St. Louis Radio: Listeners Tune-Out Sports

Fans are tuning out St. Louis sports-talk radio in massive quantities and media writer Dan Caesar at stltoday.com calls it “stunning”.

The jock-talk format targets men ages 25-54 and figures compiled by Aribtron, which surveys radio listenership, show that there was a mammoth decline — 58 percent — in market share in the format over the past year.

According to the statistics, the three St. Louis sports stations — WXOS 101.1 FM, KFNS 590 AM and KXFN 1380 AM — combined in January 2012 to draw 13.5 percent of the estimated 549,100 men in the market in that age bracket. That’s about 74,000 listeners.

This January, their combined market share staggered to 5.6 percent. And because there were about 17,000 fewer men in the target audience than there were a year earlier, total sports-radio listenership was just under 30,000 — a whopping 60 percent loss.

The crash comes despite a notable year locally in sports. The Cardinals followed their miracle comeback run to the World Series title by falling one game short of returning to the Fall Classic, the Blues had a breakout year, there was much hoopla surrounding the Rams’ hiring of Jeff Fisher as coach then a significant improvement on the field. And there was Missouri’s bold move to the Southeastern Conference.

St. Louis broadcast historian Frank Absher, who has worked on the air, behind the scenes and has taught journalism at St. Louis University, says the point of “too much’’ finally has arrived.

“The St. Louis market is over-populated with all-sports stations and the pie isn’t big enough to keep all of them afloat,” said Absher, executive director of the St. Louis media history foundation. “Add to that the establishment of more all-sports programming by the major networks and we’ll see over-saturation.”

John Kijowski, who runs WXOS as well as Hubbard Radio’s other St. Louis outlets, attributes the decline in part to abnormalities in gathering listenership data. He points out that many stations appealing to men in other formats are down, too.

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