Courtesy the Houston Chronicle

(September 17, 2010) One of the constants of sports radio since I started doing this job in 1997 has been listening to Bob Berger, who is in his 16th season as host of the Sunday afternoon Around the NFL show on One on One Sports and, since 2001, Sporting News Radio.

Change, however, has been a constant for Berger, who has worked with five co-hosts (most recently Craig Shemon) and hosted the show in Chicago, in Santa Monica, Calif., and now, with Sporting News Radio’s move to Houston, from the network’s new operations center near the Galleria.

Berger, Shemon and programming manager Craig Larson were among several Sporting News Radio employees who made the move from California to Houston. They now work in the same office suite as KGOW (1560 AM), whose owner, David Gow, chairs a group that acquired the rights to SNR earlier this year.

Berger’s sinuses are still adjusting to the move, but the job is pretty much the same as it was in Chicago and Santa Monica.

“Once you can master watching TV and talking at the same time …” he said. “People seem to love the football show. I think it’s people driving around on Sundays or doing things in their backyards or maybe sitting around the pool. We try to keep it light and entertaining.”

Around the NFL, for the uninitiated, is an aural equivalent of the roundup style that DirecTV and NFL Network offer with their Red Zone networks. Berger and Shemon monitor games and offer updates and observations from their studio, equipped with a wall of TV monitors, and mix in correspondents’ reports from game sites. The show airs from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday and is heard on about 125 stations nationwide.

Larson is encouraged by the network’s move to Houston and the cooperation with KGOW’s staff, most visibly with nighttime host David Nuno, who hosts Sporting News Radio’s college football preview show Saturday and also does headline updates.

“Their (KGOW’s) focus is local, and ours is national, but we’re both trying to compete,” Larson said. “It’s great to have the operations center here, and we’re enjoying the cooperation and the opportunity to share talent.”

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