• L.A. Times, Wednesday, April 12, 2006 11:31 AM

Despite the huge media blitz that attended Howard Stern's leap from terrestrial radio to Sirius satellite radio several months ago, the fact of the matter is that most of his former listeners did not follow him to his new home.  The impediment, clearly, was the monthly fee charged by Sirius.  "The self-proclaimed King of All Media once commanded a national audience of 12 million daily listeners before jumping to satellite in January," reports the Los Angeles Times.  "But since then, his kingdom has shrunk to a small fraction of that size. Meanwhile, the shock jock's main replacements thus far have failed to hold very much of the former flock."  That realization puts the radio medium itself in an awkward situation.  "It's unprecedented that a radio personality of Stern's magnitude has ever just pulled the plug on his show, Perry Michael Simon, news-talk-sports editor of AllAccess.com, an online journal of the radio industry, told the Times. "We're really in uncharted territory here."    Stern has scolded his former fans for notfollowing him to Sirius, apparently to little avail.  Meanwhile, radio stations all across the U.S. have launched soft-sell campaigns to lure the Stern unfaithful. That strategy apppears to be paying off.  A recent industry poll showed more than half of Stern's former audience has not stuck with the affiliate replacements David Lee Roth and Adam Corolla. "Instead they seem to be gravitating toward similar, well-established morning programs," the Times reports. "Stern's departure has shaken up the pecking order of what people are listening to," says Fred Jacobs, whose Michigan-based rock radio consulting firm conducted the poll. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for local radio stations."

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