(* well, okay, she quit...wink wink nod nod)


Move over Mike Barnicle you have company in the dog house.

Famous for her hoop earrings and hair fashion frozen in the big-hair 80’s (nicknamed “Fluffy the columnist” by the Sacramento News & Review) featherweight columnist Diana Griego Erwin was unceremoniously booted out the doo…. er, I mean, resigned from the Bee for “personal reasons”.

That those “personal reasons’ just happen to coincide with a Bee internal investigation into whether or not she was just making stuff up in her columns is of course pure coincidence.

Bee executive editor Rick Rodriquez also happens to be the new president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors so even in the absence of proof that Fluffy made it up, just the fact that she could not prove beyond any doubt every source she cited was enough for Rodriquez to worry about the appearance of his skirts.

Although he was not worried enough about his credibility to prevent the Bee from turning Al Franken’s visit to Sacramento into two days of feature section front page stories.

Never mind that Franken is on the market’s 24th ranked radio station.

This is a two station talk market. KFBK is #1, has been for years the other talker, 650 AM KSTE most recently ranked in a two-way tie for 10th (with the King's station, when the Kings are not playing KSTE does far better). Combined the two Sacramento talk stations command around 80% of the Sacramento talk radio audience (KGO & KSFO out of San Francisco split most of the remaining balance with Franken's station). That means that the market's two talk stations account for between 11% & 15%, sometimes more, of the entire Sacramento radio universe of 1.7 million people and 32 radio stations, a number which includes every variety of music and appeal along with several large signals from the Bay Area, and some smaller local signals targeted toward narrow and specific audiences; ethnic, religous, localities - or political bents, like Franken's station.

In terms of talk formatted stations here Franken is on the third ranked station with around 1 ½ % of the market, which means basically that if you play your bongo drums at Old Ironsides on Open Mic Night you have a bigger audience. Unlike KFBK and KSTE however Franken & his station are aimed at a very narrow niche market of welfare recipients, 1960’s left-overs, haters and parasites. Anger, envy and discontent are the coin of the realm there. (The forth ranked talker here is San Francisco giant KGO which is a fraction of a percent behind Franken's station.)

That makes Franken a perfect subject for a Bee feature subject, they speak to the same audience and that is a crowd that really likes to hear itself sing while it shrinks. So that doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that we all look like a bunch of rubes because some old guy who wrote for Saturday Night Live when it was funny blows into town and the local paper gets all ga ga. Like we were Green Acres or something.

My family and friends in bigger cities where guys like Franken are a dime a dozen, and are C-level talent that warm the crowd before the opening act to the real talent while the crowd is still being seated and ordering drinks and wings at a sub-par club on a Tuesday night, are all needling me about living in a place where people must schedule vacation time to go visit the Mall of America or to go see the world’s biggest ball of string, maybe even the Bowling Hall of Fame.

Bad enough we’ve got an alleged mayor in a torn bathrobe and fuzzy slippers but does the major daily newspaper really have to go out of its way to make us look like hicks?


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This ratings stuff is all public domain and not rocket science, just counting heads. See the mysterious ratings for yourself at Radio & Records, click on "ratings"

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Mark Williams is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. His work appears in this publication, on Fox News Channel and nightly on Sacramento’s 1530 AM KFBK radio. For more on Mark and his background visit his web site.