News 95.7 marks its 3rd anniversary on October 11th. Happy birthday, guys.
I run hot and cold on that station. The morning and afternoon news reports do not exactly engender or encourage continued listening. The news wheel is so rigidly formatted that I can't imagine that there is a lot of room for creativity for them. But they say their ratings are way up. When I met Andrew Krystal this Spring, he told me his ratings had gone up by 50%. Local stations are in a ratings period now, so we'll see how things work out for them.
They are at their strongest covering live events like storms and things like the fire this summer in Dartmouth. Then, they provided wall-to-wall coverage all weekend, along with, oddly enough, Q104. Local tv stations had only their regular news broadcasts. Even CBC radio only had their 4 minute news hits at the top of the hour. But News 95.7 and Q104 were there all weekend.
There is far too much sports coverage on that station. They run ESPN radio all night long. The only local content then would be the pre-recorded weather and local commercials.
I do not know why they think this is a good approach to overnight radio. There are plenty of more compelling programs they could run, most notably Coast to Coast AM, which used to run locally on CJCH. They could also run The X Zone radio show if they wanted to, which also ran on CJ as recently as 2007.
I have heard in a couple of places that News 95.7 and its other network partners in Moncton and St. John will soon have more local programming in the evening. Some kind of talk show. And they're gonna do something with Sundays, too. Dunno what, yet.
Anyway, I wish the station well. I hope they have many more years on Halifax radio!
Bevboy
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