discretion till I discovered the Sun Times put it on full blast. Article below…Talk about BUSTED… that video is null and void now (laugh)
[source] BY SANDRA GUY [email protected]
Tom Joyner said Monday he is happy to be back for Chicago listeners, even though he bought the air time to do it.
The Tom Joyner Morning Show (TJMS) , known as “The Party with The Purpose,” will start airing Wednesday from 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays on SOUL 106.3FM, WSRB/ WYRB radio Joyner’s weekend program, “Right Back at Cha,” will air 9 to 11 a.m. Saturdays. “We knew we had to be back on the air, especially with the outcry of support from listeners and advertisers. So we said, ‘OK, rather than cut a deal with Crawford where we don’t have control, let’s just cough up the money, buy the morning drive and do it ourselves,'” Joyner said, declining to say how much it cost. Joyner, who was abruptly replaced March 24 by entertainer Steve Harvey on WVAZ-FM/V103’s morning show, said in a phone interview that Chicago is the only market in which he has bought air time because it’s his largest market and he “had to capitalize on the outcry” from listeners and advertisers who wanted him back.
“Chicago is the mother ship,” he said. “This is how Univision launched on TV, by buying time on independent stations,” he said, noting that if the strategy works in Chicago, he might expand it elsewhere. “We stepped out on faith that all the people who blogged, Tweeted, posted Facebook messages … saying they wanted to protest, to march, to do this and that … and the outcry of support from listeners and advertisers who said, ‘We want you back.'” Joyner will return to Chicago Monday to broadcast live from Kennedy-King College, host a news conference, and start an internship program in which Kennedy-King College communications students will work on the Joyner show.
“The students will be our street team, our roving reporters of news and events. We’ll let them learn what we mean when we say we ‘super serve’ the African-American community,” Joyner said. Joyner said his show will reflect “the sound of Chicago — the music, the people, the flavor. This will be the voice of black radio, Chicago’s Black radio!” Joyner said he was fired the day he returned from a week’s vacation and after he had completed that morning’s show. “At lunchtime we get a call,” he said. “It’s a cold business.”
Though Soul 106.3 reaches primarily the South Side and counts 475,000 weekday listeners, Joyner said he can still be competitive, partly because his Web-site listenership has tripled since his show was dropped in Chicago. “People in Chicago who want to hear our show have found it online,” he said. Reach Media, the Dallas-based parent company of the Morning Show, reached an agreement with Crawford Broadcasting, owner of SOUL 106.3FM, that allows “a more customized morning program that will be specific to Joyner’s ‘radio hometown,’ ” according to Joyner’s Web posting. “The irony was that Arbitron PPM ratings, released just days later, showed Joyner ranked No. 4 mornings in the key demographic of 25-54 year-olds with a 4.6 share for the entire market, and as the top urban morning show,” the Web posting stated. “It’s good to back. Thank you Lord,” Joyner said. “For all the outcry of support, please don’t stop now. You said you wanted this, don’t fail me now.”