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New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
'EPN vs. 'FAN:
More play-by-play action
By DAVID HINCKLEY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, February 18th, 2004
The game of musical sports teams may not be over yet for WFAN (660 AM) and WEPN (ESPN Radio, 1050 AM).
More important, we may not know for several years whether the shuffle will help move WEPN closer to long-established WFAN in the lucrative sports-radio market.
WEPN is betting a fair amount of ESPN's money that it will.
On Feb. 4, WEPN announced the Rangers and Knicks, the city's two marquee winter sports franchises, will move from WFAN to WEPN, starting next season.
Two days later, WFAN announced the Devils will move from WEPN's sister station WABC to WFAN starting next season.
This raises the question of which is more desirable for a radio station: a team that's better (the Devils, right now) or a team with more fans and tradition.
In any case, the dealing may not be done. The Nets are still out there, on WOR, but more important, so are the biggest sports tickets: the Jets on WABC, the Mets and Giants on WFAN and the Yankees on WFAN's sister station WCBS-AM.
The scorecard gets confusing, but when the dust clears, WEPN program director Mike Thompson would not be unhappy to see his station replace WFAN as the main play-by-play outlet in the city.
"The Mets and Yankees are still in their current deals," he says. "But as those deals expire, would we take a look? Sure, we would."
Like most sports radio people, Thompson sees carrying the play-by-play of a popular team as a way to get a station on a fan's radar - and with a relative upstart like 1050, awareness is the first big challenge.
"Look, WFAN is a great radio station," says Thompson. "But we think there's room for more than one. WEPN isn't too shabby at what we do, either."
WFAN's public posture to this point largely has been to ignore the new kid, and the numbers explain why. In the last Arbitron ratings, WFAN averaged 2.6% of the city audience and WEPN averaged 0.6%.
But ironically, those numbers are part of the reason WEPN was able to lure the Rangers and Knicks.
In their expiring deal with WFAN, those teams paid WFAN for their airtime and made their money back by selling ads.
For the new deal, the teams naturally took advantage of the fact they had two potential sport-station outlets.
They reportedly told WFAN they wanted to pay what one source said would be "virtually nothing" for the airtime, saying WFAN would benefit from the ratings the teams bring.
WFAN, which sells a ton of ads for talk shows, feels its airtime is worth more than that.
But for WEPN, with less ad revenue, that same kind of deal would work.
So both stations did what made sense. The questions: Will WFAN's ratings fall without play-by-play? Will WEPN's go up? Will the Knicks and Rangers get fewer listeners on a lower-rated stations or will fans follow them anywhere?
What's clear is that WEPN is serious about making New York sports radio into a two-team race. What we don't know is whether it will be halted at some level by WFAN - whose own success, of course, is the whole reason the sports radio market is worth having such a spirited fight over.
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