Courtesy the Houston Chronicle

(September 2, 2010) We talk a lot about ratings in this space, but money, as always, is the bottom line. And money, as measured in ad revenue, played a significant role in the decision by KGOW (1560 AM) to hire Travis Rodgers, the former producer of the Jim Rome Show, to replace Chronicle columnist Ken Hoffman in the 1-3 p.m. slot.

It's not that KGOW president David Gow and his management team were looking to dump Hoffman. However, Gow acknowledged that revenue from Hoffman's show was affected by the Chronicle's policy that prohibits newspaper employees from reading commercials or making on-air commercial endorsements.

"The nature of talk radio right now is that it's important for the local personality to do endorsements, and that is an attraction we have with Travis," Gow said. "We think advertisers will want to enlist him as a spokesman."

Hoffman, it should be noted, never had a problem with abiding by the ban on advertising. It's interesting to note, though, that every Chronicle staff member who at one point was doing a daily radio gig as this market grew to include four sports talk stations has now either left the station or has been replaced.

Money talks, and talks loudly, particularly in this economy, when it comes to the need of radio hosts to be able to do live commercial reads. When that runs up against this newspaper's ethics policy, radio stations, understandably, are going to opt for the former.

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