The
Trail Blazers' flagship radio station will soon have the Portland area's only locally produced morning sports show.
"Rip City Mornings with Bunker and Danforth" will air on KPOJ (620 AM), also known as Rip City Radio, weekdays from 6 to 9 a.m., with a tentative start date of Monday, March 9. It will be hosted by Taylor Danforth, who recently worked at KFXX (1080 The Fan), and Andy Bunker, who will move from Seattle.
Rip City Radio has been
working to start a morning show for months, trying to fill a hole in a market that has four all-sports stations, including three with local programming. The last local morning sports talk show was "The Morning Sports Page" on KXTG (750 The Game), last hosted by Chad Doing, which was shut down in 2012 to make room for the syndicated "Dan Patrick Show."
"People want to talk about what's happening in Portland," said Dave Hill, Rip City Radio's program director. "I think Portland is just one of those towns that wears its locality like a badge of honor, and I think we were doing a disservice to the marketplace by not having a morning talk show locally."
Danforth was part of a
three-host noon-3 p.m. on KFXX, "Danforth, Dirt and Sprague," before departing Feb. 4. His former co-hosts, Andy Johnson and Brandon Sprague, remain in that time slot in a two-man "Dirt and Sprague" show, although other changes could be coming to Portland's longest-running all-sports station.
Danforth, 26, grew up in Bend and attended the University of Oregon, where he was a finance major, but also dabbled in media. After graduating, he took a job with an investment firm in Vancouver, but also did high school football play-by-play for KUIK (1360). Unsure of his future in finance with the economy floundering, he applied to KFXX and got a job as a board operator.
He and Johnson, trying to advance their careers, started a podcast, and were joined by Sprague. The threesome were given an evening time slot, then moved to the noon-3 p.m. slot in June.
"We thought really highly of Taylor, and when they parted ways, we saw an opportunity, and we went for it," Hill said.
Bunker, 30, went to high school with former Oregon point guard Aaron Brooks and attended the University of Washington. He worked as a producer for Seattle's KJR before going to graduate school in Boston, then returned to Seattle radio in August, and had been doing a show on KIRO (710ESPN).
The Rip City Radio show was originally slated to have Justin Myers, who co-hosted an evening Seattle show with Bunker, as a host, but
Myers opted to remain in Seattle.
Danforth made his debut on Rip City Radio last week, when he co-hosted an impromptu 6-9 a.m. tribute show for
Jerome Kersey, the Blazers icon who unexpectedly died at 52.
Hill said the station still needs to hire a producer for the show, although he has a candidate in mind. Once that hire is finalized, Danforth and Bunker will race to get ready, doing mock shows next week with a target start date of March 9 in mind.
"We've got to get everything in order in the next week or so, get the producer in place, and when we feel like we're ready, then we'll pull the trigger," Hills said. "Our target date is March 9, but if I don't feel like we're quite there yet, it may be a couple days out of that."
As for the focus of the show, Hill said that will be obvious.
"It's going to be talking about everything sports, but obviously there's going to be a focus on what's happening here in Portland, which obviously, right now, is the Blazers," he said. "To pretend we're not going to be talking about the Blazers more than anything else, well, look at the name of the show, look at the name of the radio station."
