D Peter Maus wrote:


Those days are long gone. But remember, a jock acknowledging a long
distance listener on the air, is and was even then, largely a novelty.
It doesn't reflect what's happening in the PD's office with the Arbitron
book, or how they compute rates for the Sales department.

Working in Chicago, having listeners in South Fox Crotch, Tennesee is
good for the ego. Hell, I sat in for the night jock one evening at KWKH
and took a request from Crayford, south of London. A great stroke. But
hardly saleable. And in the US, Radio is always about the money.

Actually, my favorite acknowledgement was from a college party in
Miami. I personally listened because I was a geek and thought it was
cool, and it became VERY interesting listening during the blackout of
77.


Now, CKLW is not representative of what happens in radio in the US.
At time to which you refer, radio stations in Canada were licenses to
print money. There were more radio stations in Illinois than the whole
of Canada, and the Canadian model for broadcast is vastly different than
it is in the US, specifically because of the large unserved areas
between radio stations.

But CKLW's target was the US, not Canada at all, and they made no
bones about it. I'm sure they were in Windsor rather than Detroit
because of costs, but their target audience was south of the border.

For that matter, last time I was in San Diego (quite some time ago,
actually), the dial was packed with stations in Mexico targeting SD.

--
Eric F. Richards

"Nature abhors a vacuum tube." -- Myron Glass,
often attributed to J. R. Pierce, Bell Labs, c. 1940