Arbitron Ratings

Don O'Brien -- the morning drive time personality for dance-oriented Top 40 station WERQ-FM (92 Q) and one of the area's most identifiable broadcast names and voices -- was fired yesterday.Mr. O'Brien, 36, had been with the station formerly known as WYST-FM since 1990 and was one-half of the infamous Brian (Wilson) and O'Brien morning team on WBSB-FM (B-104) in the mid- and late 1980s."I guess they figured I wasn't young enough or hip enough," said Mr. O'Brien, who added that he was warned in a memo from the management of the station two weeks ago to "get your act together or get another job."

News/talk WBAL-AM (1090), which went "wall-to-wall" with coverage during much of the Persian Gulf war, scored the largest audience increase of any local radio station in the winter Arbitron ratings released yesterday.However, WBAL did not loosen urban contemporary WXYV-FM's (V-103) stranglehold on first place in the market.WBAL, which expanded its local and national newscasts and devoted dozens of hours of talk shows to discussion of the war, got an 8.6 share of listeners 12 and over, good for second place, up from a 6.8 share and a fourth-place finish in the fall.

It's the same old song in the Birch Radio ratings.WXYV-FM (V-103) maintained its position as the top-rated Baltimore area radio station in the summer ratings released this week.The urban contemporary station, which has held down the top spot in the quarterly Birch book for the last 1 1/2 years, registered an 11.7 share of listeners aged 12 and over. That was down slightly from V-103's 12.1 share in the spring, but it marked the fourth consecutive quarter in which it was the only area radio station to score a double-digit audience share.

There is no mystery about WJHU-FM's format changes that have strengthened its news orientation while banishing classical music to weekends. The station, owned by the Johns Hopkins University, is going after ratings. It believes it will have higher ratings -- and a stronger identity -- as a news-dominated station.Time was when non-commercial radio stations could ignore ratings. No longer. Today, their formats, like those of commercial stations, are determined by the Arbitron book."Unfortunately, this has become more and more necessary in recent years as institutional support has been cut or eliminated," says Cary Smith, general manager of WJHU's arch-rival, WBJC-FM.

Light adult contemporary station WLIF-FM (101.9) and country music station WPOC-FM (93.1) both scored impressive gains in the Arbitron ratings for the fall released yesterday.Lite 102, which switched from an easy listening instrumental format to soft vocal music a little over a year ago, jumped from a 6.4 share of listeners 12 and over in the summer to an 8.0, good for second place among area stations. WPOC leapt from a 5.4 to a 7.4, good for third place.Urban contemporary station WXYV-FM (V-103)

Despite a morning-show shake-up that might suggest otherwise, WERQ-FM (92.3) and its urban contemporary format remain firmly atop Baltimore's ratings heap, more than 12,000 listeners ahead of the competition.Just two weeks after the station fired long-time second-banana Tony Boston from its morning show, Arbitron ratings for the first three months of 1999 place 92-Q 3.5 ratings points ahead of second-place WPOC-FM (93.1). Each point represents about 3,600 listeners in an average quarter-hour.

Limited ProgramStaff Writer Steve McKerrow, in "Classical music hits high note in Arbitron ratings" (Feb. 18) would seem to be the bearer of good news to the Baltimore area -- until one stops to examine what the so-called programming at WBJC and WJHU really consists of.As a listener of these stations for more years that I care to mention, let me inform you that one of the stations has a policy of playing almost exclusively from a list of basic repertory items,...

The first peek at the Arbitron November ratings book shows one significant difference from the numbers released by Nielsen over the weekend as the 11 o'clock news on Channel 13 (WJZ) drops considerably while Channel 11 (WBAL) moves into a strong second place in the late news race.The numbers show WJZ with an 11 rating and 29 share at 11 p.m., WBAL with a 9 rating and 22 share and Channel 2 (WMAR) close behind with an 8 rating, 20 share.In the Nielsen book, Channel 13 had a 14 rating at 11 p.m., doubling the 7 ratings recorded by both Channel 11 and Channel 2. In Arbitron, Channel 11 also had a noticeable lead with its noon news over Channel 13 -- a 9 rating compared to a 7 -- though both were virtually tied in Nielsen.

Maybe the folks at what used to be V-103 knew something when they ceded Baltimore's urban radio market to their downtown rivals at 92-Q.WERQ-FM (92.3) has vaulted back to the top of Baltimore's radio heap, according to Arbitron ratings released last week for April-June 1997. And it did so in spectacular fashion, besting its closest competitor (WBAL-AM) by 2.5 share points, or roughly 9,000 listeners.WXYV, which had been battling 92-Q for the urban market, threw in the towel late last month, switching formats from Urban Contemporary to Contemporary Hit Radio, a '90s version of Top 40. The station did not make the top-10 list this go-round, the first time that's happened in recent memory.

DUNDALK -- A meeting will be held tonight at Dundalk Community College to protest a radio disc jockey's "Dundalk bashing" comments and to discuss strategies for removing him from the air.Organizers of the 6 p.m. meeting, in the lecture hall of the college's classroom building, said they will discuss boycotting advertisers of the show and requesting a hearing with the Federal Communications Commission about disc jockey Brian Wilson of WOCT-FM (104.3)."We are weary of being asked our bowling scores," said Deb Golden, a spokeswoman for the Dundalk Image Group, which monitors and records Mr. Wilson's show and arranged tonight's meeting.