The New Kings of Talk

Roe & Roeper silence the critics

What a difference a year makes!

It was only last fall when the Roe Conn show was left for dead by critics. But with the addition of Richard Roeper and the return of Ron Magers and Christina Filiaggi, the WLS-AM weekday afternoon program reigns supreme in Chicago!

Ratings for his weekday afternoon show on Citadel Broadcasting news/talk WLS-AM (890) were so low that some critics were confidently predicting his imminent demise, according to Robert Feder at blogs.vocalo.org.

The Sun-Times’ Lewis Lazare cited unnamed “observers in the local radio market” who asserted that “the high-priced WLS talent might not be able to hold on at the station much longer,” while ChicagolandRadioandMedia.com went even further, flatly declaring it “the end of the line for Roe Conn at WLS,” and identifying three potential replacements for him.

Now, just 10 months after those dire words were written, Conn is presiding over the top-rated talk show of any kind — at any hour — among adults between the ages of 25 and 54, according to Arbitron Portable People Meter figures released last Friday. He even outperforms syndicated behemoth Rush Limbaugh on his own station — to say nothing of the competition on Tribune Co.-owned news/talk WGN-AM (720). I can’t recall a more dramatic turnaround for any Chicago radio show in the last 30 years.

In hindsight, Feder writes it’s clear that Conn’s worst enemies last year weren’t his competitors or his critics but his own bosses, who’d made so many hasty and ill-advised changes to the show that listeners were bailing out in droves. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

“In all of my years at WLS, I’ve never had one as crazy as 2009,” recalled Conn, a 21-year veteran of the station. “Managers throughout the market were making dramatic changes reacting to the twin perils of a weak economy and the unpredictability of a new rating system. Those running WLS were no different. They literally dismantled the show.”

The promotion in January of Michael Damsky to president and general manager of WLS — followed almost immediately by the return of Drew Hayes as operations director — began the process of turning everything around. “We all understood that when you remove popular members of an ensemble, the audience is going to get mad and disoriented,” Conn said. So they moved quickly to bring Chicago’s preeminent anchorman, Ron Magers, back as a daily contributor to Conn’s show, and they restored Christina Filiaggi to her former role as traffic reporter and female foil. Other improvements followed.
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