The decline of Vancouver sports media & its effect on Lions

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Belize City Lion
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David wrote:
Rocko604 wrote:1040 has been a total dumpster fire since Bro Jake and Pratt were brought on
I marvel at how this show has been held intact since its inception. It's lasted about 2 years longer than I thought it would.


DH :cool:
Jake is there for sales, not ratings. He brings in a lot of revenue himself. If you spend money on his show Jake becomes your buddy. Calls you just to say "hey", takes you out for lunch or a round of golf or even a fishing trip. He probably works the clients harder than the sales reps. His show is the rare example in radio where lower ratings result in higher ad revenue. He's smart, he learned along the way to chase the clients instead of ratings. It's why he has survived so long in the radio business while not having much more to offer than his stupid and tired "Champ" character all these years.
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Belize City Lion wrote:
David wrote:
Rocko604 wrote:1040 has been a total dumpster fire since Bro Jake and Pratt were brought on
I marvel at how this show has been held intact since its inception. It's lasted about 2 years longer than I thought it would.


DH :cool:
Jake is there for sales, not ratings. He brings in a lot of revenue himself. If you spend money on his show Jake becomes your buddy. Calls you just to say "hey", takes you out for lunch or a round of golf or even a fishing trip. He probably works the clients harder than the sales reps. His show is the rare example in radio where lower ratings result in higher ad revenue. He's smart, he learned along the way to chase the clients instead of ratings. It's why he has survived so long in the radio business while not having much more to offer than his stupid and tired "Champ" character all these years.
Good point. That's the only logical explanation for keeping him around.
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SammyGreene
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So a big twist in Vancouver sports radio with Rogers outbidding Bell Media (TSN 1040) for the Canucks radio rights. Another all-sports station on the horizon? More layoffs now coming for 1040? Will they keep operating two all-sports stations? What does this mean to the Lions broadcast rights which are also up for the coming season? Interesting days ahead for sure.
TSN 1040, the longtime radio home of the Vancouver Canucks, has lost its broadcast contract with the team to Rogers Media.

The news came in the form of a Twitter post on TSN Radio Vancouver’s official account.

“Thank you @Canucks for 11 great seasons of hockey on #TSN1040,” it read.
However, on Wednesday evening, the station announced the team had opted to move their broadcast contract over to Rogers Media, though it remains unclear where the game broadcasts will show up on the dial.

Some have suggested the move to Rogers opens up the possibility for them to launch a sports-based radio station here in Vancouver, as Rogers owns the Toronto Blue Jays and would likely want to carry their broadcasts across the country on its own station.
Currently, Rogers owns 55 radio stations across Canada, including News 1130, 96.9 Jack FM, and Kiss Radio here in B.C.

The Vancouver Canucks also call Rogers Arena their home ice.
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Belize City Lion
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It sounds to me like a second all sports station is coming to Vancouver. I can't see Rogers paying big money for the Canucks radio rights just to give 1130 or Jack-FM 3 hours of programming 82 nights per year. MLB and NHL are almost perfectly suited for each other on one radio station. There is very little overlap in scheduling (especially with Vancouver missing the playoffs). Add some out of market games (Mariners, Leafs) and you would have a live game nearly every night. As soon as Rogers starts broadcasting Canuck games they will easily poach the hockey fanbase from TSN 1040 simply by having anyone not named Bro Jake host their morning show.

Meanwhile TSN Radio will need to do whatever it takes to preserve the relationship with the Lions and Whitecaps or become irrelevant. This could be good for both of those teams.
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The loss of Canucks broadcasting rights will definitely hurt TSN 1040, which has gone all-in on Canucks talk all year long. I'm not sure there's a market for another sports talk radio station in Vancouver, though. TSN 1040 is the 14th rated station of 19 stations in the Vancouver market. TSN 1410 is the lowest rated station, with only a few hundred listeners on average. The second lowest-rated station is AM730, owned by Corus, which used to be a sports talk station but changed to an all-traffic format.

This may be a good move by the Canucks to expose their games to a broader market on a station outside of the niche of all-sports radio. I can't see Rogers breaking up the all-news format on CKWX (News 1130), which does pretty well in the ratings. That leaves two FM stations owned by Rogers, CJAX (JACK FM) and CKKS (KiSS FM), which is lower rated than TSN 1040. Lots of dominoes will probably fall before it all plays out.
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B.C.FAN wrote:The loss of Canucks broadcasting rights will definitely hurt TSN 1040, which has gone all-in on Canucks talk all year long. I'm not sure there's a market for another sports talk radio station in Vancouver, though. TSN 1040 is the 14th rated station of 19 stations in the Vancouver market. TSN 1410 is the lowest rated station, with only a few hundred listeners on average. The second lowest-rated station is AM730, owned by Corus, which used to be a sports talk station but changed to an all-traffic format.

This may be a good move by the Canucks to expose their games to a broader market on a station outside of the niche of all-sports radio. I can't see Rogers breaking up the all-news format on CKWX (News 1130), which does pretty well in the ratings. That leaves two FM stations owned by Rogers, CJAX (JACK FM) and CKKS (KiSS FM), which is lower rated than TSN 1040. Lots of dominoes will probably fall before it all plays out.
Scott Moore was VERY non-committal on Rogers plans (sounds like Aquilinis just hate 1040 and this landed in Rogers lap). Doesn't sound like a new sports station is coming though unless they can buy an AM station for cheap or change formats.

Anyways, good for the Lions as 1040 will focus more on them like they did in the first few years of the station before Canucks moved from MOJO/NW
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Iain MacIntyre has a lot more background on the deal, which he says is believed to be worth about $2 million a year, much less than the $3.5 million a year that TSN had paid for the previous radio rights.
Canuck chief operating officer Jeff Stipec is aware how his new five-year deal with Rogers Sportsnet, which swooped in late to win the rights after months of negotiations between the hockey club and TSN, will affect not only the media market but many people who work in it.

“It was a funny day in the halls here,” Stipec said Thursday afternoon. “We’re excited to strengthen this partnership with Sportsnet, but there’s no confetti, no champagne. These TSN guys have been awesome with us. We’re going to have that chance to celebrate with Sportsnet down the road when they kind of get their station in order. I look forward to that time, but it has been pretty subdued in some respects today.”

Stipec said the rights wouldn’t have changed had the Canucks not had such a strong relationship with Rogers.

Rogers owns naming rights on the Canucks’ arena, reportedly for $60 million over 10 years, and pays the hockey team about $20-$25 million annually for television rights. Amid this financial scale, radio rights are a comparative drip in the revenue stream for the Canucks.

The radio rights themselves have gone down in value.

TSN 1040’s expiring agreement was worth about $3.5 million annually to the Canucks, but the new deal with Rogers is believed to be worth only about $2 million per season. The contract, however, is for five years, which is longer than TSN had offered.

“There are so many things,” Stipec said of the Canucks’ multi-faceted partnership with Rogers. “This is the one piece in the broadcast platform that wasn’t in Rogers’ portfolio and it made sense on a lot of levels to extend that.”
Rogers has been using the name Sportsnet Radio for some time on its local stations without having an all-sports station by that name.
“We’re thrilled,” Rogers Sportsnet president Scott Moore told Postmedia. “It’s been a terrific partnership with the Canucks over the last 20 years and it was a natural to expand the relationship. We’re now in the enviable position of having the most important sports content in the market on both television and radio.”

But Rogers does not yet have a radio station to broadcast the Canucks.

It owns News 1130 AM, but isn’t likely to mess with a profitable station that leads the Metro Vancouver market in news and traffic.

Rogers’ local FM properties are KISS 104.9 and JACK 96.9 — both music stations.

It seems to make little sense to acquire Canuck radio rights, monopolizing the team’s broadcasts, without an all-sports station like 1040 to drive listeners.

Moore said no decision has been made on where and how Canuck games will be presented on radio next season but didn’t rule out the possibility of Sportsnet developing its own all-sports station. If that happens, can TSN 1040 survive without the Canucks as an anchor?

Seattle station KJR tops its sports radio market without holding any major local broadcast rights. But no one entity dominates the Seattle sports scene the way the Canucks do in Vancouver.

“It’s a little early for us to talk about that,” Moore said of an all-sports Rogers station. “But we certainly will build a great deal of content around the Canucks. We plan on expanding our online capabilities in Vancouver. Having just acquired the rights, we’re still in the process of putting together the right strategy.”
Iain MacIntyre: Rogers swoops, scoops Bell as Canucks move radio rights to Sportsnet from TSN
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should be also be noted that MOJO couldn't come close to competing with 1040 when MOJO had the canucks rights. And 1040 didn't have the long standing established shows it has now.
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Currently TSN has 8 radio stations in 7 Canadian markets including the 1040/1410 split in Vancouver. Sportsnet which has most of the Canadian NHL rights only has 2 stations; Fan590 in Toronto and Fan960 in Calgary, the latter of which seems to carry a lot of syndicated programming. When Sportsnet acquired the NHL rights it was the digital rights that really interested them as much or more so than the television rights.
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Qman wrote:should be also be noted that MOJO couldn't come close to competing with 1040 when MOJO had the canucks rights. And 1040 didn't have the long standing established shows it has now.

Maybe Jim Mullin will weigh in but I always thought MOJO (which had some terrible programming - solo Moj, solo Arthur Griffiths) may have killed 1040 if they had the guts to put Canucks' PBP and Dan Russell's Sportstalk exclusively on 730. Instead they simulcast with 980 and people had no incentive to go down the dial. Starting a sports station and not giving it your two big sports properties is pretty dumb. I believe their were nights when NW had the Canucks and 730 couldn't even simulcast because they were obligated to the Giants.

In short, Corus never went "all in" on 730 as a flagship sports station. I do recall they had a weekly show with Bro Jake and MacRae that was really bad.
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a huge chunk of the time that MOJO had the sports radio format (early 2004 to early 2006; for 2 years prior the format was "talk radio for guys") coincided with the lockout of the entire 2004/05 NHL season. so there was a long stretch with no canucks games for corus to broadcast at all, and MOJO had little choice but to devote a lot of airtime to the then-red hot lions, running their own pre and post game shows up against 1040's licensed coverage. this was a brief golden era of competitive/comprehensive lions coverage on the radio that we're not likely to see again if rogers is going to shove the blue jays down our throats all through CFL season, and :puke: use leafs games as filler too (that one is hard to believe, belize city lion!). with no lions or whitecaps radio deals in place(?) and the lions nearly moribund due to the stagnant ownership and marketing situations, and constant cuts at bell/1040 etc, i'd say the future looks grim for both 1040/1410 and lions radio coverage in this city, and bright for rogers to launch their own sports station within a year or 2.

imo with the canucks rights gone, the raison d'etre for 1410 is no more, as it was mainly just a place to bump conflicting games and serve as a kind of brand placeholder the rest of the time. it's long been said that "ratings don't really matter" in sports radio outside of a narrow demographic, but that only holds true to a certain point of no returns, and less and less in the ever changing media landscape. if rogers does launch an all sports station here, and nothing outside of the box happens with 1040/1410, i'd say the writing's on the wall for both of em sooner or later...

with all the probable corporate intransigence on various sides, this is just a little daydream... but it'd be cool to see the lions seize this opportunity to step into the void and into some kind of creative partnership with 1040, not just on the radio but new media platforms as well, and make 1040 the place to turn to for football. theoretically, new lions owners could even buy the station and make it part of their own media empire. dan snyder owns both the washington dc nfl team and a cluster of espn-branded regional sports radio stations providing blanket coverage of his team, and not all of it is homer/house radio either. hell, get the whitecaps involved... keep the nfl coverage... add local university and amateur stuff and make it the local hub for of all things football...
Last edited by mountaincat on Sat Mar 11, 2017 9:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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David
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Ed Willes wrote:According to one source, the Canucks’ owners have made an offer which, depending on who you talk to, was either rejected or is being considered.
The $64,000 question: If Braley had accepted the Aquilini offer instead of letting him twist in the wind, would Aquilini have just kept things status quo on TSN1040 with both properties (Canucks and Lions) staying where they are on the radio dial?

Rogers loathes the CFL. Even more so that the league is affiliated with rival Bell. No way in hell do they take on Lions coverage when they start their new all-sports station (and in my opinion it's going to be when and not if). That new station is going to be wall-to-wall Canucks, Jays, and NFL and its going to swallow a huge chunk of sports radio listeners, probably even some of the personalities that you listen to now on 1040.


DH :cool:
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David
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On the heels of this piece of news comes word that Bell Media (CTV News) has eliminated its sports department, effective immediately. Last night at 11:50pm I tuned in to see them run a story on colours being eliminated from Crayola Crayons, then a stray cat taking up residence at an Island hospital (I sh*t you not). This would normally be sports scores and highlights from earlier in the evening and feature stories/reports from earlier in the day.

This is not good news for Lions' exposure on the Lower Mainland. Not only is CTV the #1 TV news station in this market, it was also a major source of content surrounding the football club and the CFL. One more casualty to the omni-present internet for online content I suppose. :sigh:

Of course, a whole Sports Dep't goes with this decision, so sympathies to them.


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Won't be long til Global eliminates it's so called sports department. It's nothing more than Squire Barnes joking and flirting with the news anchors with a little sports thrown in.
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David wrote:Not only is CTV the #1 TV news station in this market, it was also a major source of content surrounding the football club and the CFL. One more casualty to the omni-present internet for online content I suppose. :sigh:

Of course, a whole Sports Dep't goes with this decision, so sympathies to them.


DH :cool:
Could've fooled me re: CTV. I keep forgetting they're even still on the air. Only time I've tuned into them in recent memory is when they happen to be showing an NFL game I'm interested in watching. Even then I'm not looking for CTV in the Shaw guide, just looking to see what games are on and picking the one I want regardless of station.
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