New numbers from Nielsen Media Research show that the Milwaukee Brewers have the third-best ratings in their home TV market among major league baseball teams.
For the regular season, Philadelphia was the number one market, with 9.7 percent of all TV households tuning in for the Phillies. Number two was the St. Louis Cardinals, with 8.9 percent of TV households in that TV market.
Next comes Milwaukee and the Boston Red Sox – both with 7.9 percent of the households tuning in each market. Nielsen reports the Brewers had a phenomenal 63 percent boost in the ratings that landed the team in third place.
Milwaukee also landed in third when regular season numbers are combined with the first two post season rounds – coming behind St. Louis and Detroit.
For the record, these are ratings, a percentage of TV households in each market. That allows for comparing viewership in TV markets with dramatically different populations.
By far, the biggest raw audience went to the New York Yankees, which came in tenth when measuring the average household ratings.
On radio: What looks like the first all-Christmas station in the country this year, WEZW-FM in the Atlantic City, N.J. area, made the flip Tuesday. We're still likely a month from any Milwaukee station flips to holiday tunes.
- I was a little confused with the announcement this week from suburban Chicago's WJJG-AM that Steve Dahl was joining a lineup that now includes Erich "Mancow" Mueller and Michael Savage. The problem was there was no announcement as to when Dahl's show would air. It's all clearer now: the station will play bits from his subscription podcast, clearly just a promotional tool for Dahl's questionable internet effort – which goes for $9.99 a month.
- Norman Corwin, a stately figure from the early days of radio, has died at the age of 101. He's been dubbed "the poet laureate of radio" for the elegance of his writing – a lost art in broadcasting.
- SiriusXM satellite radio is expanding its channel layout as it launches what it's calling SiriusXM 2.0. The expansion starts with 22 new channels.
Did Bryant Gumbel go too far in his criticism of David Stern? HBO's Bryant Gumbel used plenty of racially-charged words in his criticisms of NBA Commissioner David Stern's role in the lockout on his "Real Sports."
Do you think his comments went out over the line? I do.
Here's the video:
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
