Let me start today with a prediction: you won't hear an all-Christmas radio station on Milwaukee radio this year until around Thanksgiving.
The blizzard of '11 is memory, the Super Bowl glow is starting to fade just a bit, so it's a good time to look back to Christmas -- at least Christmas radio. It was the first holiday season since the new portable people meters started measuring our listening habits.
Let me preface this by saying I'm not allowed to give the detailed numbers I have been providing since the mid-1990s. Arbitron's lawyers put the hammer down about demographic data from the new ratings system, and so I can give you information without the numbers to back it up.
And the information shows both stations that went all-Christmas in mid-November -- WRIT-FM (95.7) and WMYX-FM (99.1) -- did great in December, especially as Christmas neared. But their audience bumps evaporated at the end of the Christmas season, meaning they didn't retain the gains Christmas music brought them.
WRIT did better than WMYX among all listeners.
The broadest measure, listeners 6 and older, are publicly released, and they showed WRIT in second for the holiday period, behind WTMJ-AM (620). WXSS-FM (103.7) was third and WMYX was fourth. Here's a spot that gives you all those numbers, if you're interested.
Among women 25 to 54, WRIT and WMYX were ahead of the competition, with WMYX doing better than WRIT among the listeners who are the real target of all-Christmas radio.
In the most recent holiday season, WRIT and WMYX flip to all-Christmas formats on Nov. 18. In 2009, it was Nov. 13. The earliest flip was Halloween, back in 2008.
Another kind of holiday radio: Sirius XM satellite radio launches its "Valentine's Radio" at 11 a.m. Friday on Siriux Channel 3/XM Channel 23 and runs through Valentine's Day (which is Monday, if you've forgotten).
Among the features is Dionne Warwick's "Ultimate Love Playlist" and listeners can e-mail their dedications to love@siriusxm.com.
Naima is number one: Milwaukee's Naima Adedapo tops the list of "American Idol" contenders from Michael Slezak on the TV Line Web site.
Writes Slezak: "We’ve got a gut feeling that Naima has more tricks up her sleeve than we saw from her initial performance."
Adedapo was the standout of the televised Milwaukee auditions, which showed her cleaning toilets at Summerfest, as well as belting out a Donny Hathaway's "For All We Know." Slezak described her performance as "potent" and "unfussy."
Another Milwaukeean, 25-year-old Riverside High School student teacher Scott Dangerfield, was in 11th place in TV Line's top 20.
Meanwhile, a supposedly "leaked" list of the top 40 "Idol" contestants includes Adedapo, but not Dangerfield.
If you didn't see it last month, here's Adedapo's audition:
On TV: Animal Planet says the seventh annual edition of its "Puppy Bowl" pulled in 9.2 million viewers over its 12 hour marathon-run.
- Packers linebacker Clay Matthews drops by Ellen DeGeneres' show at 4 this afternoon on Channel 58. DeGeneres was an outspoken Matthews' fan and backed the Packers in the Super Bowl. It's Matthews' second visit to the show.
- Speaking of Matthews, he'll be a presenter at Sunday's Grammy Awards, along with Will.i.am. CBS' broadcast of the Grammys airs Sunday night at 7 on Channel 58.
- Norm MacDonald has picked up two jobs. He'll host Comedy Central's new "Sports Show" starting in April. With a live audience it will skewer, naturally, sports. Meanwhile, he's also taking over the helm of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" from Gabe Kaplan.
- Oscar fans can update their iPhone/iPad app from last year or download it for the first time at the iTunes store so they can broadcast their picks or get real-time results on Oscar night. Last year, more than half a million users downloaded the first edition of the app.
The cottony Grace Weber: When last I wrote about Wauwatosa's talented Grace Weber, she was competing for Oprah Winfrey's version of "American Idol."
She didn't win that one, but the singer -- who now lives in New York and just finished recording her first album -- is now one of five finalists in Cotton Inc.'s contest for singers of its "Fabric of My Life" jingle.
Voting is open through Feb. 21 at the Cotton Inc. Web site.
Here's her version the song:
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.
