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May 9, 2005
Hall To Buy Connecticut's WILI AM-FM
 *After 46 years of family ownership, two CONNECTICUT
stations are changing hands. For the last five years, Nutmeg
Broadcasting's WILI (1400 Willimantic) and WILI-FM (98.3 Willimantic)
have been controlled by the Herbert C. Rice Trust, a 30-year
trust that expires at the end of 2005.
Last week, GM Michael Rice announced that the Rice family
and the trust will sell Nutmeg Broadcasting to Hall Communications,
which owns nearby WICH (1310 Norwich), WCTY (97.7 Norwich), WNLC
(98.7 East Lyme) and WKNL (100.9 New London). Details of the
transaction have not yet been disclosed (it had yet to be filed
with the FCC at press time Sunday night), but Hall says all staffers
will stay with WILI, with the exception of Michael Rice, who'll
retire.
Norwich market manager Andy Russell will add responsibility
for WILI, but the stations will remain at their current Willimantic
studio location, which Hall will purchase from the Rice family.
No changes are anticipated to WILI's AC/talk format or WILI-FM's
top 40 format.
*MASSACHUSETTS is
getting another 50,000 watt AM station, of sorts. Keating Willcox's
Willow Farm won FCC permission last week to crank WNSH (1570
Beverly) up from 500 watts to 50 kilowatts by day, with a directional
pattern that will serve the North Shore, much of coastal NEW
HAMPSHIRE and Maine, and the tip of Cape Cod - but without
much signal down towards Boston and the South Shore. At night,
WNSH will remain an 85 watt, nondirectional signal serving the
area near its transmitter at Endicott College and not much else.
 There's a tradeoff
- the power increase at WNSH means the demise of another little
local AM station, as WPEP (1570 Taunton) will surrender its license
and go dark. Though it's only 1000 watts by day and 227 watts
at night, WPEP has more than 55 years of history serving Taunton
as effectively its only local station. (WSNE 93.3 is licensed
to Taunton as well, but it's operated out of Clear Channel's
Providence cluster and serves mainly a RHODE ISLAND audience.)
We don't spend much time writing about the tower business
itself, but we can't ignore the biggest merger in the history
of tower ownership, as Boston-based American Tower agrees to
pay $3.1 billion to acquire competitor Spectrasite. The deal
adds Spectrasite's 7800 towers in the U.S. to an ATC portfolio
that includes 12,400 towers in the U.S. and 2400 more abroad
- and it keeps American Tower's headquarters in Boston.
And we were delighted to hear Paul Sullivan back on the air,
in good spirits and ahead of schedule, at WBZ (1030), as he returns
from his treatment for a brain tumor. Welcome back, Sully!
*It looks as though the tower construction
is all done at MAINE's WMGX (93.1 Portland) - the Saga
hot AC station filed last week for a license to cover on its
new facilities on its rebuilt tower on the Portland waterfront,
where it's running 50 kW at 135 meters above average terrain.
*We'll start our NEW YORK report on
Long Island, where WGSM (740 Huntington) remains silent as it
heads for a second sale in one year. Atmor Properties, which
just bought the station from K Radio License, is now selling
it to Win Radio Properties for $2.2 million. Win, owned by Richard
Yoon, also owns Spanish-language WCTN (950 Potomac-Cabin John
MD); no word on what it might have in mind for WGSM.
There's apparently a new station coming to the bottom of the
FM dial in New York City, but it's not really an FM station:
we're hearing that when low-power TV station WNYZ-LP moves from
channel 49 to channel 6, it'll use its audio carrier (at, of
course, 87.75 MHz) as a radio station, broadcasting with a highly
directional pattern from Long Island City that will primarily
serve the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn and Queens.
Upstate, the FCC rejected a petition from the Finger Lakes
Alliance for Independent Media (FLAIM) and a group of Ithaca
residents, objecting to the proposed sale of Eagle Broadcasting's
four Ithaca stations to Saga. The FLAIM petition argued that
the Arbitron market definition that the FCC used, which claims
nine stations within the Ithaca market, was flawed because of
terrain irregularities that block several of those stations from
being clearly heard in Ithaca itself. FCC lawyers studied the
issue and determined otherwise, allowing the sale of WHCU (870),
WTKO (1470), WYXL (97.3) and WQNY (103.7) to go forward.
(The FCC also noted that even if the four stations control
much of the market's revenue - which they do - that there's already
an established history of allowing them to be commonly owned
under Eagle, and thus a presumption that the public interest
is being served by allowing the sale to Saga.)
Down the road in Binghamton, we're hearing that Citadel's
WYOS (1360) is picking up Air America Radio beginning today...stay
tuned.
(And what does Citadel want with the "WBBF" call
letters that were in use in Rochester for 52 years before being
abandoned by Entercom last month? We don't know - but Citadel
has put in a reservation for the calls, in any event.)
Sorry to report the death of Jim O'Brien, who was a nighttime
fixture on the old WNDR (1260 Syracuse) and later on WNTQ (93.1
Syracuse). O'Brien died on April 30, at age 62; he had been living
in North Syracuse, we're told.
*In western PENNSYLVANIA, EMF Broadcasting's
"K-Love" contemporary Christian format is now on three
frequencies. We knew it was coming to WKVB (107.9 Port Matilda
PA), which picked up K-Love early last week - but now it's on
two more frequencies down in the Johnstown market.
 Here's
how it shook out: Forever Broadcasting, which is selling its
WUZI (105.7 Portage) and WUZY (97.7 Somerset) to Nick Galli's
2510 Licenses, shut down the classic hits "Wuzz" format
on those two stations last week, replacing it with a loop directing
listeners to new Forever acquisition WGLU (92.1 Johnstown), which
promptly flipped from "Rock 92.1" to "Rocky,"
with new calls WRKW, closely paralleling Forever's "Rocky"
WRKY (104.9 Hollidaysburg) over in Altoona.
And 105.7 and 97.7 finished out the week by changing calls
to WLKJ and WLKH, respectively, and flipping to K-Love - which
just happens to take them out of commercial competition with
the Forever group.
In Scranton, WKRZ (98.5) is getting a new director of promotions
and marketing, as Nathan James moves up from Entercom's Norfolk,
Virginia cluster.
Down the road in Nanticoke, there's word that longtime WNAK
(730) general manager Robert W. Neilson died at the end of March,
though few details were made public.
In Philadelphia, Greater Media has apparently reached a deal
with Entercom to put the WBEN-FM call letters on its "Ben
95.7 FM," still legally WMWX. Greater Media filed a request
for the WBEN-FM calls last week; they remain in use on the AM
dial, of course, at Entercom's WBEN (930) in Buffalo. (And those
of us who grew up in western New York in a certain era know there
was, and will always be, only one true WBEN-FM, even if its calls
have changed a couple of times since then...)
*Just one bit of news from CANADA:
Bayshore Broadcasting is on the air with tests of its new FM
signal in Port Elgin, Ontario. The new CFPS-FM (97.9) is going
by "98 the Beach," we hear - and CFPS (1490) will be
going silent within a few months as a result.
*Our special clearance pricing continues
for fans of the Tower Site Calendar 2005. We're well aware
that many of the calendar's fans buy it for the pictures, not
the actual calendar pages...but that doesn't change the fact
that by this time of the year, we're not exactly shipping 'em
out the door at a breakneck pace, and Mrs. NERW would very much
like a corner of her living room back.
So while she rediscovers the floor beneath those boxes of
calendars and we begin to line up the images for Tower Site Calendar
2006, you get the very first crack at our Calendar
Clearance Deal for 2005.
 Here's how it works:
instead of our list price of $16 for this fabulous, full-color,
glossy calendar, you can now pick one up for just $8,
postpaid. ($8.66 to New York State addresses.) Better yet, if
you order two calendars at this special clearance price, we'll
throw in a third for free - $16 for THREE calendars, with nine
exciting months of 2005 yet to go. (That's $17.32 in NYS.)
Maybe you've already hung your original 2005 calendar on the
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