Styble loves Seattle...always!

It's my solemn duty to inform the radioactive audience and, in fact, all Puget Sound newstalk radio listeners, that KIRO's new ownership regime has cancelled The Bryan Styble Program, replacing it with an as-yet-unannounced syndicated show to be pulled down off a satellite.

The reason cited is "purely budgetary", and inasmuch as syndicated fare always comes to local-affiliating stations free-of-charge (a fact many newstalk radio fans are surprised to learn), this change will certainly save KIRO and Bonneville the quite-generous salary they've been expending for my professional efforts.

This news, just received directly from the Bonneville's programming chief in Seattle, has been as long-anticipated by the show's host/producer as it is disappointing. Indeed, I'm grateful that my modest radioactive-themed program--once the most-often heard Seattle newstalk radio broadcast, when I had the overnight KIRO show six nights a week for 24 weekly hours--survived as many lineup rearrangements as it did during this past year that Bonneville has owned KIRO.

(It shall be interesting to see if any radio or television newstalker decides my Everything-from-Astronomy-to-Zoology twist on the old-school open-line format is now worthy of theft, before I'm able to return to the airwaves sometime, somewhere. If so, they'll presumably pass on lifting my Open Lines for Open Minds title, which has trademark protection.)

It is without reservation that I state that my 2005-2008 run at KIRO has been the absolute highlight of my media career. That has been a trajectory which started in print in 1975, continued in professional radio in 1982, and since 1989 has been focussed on the type of programming which, from the audience's perspective at least, is the finest variety of media of all, live local newstalk call-in radio.