WABE’S New Schedule Will Not Conquer The World
What were they thinking? WABE, which had some momentum has just lost some with the release of their new schedule. Yes adding “The World” was a great thing, but lessening the number of days that ‘Fresh Air’ was carried is not the way. Moving ‘The Infinite Mind” and “Speaking of Faith” to 7 AM on the weekends when the number of people who are awake to hear it is significantly lessened is not the way.
Further, ‘My Word‘ is gone. Bundling it with ‘Says You‘ or ‘My Music’ would have made a lot more sense. It could have been coupled with ‘Studio 360′ and replaced the repeat of a ‘Prarie Home Companion’.
The Best Solution would simply have been to run Fresh Air at 2 P.M. and leave everything else in place. That would have meant losing an hour of music and that well may be the cause of the reluctance. However, the public seems to want the news programming. Moreover, there does not seem to be a well organized program to the classical music played in the afternoons. One solution to this would be to have an hour set aside each day to recordings of Atlanta Classical Music. Another would be to have an hour dedicated each day to serious music of the past 20 years.
In the mean time the new line up will make one element of the station more popular… the HD news Channel.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:27 am
I agree that their changes were bad for the same reasons. They also knocked off “City Arts and Lectures” on Mondays. WABE got this schedule shuffle wrong.
The daily variety that they used to have at the 7pm hour is now gone. We get the same stuff every day from 3 to 8pm. *YAWN*
and do we really need an HOUR AND A HALF of pipe dreams on Sunday Evenings? is there anyone on the entire planet who can listen to pipe organ music for that long? how about bumping Hearts of Space before midnight?
August 8th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Why is it that we only have a part-time NPR/PRI station here anyway? Can’t the metro area justify a full day’s programming, even if you had to throw in BBC stuff as well?
August 8th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Some of us actually love the classical music programming (though I agree the “Pipe Dreams” could be bumped to a later hour); I think WABE gets the balance right. Many US cities have no classical radio. Nonprofit radio exists to give us things the market doesn’t.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I guess there are some that like non-stop 6.5 hours of classical music. I’m not one of them and I daresay there are very very few of them out there. WABE’s programming in enraging.
August 9th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Do what NYC does: NPR talk on an AM station, and music on an FM station.
August 10th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I’ve been saying that WABE needs to dump the classical for a long time. At the very least, why not just broadcast it for the 3 hours from 9am to 12pm, and then put on some of the news and cultural programming that people living in the rest of the country get to hear.
I bought a new car, it does not have an HD radio, and I do not want to go through the added expense and unsightliness of adding an HD radio to it. I’d rather be able to have a real NPR station on the FM band.
August 21st, 2007 at 8:46 pm
I really like the AM-news FM-music idea. This change has definitely thrown off my daily routine in a bad way. I don’t want to hear “The World” at 3: it’s too serious. I used to hear that show in DC every day and didn’t really like it then; if we were going to get a new show I’d rather hear Talk of the Nation. Another proposal: nuke the 4pm ATC and make it Fresh Air at 3, Talk of the Nation (or The World) at 4, then ATC. I gotta get me an HD radio
August 29th, 2007 at 8:44 am
[…] as the comments to various posts here have shown, people want the news and cutting off the HD stream is not going to help. WABE […]