Media Views: The wildest year in St. Louis sports media
Early this year I wrote that a series of pieces about people who had worked in the local sports media business over the last quarter century but have faded from the public eye would appear in this space throughout 2013. The plan was to tie that to the 25th anniversary of the Media Views column.
But because of an unprecedented year of breaking news in the business of covering St. Louis sports, only one of those columns ran a look at St. Louis jock-talk radio pioneers Jon Sloane and Mark Eissman.
The year, as usual, had a significant amount of personnel moves including the ouster of Bob Ramsey and Zach McCrite at WXOS (101.1 FM), the move of Kevin Wheeler from KMOX (1120 AM) into their old slot and the decision of Post-Dispatch sports columnist Bernie Miklasz to stop doing sports radio in order to expand his role with the newspaper and its website, STLtoday.com.
There was the first change of sports directors in the market in nine years, as Maurice Drummond moved from a secondary role at KTVI (Channel 2) into the lead role at KMOV (Channel 4) after Steve Savard became a news anchor. Drummond became the first new TV sports director in town since Rene Knott took over at KSDK (Channel 5) after Mike Bush moved to a news anchoring position.
There was a key positive development, as the main local TV stations finally found an acceptable way to strike a balance in televising live sporting events and providing updates simultaneous on severe weather.
There was the absence of Mike Shannon from the Cardinals broadcast booth for about a month and a half because of heart surgery, but he returned in late September and is expected back next year.
Plus the Cards played in the World Series and Mizzous football team was in the Southeastern Conference title game, drawing big ratings.
In some years, any of those could have been the top St. Louis sports media story. But this wasnt a normal year. Blockbuster stories not only broke often, they seemed to keep trying to upstage each another, with the Jack Clark-Albert Pujols controversy trumping all.
Well try to get to more of the "whatever happened to ..." stories in 2014. But now its time to look back on the wildest year in the quarter century of Media Views.
THE MARSHALL PLAN
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Media Views: The wildest year in St. Louis sports media