Joe Duffy King of the airwaves
Published on June 01, 2011. Appeared in Independent Group Newspapers. Written by Gavin Duffy.
The recent figures for radio listening gave rise to a lot of headlines about Ryan Tubridy’s difficulties filling Gerry Ryan’s rather large shoes on 2FM. Unfairly much was made of how Ryan has lost almost one third of Gerry’s audience but, although I believed he was more suited to radio one, I believe Ryan will build up his own audience in time. The national media do give him such a hard time. Ryan is an excellent presenter of the Late Late Show yet he is constantly criticised for the show’s content something he is not in charge of.
But all the talk of Ryan is a distraction from the real story of the
recent listenership survey results. Not near enough attention was given
to the real success story of RTE, The Joe Duffy Live Line Show. Joe is
in the after lunch grave yard shift and steadily he has built up a huge
audience for his show each day from 1:45pm At over four hundred thousand
listeners to his show he is now the second most listened to show in the
country, just over fifty thousand listeners behind Morning Ireland.
This is a phenomenal success. That a mid afternoon show should be
catching up with a morning show is unprecedented.
Yes we all
criticise the show from time to time and call it whine line but clearly
Joe is giving the listeners what they want and the people of Ireland do
have a voice and in Joe an empathetic listener.