News Is Talk of the Town With Latest Arbitron Ratings

News of the gubernatorial recall election and the October firestorms helped to push an AM news/talk radio station to the top of the San Diego's listener charts last fall.

KOGO-AM 600, owned by San Antoniobased Clear Channel Communications Inc., received a 6.5 percent rating among listeners age 12 and older by New York City-based Arbitron Inc. - considered among advertisers to be the bible of radio listener surveys. The fall rating sampled more than 3,000 local listeners from October through December.

"We had the largest fires in the state's

history and an unprecedented upheaval in the governor's race, so a lot of people tuned into KOGO to find out what was happening in the recall and the immediate aftermath," said Jim Richards, Clear Channel's regional vice president of programming. KOGO was in fifth place in Arbitron's fall 2002 rating with 4.3 percent of local listeners.

"But we were in the No. 1 slot as recently as the spring of 2003, so being there is not uncharted territory," Richards said.