The paywall article has more than three paragraphs. It mentions Tunks and Hughes were teammates at Canterbury Bulldogs in the early 1980s, and that Phil Rothfield (who wrote the article) tried unsuccessfully to get a response from Hughes regarding the fallout.
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Thanks @JohnsonTV, I wouldnât reply to Rothfield either. He has a poor record.
I understand your reasoning @Rossco, perhaps the callers are close to the extent of the audience, the client value and lack of depth would suggest audience is scarce.
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I would have to agree here.
I too think Laws especially would be pulling a half-decent figure considering his heritage programme, along with the fact there is very little alternative to talkback if you are not a Hadley fan.
Sydney commercial AM talkback is a lot different to the FM market (where listeners can jump to Nova969, 2DayFM, or Central Coast/Wollongong/Blue Mountains/community stations if they do not agree with K&J or do not like the show format).
Ironically, I think we have Nine Radio to thank for this. By them killing off 2UE as a talkback station, immediately wouldâve helped 2SMâs listenership as not everyone is an immediate 2GB & ABC fan.
IMO Nine Radio couldâve kept 2UE as a âlighterâ/alternate talk station. Wouldnât you rather own BOTH Apple & Samsung instead of putting all your eggs into one basket?
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Although 5AA and 5DN werenât ever under the same ownership AFAIK, I remember as a preteen/early teen in SA in the early 2000s there was ABC 891, 5AA 1395 and 5DN 1323 all doing talk. Before the doomed SEN 1323 experiment 5DN was somewhat revived as a lighter alternative talk station but I think it was simply factors of population and market size which meant it just didnât work in Adelaide.
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Agree, 3 talk stations is overkill for Adelaide, even if itâs an older skewing population.
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I do wonder about the hows and whys of 3 talk stations not being âviableâ in such cities as Sydney and Melbourne though, considering so many cities in the US have several talk stations - these comparable-population markets such as Seattle and Minneapolis mostly comprise, for example:
1 mainstream commercial news/talk station which is mostly unbiased and/or a mixture of âright and leftâ hosts;
1 NPR-affiliated station including the BBC overnight and sometimes Iâve even seen the odd ABC RN program pop up on NPR-affiliated station schedules;
A couple of your typical MAGA conservative stations (letâs face it most conservative talk radio there is of the MAGA type these days);
And if youâre in the Midwest even the odd progressive talk commercial station has popped up again in recent years in various cities (think shock-jock 2GB style i.e. Ray Hadley but instead itâs the opposite with folks like Stephanie Miller doing the whole taking pot-shots, making up parody songs etc about Republicans); not to mention the Black Talk inner-city stations in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago etc are still around.
This of course isnât to mention the straight-down-the-line 24/7 news stations such as WINS or KNX in the major metropolises.
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Probably due to the fact we have a lot fewer commercial stations, plus we have the ad free ABC, and the 2 station limit.
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And a glut of community stations taking up spectrum, hence reduced number of commercial stations. I honestly in this day and age donât understand the fragmented schedules of community stations which seem to serve everyone and no one at the same time, especially when you can now get your nation-of-heritage or niche-music-of-choice dose at any time via streaming etc.
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Lawsie would have more regional listeners than we think.
As for 3 talk stations in Melb or Sydney the glued on factor suggests no!
No room for anymore commercial talk in Melbourne, it has failed at every turn (MTR 3AK etc)
Considering that 3AW have around 10 callers. Shaun from Tassie, Stephen from Greenvale, Jeremy, Merl, Karen from Altona Meadows, Chris from Broadmeadows, Angie from Mount Martha, Mark from Stawell (voice is a dead ringer for Dave Hughes so maybe his dad sowed some extra oats), Jim and his brother and a speckling of others.
If 3AW stopped allowing these callers to go to air there would be no callers.
Most of the main conservative talk hosts in the US run on advertising, guests (âexpertsâ I guess they may say) and rhetoric-filled monologues more than calls though - you generally only hear about 3-4 an hour even on the overnight programs like Red Eye Radio. Coast to Coast AM, however (on the subject of overnight radio) is a completely different beast which probably shouldnât be in the same paragraph as political talk.
Getting back on topic however, I do admire how 2SM and the regional network has survived doing the same thing for 20+ years. A mate of mine recently summed up such radio perfectly when I mentioned the lack of change in our home area and he said âAt the end of civilisation the only sounds to be heard will be birds, the wind, and 5CS playing Hotel Californiaâ
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On the other hand, the supposed-to-be âlocal radioâ in Vietnam is very community-ish in approach, I mean they really airs a full spectrum of programming, from everyone (general news, some packaged pop music) to almost no-one (minority language programming) (and itâs mostly talk).
The 2UE idea that someone said above is actually used on 91fm in Vietnam during evening hours. It mostly mixes âwhatâs going onâ-ish stories (that may not necessarily news, and never going overload like typical commercial US talk stations) with Modern AC music (they did play double j/triple m-ish indie rock content in some occasions) (*). In the daytime the station sounds very NPR-like (and liberal) in reporting if not counting traffic information, which is their main corner of reporting (maybe because it targets urban listeners). Other VOV stations tend to be much more formal and stuffy in reporting and somehow has political or highbrow lean in talk content.
(*) It used to be soft AC with much more entertainment content than right now. 91fm of six years ago was a different species to what it is today.
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Thank you @motosenokia, interesting read
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Hang on @thesub1, it was Singo and his long lunch pals/fellow shareholders who agreed to the reverse takeover with Fairfax and then gutted 2UE with Talking Lifestyle and Macq Sports Radio.
Remember Adam Lang and his band of loonies who did the dirty work of Singo and the rest of his lunch buddies? They wrecked 2UE.
MSR was commercially unsustainable, Nine did the right thing of establishing a placeholder music format and Ace have done a great job with a seemingly viable offering.
Singo et al were always bitter 2UE beat them, they had to buy the UE talent to win, still werenât content and wanted to see the death of it. Theyâre probably still grumbling Ave retained the call sign.
Singoâs wrecking of 2UE also saw 4BH and Magic 1278 equally suffer. Both are back with their callsign/name, albeit different formats to their earlier incarnation and differing successes.
I felt it important to clarify that history. Yes, Nine couldâve restored the talk format, but Singo had earlier created the circumstances ensuring that was unlikely. Most of the damage happened within the Macquarie era.
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Yeah i still remember Adam rolling into the Engineering Office at 4BC with a big smirk on his face and thought it would be a good idea to ask for suggestions on how to improve Talking Lifestyle and help it run with less loss⌠Without a second thought I said âturn off the f***en transmitter and save yourself the money as no one is listeningâ and OHHHH boy did I get in the shit for telling him that 
Ask stupid questions and you get answers you donât want to hear 
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Love that!
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Way to go, well done @gordo92 !
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You legitimately deserve an award for having the balls to say that.
Shame nobody was listening to you!!
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Ironically I thought that Lang came from 2UE in the first place! I thought nowadays he is the editor of something somewhere. Perhaps somebody may know.
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Mate I was treated like shit while working there so I didnât really care telling them what I thought. Itâs a long story but almost made me leave the industry and went into a very deep dive mentally until I got a leaf from a friend of mine and ended up at SRN where things were much better
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