It’s time for our look back at the year that was in arts and entertainment, 2020. Every day between now and New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31, we’ll be posting a story painting the big picture on the year. Some days will have multiple stories, some days there was so much going on in one month we just stuck to that one. We hope you enjoy the look back, and let’s all hope for a happy new year and a much, much, much, much better 2021! Here’s today’s installment, months January and February, the two most normal months of the year. During this time, coronavirus was just a news story for the... Read More

When’s the last time you listened to WOC? How old are you? If you’re somewhere under the age of 65, you probably couldn’t remember your answer to that first question. And if you’re somewhere over the age of 65, you probably couldn’t remember either, only for a different reason. I keed! I keed! In all seriousness though, the audience for local talk radio has been growing older and older over the decades. Most of the shows appeal to a decidedly conservative audience and the demographic for those kinds of shows skews older, and not just in radio. Median age of a Fox News prime time viewer?... Read More

It was worth a shot. But you can stop calling and e-mailing the stations. It ain’t happening. When it was announced first here on QuadCities.com that a number of on- and off-air personnel were let go from local I Heart Radio stations, including WOC’s Jim Fisher and Dave Levora, Debbie McFadden of Mix 96 and Q106, Todd Alan of KISS-FM and Ron Evans of Mix 96, fans of those shows were understandably upset. When it was learned that, a day later, two shows and six jobs had been restored to Des Moines sports talk station KXnO, due to, as they put it “overwhelming fan outcry,” there was some... Read More

I was never a big fan of Jim Fisher’s show. I know him personally, but not very well. I was a guest on his show a handful of times (where we would often disagree, on live radio), and when we ran into each other in social situations, we could get along fine as long as we avoided any hot button topics. As a person, a human being, I got along with him alright because we had a fairly superficial small talky interaction. But I can’t say I was ever a fan of his show. It’s not just that Jim and I often disagreed on topics and politics, it’s that the show, especially in the last decade, went off... Read More