It’s been a fairly quiet week on the local media front, give or take items we’ve already covered, but all the off-blog activity has involved a high profile radio show.
Our inbox has been peppered with questions like this one about Clear Channel rock/talk WMMS/100.7’s “Rover’s Morning Glory”, which we’ll copy verbatim from one of our readers:
Rover was recently on vacation for 2 weeks, returned with a major arm injury, and subsequently, the show has been on “Best Of” for 4 to 5 weeks now. Give or take 3 or 4 days of “Live” broadcast. Some of the members of the show use “Twitter”, but are not forthcoming with any info. As you can imagine, rumors are running rampant about the show being canceled because of the excessive time off by Rover himself.
We ran this up the flagpole at Oak Tree to some of our sources there, and they’re seeing no signs of anything.
The general thought seems to be that it’s a publicity stunt of some sort, or some sort of show drama played out for the listeners’ benefit (like a certain previous incident involving Rover and show co-host Duji and their previous relationship).
And, well, it’s a bit frustrating to us. Here we go again.
Popular personality talk shows like “RMG” have one big thing in their favor…the listeners are invested in the show, sometimes for years on end.
The show’s personalities become familiar parts of their lives…”friends on the radio”. The personal lives of those “friends” play out on the air.
And when those “friends” are gone a lot, the listeners tend to worry.
We get the same reaction when popular TV personalities take more than a week off. At two weeks, viewers start sending out the bat signals…and after three weeks, the search parties are out.
Particularly for the highest profile TV and radio personalities, they get a lot of vacation time – Clear Channel classic hits WMJI/105.7 “Majic 105.7” morning icon John Lanigan’s vacation schedule has been compared to Johnny Carson’s, back in the “Tonight Show” host’s heyday.
We don’t know if Rover is comparably compensated in vacation time – the one time we did manage to tune in recently, he’d mentioned being in Greece, which would certainly account for radio absence if that mention was “live” on the air when we heard it.
But as far as we know right now, the show has not been cancelled, show cast members have not been fired, the “RMG” studio has not been set ablaze, dogs and cats are not fighting in the parking lot at Oak Tree, and whatnot.
If any major changes happen with the Rover show, you’ll read about them here, probably before anywhere else (give or take our schedule).
We apologize for getting a bit snippy on our Twitter account about this early one morning, but this is not the “Track Down Rover’s Show Rumors” Blog…if stuff happens, we’ll let you know.
And we realize that if the RMG crew is aiming for publicity out of this, they aren’t aiming at us.
The Mighty Blog of Fun(tm) has, even on its busiest day, readership that is a mere fraction of “Rover’s Morning Glory’s” average quarter hour audience. A large chunk of our readers are either in the media business or connected to that business somehow.
No, we suspect they’re hoping to gather the attention of Reserve Square, the home of Raycom Media’s CBS affiluate WOIO/19-MyNetwork TV affiliate WUAB/43 and its “19 Action News”.
They bit on the previous “controversy”, after all…and actually did a news story on it.
We realize we brought some of this on ourselves.
When Shane “Rover” French and his crew made the move from CBS Radio alt-rock W-whatever-the-calls-were-at-the-time/92.3 to WMMS, we delivered everything but the crew members’ lunch menus when they were preparing to take the air at 100.7…
I agree with you that Rover & his crew are major publicity hounds. However, I do believe that he was suspended for a week because of his Trivisanno getting remarried bit. I know Clear Channel has a gag order on both Rover & Triv not to talk about it or take any phone calls about it!
Understood, if that’s the case.
But it’s nothing we’d really be interested in, if that’s the case. It’s inter-show by play that is also in the “publicity stunt” category. If it means nothing more than an unscheduled week off, who cares? Rover and Triv take pot shots at each other on the air all the time.
The problem here is that there’s apparently been a multi-week absence, which could well be vacation time combined with suspension combined with illness combined with sunspots, and that leads to the kind of speculation you see from our reader here.
And yes, these shows want you talking about it. It’s all part of the game.
I remember a few months back, Rover was looking over his contract and had mentioned that he didn’t realize not only how much vacation time he was entitled to, but the fact that only a certain amount, if any, rolled over. That may not be word for word what was said but it went something like that.
After that, he mentioned he would be taking full advantage of his vacation time…much like the others along the radio dial. Hey, who could blame him. I wouldn’t want to lose vacation time either.
And what was Rover talking about today? Supposedly a major Cleveland Personality
is in “big trouble” (I assume legally because of the description of their activity: “A Real Career-Ender.”)
He refused to name the Personality, except to say the wheels are in motion on this, and
when the news comes out, he’ll give his additional two cents then.