99.9 The Fan top-rated local sports station

The latest quarterly radio ratings from Arbitron show that 99.9 The Fan, Capitol Broadcasting's all-sports FM station, leads each of McClatchey Broadcasting's two AM sports stations, 850 The Buzz and 620 The Bull, in the Raleigh-Durham market.

But McClatchey General Manager Brian Maloney says "The Triangle's Sports Leader," to borrow the company's claim, has not changed, because McClatchey counts its two stations together.

According to Arbitron, 99.9 (WCMC) drew a 1.0 rating — measuring listeners age 12 and over from 6 a.m. to midnight Monday through Sunday — in the fall 2008 quarter, up from 0.7 in the summer. The Fan attracted an estimated 41,800 unique listeners in any given 15-minute period, up from 30,600.

Next was 850 (WRBZ) at 0.8, the same as the previous quarter, followed by 620 (WDNC) at 0.6. The latter fell 0.2.

But Maloney sees those numbers as a combined 1.4 — or higher than 99.9 The Fan's 1.0.

"We're in the business of providing sports programming to sports radio fans, and we don't really care which one they're listening to as long as they're listening to The Buzz or The Bull. And we have the lion's share of the sports radio market," Maloney says.

More important, as far as 99.9 The Fan is concerned, was its performance in the demographic categories it really wants to own: men 25-54 and men 18-34, essentially the target audience for a sports radio station. In the male 25-54 category, 99.9's rating increased from 0.7 to 2.5, according to the station. (Arbitron limits what it makes immediately available to the press.) Among men 18-34, The Fan's rating rose from 1.4 to 1.9.

Again, in a news release Monday, McClatchey (no relation to the parent company of The News & Observer) noted that its combined rating among men 25-54 exceeded 99.9 The Fan's figure in that category. 

The Fan benefited from its FM signal, its move to ESPN programming and its coverage of Carolina Hurricanes hockey and NFL games, says Dave Shore, the operations manager for the station.

"I'm happy we've been able to do this in the first year," Shore says, referring to the station's ratings success in the year following its format change from country music to all-sports in October 2007.

Ultimately, he adds, 99.9 The Fan will measure itself in its primary demographic against all of the Triangle's stations, not just the sports-talk outlets.

Overall in the fall quarter, the leader was WQDR-FM 94.7, a country station, at 7.8, followed by WDCG-FM 105.1, a pop contemporary hits station, and WPTF-AM 680, a news talk station, each at 6.9.