If you tuned into My 92.9 this morning excited to hear what morning show host Valentine had to say, you were in for a surprise, as the station dumped the LA-based personality, replacing him with Mojo of Mojo in the Morning, a Detroit-based show formerly on Hot 98.3 (full disclosure: I worked at Clear Channel, the parent company for My 92.9 and Hot 98.3 for a few months last year, but I have zero inside information or influence over there now).

Mojo, who was on mornings for KRQ before leaving for Detroit in 2000, seems like a weird fit for My 92.9, a station that seemingly was aiming for adult females with a mix of adult contemporary hits and pop songs with the rap portions removed, but hey, if you're looking for phone scams and "second date updates," it'll be easy to flip back and forth between 92.9 and KRQ at 93.7.

Hot 98.3, now without a morning show, stuck to playing just music this morning, will be airing The Breakfast Club, Power 105.1's morning show in New York City. Again, this seems a little weird, since urban radio is generally a different animal when you switch from East to West Coast, but the show, hosted by DJ Envy, does get great interviews, from Jay Z to this morning's talk with Macklemore, so I guess that's something.

If you want to hear local personalities and music on the radio in the morning, you're out of luck at Clear Channel, with the exception of Melissa Santa Cruz on Radio Tejano.

Tucson News Now

He's been off the air since June (one in a series of absences over the years) for reasons that haven't been disclosed, but Chuck George has announced today that he's leaving his full-time gig at KOLD to go back to school to get his doctorate.

From the article on KOLD's site:

Chuck George, the popular chief meteorologist at KOLD-TV, has decided to resign and devote his time to his pursuit of a doctorate.

KOLD News 13 Vice President and General Manager Debbie Bush made the announcement today "with much regret."

"While we are very sad Chuck won't be on the KOLD team anymore, we understand and want the best for him in the future," Bush said.

George, who has been on leave since early June, joined the station in February 2003 and quickly became one of the most recognized and favorite on-air personalities in Tucson. He is known for teaching viewers about the science of weather.

"This is the right time for me to pursue my lifelong dream," George said. "I want to continue my love of science in the academic community by pursuing a career in teaching and science in academia. It is a tough decision to leave my friends and family at KOLD as well as the wonderfully supportive Southern Arizona Community.

UPDATE: KOLD is really going all out with this news, including this image, currently receiving a ton of emotional comments as their Facebook cover photo:

More info to come.

In the upcoming Tucson Weekly, medical marijuana columnist J.M. Smith explores CNN's star doc Sanjay Gupta's recent retraction that he might have been wrong about the benefits of medical marijuana. in 2009, Gupta wrote an opinion piece for Time titled, "Why I Would Vote No on Pot."

Without getting into what Gupta's change of heart means to the future of medical marijuana or even the further legalization of marijuana since Mr. Smith is so much better at that MJ stuff, watch part of his discussion with CNN's resident hobbit Brit and see what's making all your MJ friends on Facebook so so happy.

Tucsonan Murphy Woodhouse and Laura Carlsen, both of the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, released this video recently that got to the heart of border issues using President Obama's recent speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany.

As the Media Watch Columnist for the Tucson Weekly, I’ve covered my share of firings in radio and television. That typed, it’s still admittedly a bit odd writing my own epitaph.

On Thursday, August 8, Cumulus Tucson Operations Manager Herb Crowe took the time to call Brad Allis and I and let us know the station had decided to make major changes to its radio pre and postgame broadcasts for UA football and men’s basketball. I’ve been involved in analysis for UA sports since the late 90s when I teamed with the likes of Eric Thomae and Ryan Radtke on KNST AM 790. When KNST lost the contract to KCUB AM 1290, I was able to transition into a pre and postgame role there. Brad was brought on board shortly thereafter, and we’ve acted as something of a fixture on those broadcasts for most of the last decade.

Management at Cumulus Tucson decided now was the time to shake things up a bit.

“We wanted to get a different feel for the show, and being able to get Kevin as part of the broadcast along with Rob allows us to extend the brand of the show, and that all feels like good stuff,” Crowe said.

Kevin is Kevin Woodman. Rob is Rob Lantz. They host In the House, the station’s daily afternoon talk show. Rob has teamed with Brad and I on pre and postgame broadcasts for at least the last four years. Woodman, a gifted natural radio talent who has done excellent things alongside Rob, is one of two new additions. The other is Glenn Howell.

And therein lies the real different direction. Howell, who is really good people and handled sideline reports for UA television broadcasts prior to the contract with the Pac-12 Network, brings what management views as that special athlete’s perspective.

A decision on who will help to host basketball pre and postgame shows has yet to be determined.

I’ll try to be as careful as I can with I type next, because I don’t want this to come off as being disparaging to Glenn, who can be a very engaging person. Nor do I want this to come off as sour grapes, the slighted media guy angry because he’s out of a gig. But since I’ve made reference to the dynamic in past Media Watch columns, it seems disingenuous not to include it here.

Not always, but usually, adding a former athlete to the broadcast is rarely a move that incorporates actual insight. The position is supposed to provide the listener access into the mind of a performer before, during and after the game. What’s being discussed? How are they preparing? What do they do and how do they react during big game sequences? What are the various personality traits and dynamics? These are things a former athlete could allegedly provide. After all, they at one point had unique access and an understanding of the competitive psyche not available to members of the media.

Instead, the former athlete generally utilizes the forum by doubling down on a litany of tired sports clichés while being an apologist for the home team when things aren’t going well.

Brad, Rob and I were not apologists. We may have differed on the severity of the performance or a given situation that didn’t go as well as we thought it should, but we took pride in presenting our broadcasts in a way that valued our take on objectivity. Brad and I graduated from the UA. Rob loves the Wildcats, and has lived in Tucson most of his life. As broadcasters, we wanted to see the UA do well. But when they didn’t, we weren’t going to sugarcoat it either.

But in the off-season, once 1290 and IMG, the network that produces UA sporting events, re-upped on a renewal portion of the contract that runs until 2019, IMG has also included a series of requests to try to use the flagship station as a branding platform for Wildcat athletics. It’s certainly possible that the Brad and Schu version of call-it-like-we-see-it objectivity didn’t jive with the way IMG wants to brand the product.

“I respect what you guys have done and the work that you’ve put in, but I feel like we just need to try something else and go in a different direction,” Crowe said.

Even though, with us at the helm, Wildcat pre and postgame broadcasts got better numbers and drew more traffic to the website than any station in the cluster other than KIIM 99.5 FM, the country station that leads the market in listenership.

Not to toot our own horn, but here’s what 1290 gave up. Brad Allis has covered UA athletics in some capacity for the better part of the last 20 years. He is a recruiting expert who has sifted through an obscene amount of video for the purposes of understanding and interpreting what strengths and weaknesses a player possesses before they come into the program, and how they might benefit the program upon their arrival. He is also a walking depth chart encyclopedia and possesses a historical knowledge of the program matched by only a handful of people. And none of that handful is doing commentary on the radio.

In his personal life, Brad and his wife involved themselves in raising foster children and recently adopted twins. They don’t know it now, but those are two of the luckiest kids in town, even if their dad is going to have to struggle a bit harder to help to make ends meet because the radio station decided his knowledge no longer served the kind of purpose they required.

I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 years of radio experience and another quarter century in print journalism. A lot of that has taken place in Tucson, and much of it has focused on covering UA football, men’s basketball and the university’s other successful sports pursuits. I know what I’m doing, I’m good at it, and know how to bring it across in a way that’s valuable to listeners.

Speaking of whom, the listeners have played an immense role in making that show a blast. It was a fun gig, and I really enjoyed doing it. I relished the audience participation, and valued the many more folks who made the effort to listen on their way to and from the game, whether they loved us, hated us, or were generally neutral. Just to take the time to find some value in what we delivered means more than I can express here.

I can tell you first hand, that played a big role, whether we started a pregame show at 6am for a 10 o’clock matchup that featured the UA on the east coast or remained on the air until 2:30 am following a late-night Fox Sports or ESPN made-for-TV start time. Or say, last December 15, when our day started around 7 with the UA football team’s bowl game against Nevada, and concluded around two am after sharing the excitement of Arizona’s miraculous gridiron win and last-second victory over highly-ranked Florida. That was a rush.

I’m not naïve to the ways of the business. I’ve covered stories about better radio talent losing their jobs, and they had much larger listener segments than I could fathom, and in the process meant more to the fabric of the community. But the product moves on. Occasionally, their names come up in a “where are they now” sort of way.

Even though the ego is a bit bruised I’m also well aware the pre and postgame broadcasts will progress just fine. Rob knows the drill. He’s been doing the show a long time. He knows what to expect and will perform this portion of his seemingly ever-increasing workload extraordinarily well.

Kevin Woodman has next to no formal radio experience, and is a major market talent who has a chance to make a lot of money in a business where less and less people are doing so.

And again, Glenn Howell is a good guy, and while I think he’s going to realize that filling time on the radio and continuing to come off as engaging and informative isn’t as easy as it might seem—segment after segment after segment—he has excellent contacts with the football program, is very likable and will provide numerous listeners with a perspective they’ll enjoy.

The show will go on. And I’ll listen.

It was a phenomenal privilege to be a part of it.

We mentioned last week that Daft Punk were scheduled to appear on the Colbert Report last night, but apparently that dream was thwarted by the president of MTV, who had been holding a surprise Daft Punk appearance at the Video Music Awards in his pocket and cited some sort of Viacom exclusivity clause (the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central) to bump the French duo off Colbert.

Somewhat predictably, Colbert discussed the debacle on his show last night in a hilarious fashion.

So, this should be interesting: I've been invited to appear on the Jon Justice morning show tomorrow from 8 to 9, discussing my post earlier today about Ben Buehler-Garcia's Tweetathon and the state of Tucson in general. Listen in on 104.1 FM or, if you have no other options, watch the simulcast on channel 58 so you can criticize my unfortunate taste in clothes.

Cathy Busha, the former director of LGBTQ Affairs in the UA's Dean of Students Office, has always been a great person to keep up with since her departure several year ago via Facebook. Recently, it was the first birthday of her son, Oliver. But what's worth sharing is a beautiful post by Busha's wife, Anna Deligio, on the Portland's LGBTQ Community Center's justout.com on the journey to motherhood for Busha and Deligio.

You can read Deligio's post here. A snippet I really appreciated:

Neither of us wanted to spend too long in that process because it began to feel a little eugenic and odd. In fact, when we looked at our own family health histories, we acknowledged that we probably wouldn’t pick our own sperm.

We set our non-negotiables as willing-to-be-known (so Oliver would have a chance of finding this history if he ever wants to), prior pregnancies (so we knew the sperm worked), white (because we both are) with some basic shared characteristics of Cathy (tall, fair-skinned, hazel eyes, light brown hair) and decent family medical history.

We chose Intra Unterine Insemination (IUI) as our strategy. IUI is where they take the sperm concentrate (minus the fluid, slow, and dead ones) and inject it directly into your uterus via a thin catheter. This process compares to ICI, which is when you take sperm as-is and shoot it up to the cervix (some have used turkey basters for this process). By bypassing my cervix and putting them practically at the finish line, the hope was that they could shake off having been in the deep freeze and make some magic happen.

We did our first IUI and commenced to spend a very nerve-wracking two weeks waiting to see if it stuck. It didn’t. We both cried hard that first time.

From there, we went on to have five more tries with the doctor’s office. Each try that resulted in my period brought us such sadness. There were a lot of tears, some fights, and lots of fears around the choices if this didn’t work. We even did the county’s foster-adopt training during this time to try to keep the parenting energy going, however it was going to happen.

Oh, and by the way, happy birthday, Oliver.

Making its way through the internets this morning is a Thai commercial for a push-up bra that takes an unexpected turn at the end. Totally safe for work.

• From the 7/29/13 episode of "The Late Show With David Letterman"

We can't embed the video because CBS hates blogs or something, but if you fast-forward to the 15:54 mark in last night's episode of The Late Show, Anna Mirocha's Police Dispatch from June 20 was featured. I feel like the previous story about someone shoplifting condoms and bacon stole our thunder a bit, but we take what we can get.