Syracuse has local sports talk on the dial middays and afternoons on WSKO/1260--which may well be because they have not only play by play of local pro teams but also a lot of big time college sports (Syracuse U.) to talk about. Don't know what the ratings are like--that station has a decent daytime signal, but like most of the Syracuse market AMs, their directional pattern at night lops off the southern third of the market. If Cumulus is investing as much as they seem to be in local production, and also piping in Don Imus in morning drive from NYC corporate sibling WABC, the numbers have to be decent even though that market has been embargoed by Arbitron from publishing numbers to the trades for four years now.
Arbitron's new "no embargo" policy finally gave us a look at the
Syracuse numbers yesterday, for the first time in four years. However, it's not that informative -- the second half of the "no embargo" policy is "subscribers only" and it looks like
Cumulus didn't subscribe to the winter book. In fact, aside from Clear Channel's cluster, the only other stations to show up on the list were WOLF Radio's two FM formats.
However, Eastlan Ratings does release numbers for the entire market. It's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with Arbitron since Eastlan releases ALL stations (even non-commercial) and their survey dates and methodologies are a little different. But, their
Fall 2011 Syracuse book puts WSKO pretty far down the list, with a 0.9 share P12+.
Of course, sports talk is one of the key examples of a format where P12+ numbers aren't that useful, since sports talk isn't a "mass appeal" format. I would assume they're doing a decent job in their target demo just from the fact that they
could just run network programming all-day, but they maintain a local lineup weekdays from 10am to 6pm, plus a few weekend local shows, and on top of that, they have Chiefs, Crunch and Le Moyne College.
