Bell Media shakes up radio scene: BOB-FM goes country; Winogron axed at CFRARobert Sibley
Ottawa Citizen
Published on: November 11, 2014
Last Updated: November 11, 2014 10:34 PM EST
A renamed and reprogrammed BOB-FM is set to begin broadcasting Wednesday, reportedly under a country-and-western format.
The switch follows by a day station owner Bell Media’s out-of-the-blue announcement that 93.9 BOB-FM was signing off after a decade of entertaining the region’s residents with what it called its ’80s, ’90s and Whatever format.
The media conglomerate’s cancellation included the decimation of station staff, including well-known on-air personalities such as Cub Carson, Codi Jeffreys, Melanie Adams, Darryl Kornicky and John Mielke (better known on air as Milky Show). Promotion director J.R. Ello was also let go.
And in a seemingly related dismissal, longtime CFRA-AM program director Steve Winogron was dismissed. He’d been with the station for more than 30 years.
Late Tuesday, Mielke reported via his website,
http://www.milkmanunlimited.com/tunedin.htm, that while BOB-FM was finished, the station’s owner planned to “replace it with something else.”
The Citizen has learned that that will be a station devoted to a country format, possibly along the same lines as the other country radio station in Ontario owned by Bell Media, Today’s Country BX93 in London.
On Tuesday, the station was broadcasting a mixture of music and commercials occasionally interrupted by a voice-over that says, “A brand new radio station arrives soon.”
BX93’s on-air hosts have a reputation for having a solid knowledge not only of Canadian and international country music but also having a close identification with their regional audience. Country music is popular in Ontario, and from Bell Media’s perspective another country station in its corporate quiver might prove profitable.
It is a not unreasonable assumption. Ottawa-Gatineau has a wide range of radio stations, almost as many as the Greater Toronto Area. That makes the market very competitive.
According to Fall 2012 radio rating figures from Canadian Media Rating service, BOB-FM had three per cent of the market share among the anglophone listening audience in Ottawa-Gatineau. BX93 had 10.8 per cent of the London-area radio audience.
Achieving those kinds of numbers with a newly formatted station is, obviously, Bell Media’s hope. But the loss of BOB-FM has been greeted with dismay — listeners were particularly upset there no explanation for the sign-off and that so many familiar radio hosts had been dismissed.
“Bob-FM is supposedly switching format to country music,” one disgruntled radio listener wrote on the Facebook site Fans for a Better Rock Station in Ottawa. “Have we seen this mistake before? Just about a year ago, the Bear was turned into a pop station (like we need another one) and now Jump-FM is ranked near the bottom of the ratings. (Like to say we told you so.) Now Bob-FM is getting the same special treatment by turning into another station we don’t need (country).”