Steve Dahl to launch daily podcasts in partnership with CBS Radio

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: Steve Dahl to launch daily podcasts in partnership with CBS Radio : Steve Dahl, more or less silenced since CBS Radio took him off WJMK-FM 104.3 late last year with more than 2 1/2 years left on his contract, is poised to be unmuzzled. : Dahl and CBS will partner beginning Sept. 8th for a one-hour daily podcast available on-demand through CBS' iknowjack.com, Dahl's dahl.com and Apple's iTunes site. : A Chicago radio personality for more than 30 years whose broadcast style inspired a generation of voices, Dahl has been kept off radio since Dec. 5th because of the CBS contract that will continue to pay him into mid-2011. : "On paper, I'm a genius. I'm going to get paid for 21/2 years and have total freedom to do whatever I want, except the one thing I like to do most of all, which is be on the air," Dahl told the Tribune a couple weeks after his last WJMK broadcast. : Dahl has made a few television appearances since then, in addition to blogging on his Web site, Tweeting and writing a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune. But the podcast will reunite him with listeners and enable him to get back into the routine of offering his wry take on the world with listeners, colleagues and guests. : "In the months since Dahl has been off the air, we've heard from listeners across the country who miss his daily commentary and one-of-a-kind insight," Rod Zimmerman, senior vice president and market manager for CBS Radio Chicago, said in a statement. "We're excited to move forward with this partnership satisfying legions of Dahl fans while at the same time creating an entirely new opportunity for CBS Radio and digital marketers to work with the original founding father of talk radio." : Dahl was among the first personalities to return radio, which had become a time-temperature-song medium, to something approaching theater of the mind. He has lacked a classic old-school radio voice, but that was part of bringing a certain "reality" to the air, taking listeners into his world, his head and behind the scenes at the stations where he worked. : While commanded strong ratings in Chicago for decades and established a free-form template embraced by many others, Dahl is best known nationally for his comedic anti-disco campaign, which built to a crescendo with a 1979 "Disco Demolition" night between games of a Chicago White Sox double header at Comiskey Park 30 years ago Sunday. His audience figures dropped with Arbitron's move last year from diaries to eavesdropping Portable People Meters to determine the radio ratings used to set ad rates. : It didn't help Dahl that, in anticipation of the PPM switch, CBS Radio in late 2006 abandoned the FM talk format on what was WCKG-FM, a station here it had more or less built around him, in favor of female-oriented music format. But rather than take a buyout at that time, Dahl moved from afternoons to mornings as the sole non-music show on CBS' WJMK, but he proved a perfect fit neither for his new slot nor the station. : "It's been fun taking some time off, but there are issues that cry out for some sort of comedic reckoning," Dahl, 54, said in CBS' podcast announcement. "Podcasting is something I've been doing for years and I enjoy the flexibility it gives our fans and foes to experience the show at their own convenience. It's like having your favorite radio show on a DVR with a really long extension cord." : (Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune)

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