"Myself" wrote in message ...
WLIT seems stuck at a 2.9 (in the recent Spring rating period.)

Jeesh...There are only a handlful of major markets that can't seem to
support a mainstream AC station. (WASH, KVIL, WLIT...) In most cities they
can be THE mass appeal station.

Anyone care to speculate?

The station's been hurting ever since Mark Edwards was forced out as
PD. Granted, the ratings slippage started while he was still there,
he may not have reacted to changes as fast as he needed (nobody
expected WNND to come out of nowhere with a more up tempo sound) and
he might not have survived Clear Channel taking the station over, but
for a long time he was running a great-sounding AC station.

The station seems to be like a yo-yo--going upward in the fourth
quarter when they do the all-Christmas music format (which knocked
WNND into their so-far unsuccessful 80s-90s oldies format) and then
dropping back down after the holidays.

Meanwhile, WTMX seems to have become *the* AC station in town, even
though they're modern instead of mainstream. Eric and Kathy rule in
female demos in the morning and it seems like Barry James correctly
anticipated back in 1994 that the target audience didn't want to hear
Mariah and Rod Stewart anymore and wanted to hear more current music.
It's also been helped by XRT skewing older in its music selection, the
competition for the less adventurous of the XRT audience by the Drive
and both Q101 and the Zone turning into boys' clubs musically and
demo-wise, like most modern stations (despite those two morning drive
ditzes on the Zone Brooke Hunter and Jill Egan).

John Gehron, the boss at CC Chicago who is one of the best radio minds
in the biz, has been spending most of his time trying to make KISS
competitive with B96 (since WNUA runs itself, 'LIT gets good numbers
some of the time and Marv Dyson and Elroy Smith have autonomy over at
WGCI and V103). Sooner or later, he's going to have to do something
serious with the Lite.