September 24, 2007
WRKO Legal Moves Silence Carr
TOWER SITE CALENDAR 2008 - NOW AVAILABLE!!!
*A MASSACHUSETTS judge barred WRKO
(680 Boston) Howie Carr from jumping ship to rival talker WTKK
(96.9 Boston) last week, but the decision didn't make the host's
future much clearer.
 Suffolk
Superior Court Judge Allan van Gessel ruled Wednesday, just hours
before Carr was to have started his WTKK morning shift, that
while WRKO owner Entercom couldn't enforce the non-compete clause
in Carr's contract, it could enforce a clause that allowed WRKO
to match any competing offer for Carr's services.
What does "match" mean? There's the seven-million-dollar
question as the legal battle keeps plodding along: would merely
matching WTKK's paycheck be enough to force Carr to stay with
WRKO, or are there other factors at play, too, such as the Red
Sox preemptions that have annoyed Carr all summer, not to mention
WTKK's FM signal and the conspicuous absence of Carr's nemesis
Tom Finneran over at the Greater Media talker.
In any case, WRKO succeeded in barring Carr from his scheduled
Thursday morning debut on WTKK, but for now that's the extent
of the victory. Carr was already off the air at WRKO last week
while the lawsuit was being heard, and he's not rushing back
to the WRKO studios now, either, which leaves substitute hosts
filling the afternoon slot both there and on the remaining affiliates
of Carr's syndicated show.
Over at WTKK, the picture's only marginally brighter. While
the station issued a statement saying "we are disappointed
that Howie will not be on WTKK tomorrow, but we are hopeful that
he will be a part of the Greater Media family in the very near
future," there's every reason to expect Entercom to drag
the legal wrangling out as long as possible, which leaves WTKK
filling its morning drive slot with substitute hosts as well.
That's Michael Graham, for the moment, with weekender Michelle
McPhee handling Graham's usual 10-noon slot.
 WTKK
is moving forward in other ways - it has a new website in development,
and it's started to use a new logo proclaiming the station as
"Boston's Talk Evolution." (Given the political bent
of most of the station's hosts, we'd think "Boston's Talk
Creation" might be more in order, but we digress.)
*In other Bay State news, WUMB-FM (91.9 Boston) marked its
25th anniversary last week, complete with a special
website marking the occasion - and NERW joins in with our
congratulations to founding GM Pat Monteith and her staff!
*A venerable NEW HAMPSHIRE callsign
is no more. The WKBR calls survived well over half a century
of radio turbulence, moving from 1240 to 1250, going silent for
a while in the nineties, and enduring a merry-go-round of owners
and formats in recent years. Now "The Game," as the
Manchester sports station is known, has dropped its heritage
calls, becoming WGAM. Those calls move from Absolute Broadcasting's
sister station on 900 in Nashua (itself a survivor of gale-force
radio turbulence in recent decades), which becomes WGHM.
Meanwhile, another heritage Granite State call has returned:
WNTK (1010 Newport NH) is back to its old calls, WCNL, 19 years
after dropping them. The WNTK calls live on at Bob Vinikoor's
sister FM on 99.7 in New London, of course.
*And one more northern New England call change:
Barry Lunderville's new 93.7 in Lunenburg, VERMONT changes
calls from WXBN to WOTX, calls last seen on 102.3 in Concord,
N.H.
|
LAST CHANCE FOR A BARGAIN
ON THE 2008 TOWER SITE CALENDAR!
Think the arrival of the new
phone book is an exciting time of year? (We do, actually, with
apologies to Steve Martin, but that's not the point.)
Here's a really exciting spot
on the calendar - in fact, it is the calendar. Yes, the
2008 Tower Site
Calendar is back from the printer and ready for shipping
all over the US and beyond.
This year's edition is a particularly
fine one, if we do say so ourselves. From the cover photo of
KAST in Astoria, Oregon to the back cover shot of the Blaw-Knox
diamond tower at WBNS in Columbus, this year's calendar features
14 all-new full-color shots of famous broadcast sites far and
wide. There's KROQ in Los Angeles, KFBK in Sacramento, WESX in
Salem, WGAN in Portland, Black Mountain in Vegas, Mount Spokane
in Spokane, and many (ok, several) more.
If you've been following our
adventures, you know that the 2006 and 2007 editions of the calendar
sold out. If you've been following postal rates and the cost
of printing, you know they've both gone up.
Which is to say, there's every
reason to order this year's calendar right away - especially
because the price will go up after September 30.
Get your order in now,
and you'll be able to have all this tower-calendar goodness on
your wall for last year's price - just $17 with shipping
and handling included.
Or better yet, beat our move
to mandatory subscriptions (also coming later this fall) and
get a free calendar with your $60 subscription to NERW for 2008.
(Remember, the proceeds from both the calendar and the subscriptions
help keep NERW right here on the web, as we head into our fourteenth
year of news and analysis.)
So click
right here and you can be one of the first to have
your very own Tower Site Calendar 2008! (And thank you!) |
*Our NEW YORK news begins out on eastern
Long Island, where the end of business talk on WBZB (98.5 Westhampton)
and its call change to WBON was followed by a one-day simulcast
with sister station WLIR (107.1 Hampton Bays) - and then by Thursday's
launch of "La Nueva Fiesta," with a Spanish tropical
format under the programming and operations helm of New York/Long
Island radio veteran Vic Latino.
 He's
also serving as operations manager for the third station in the
Morey cluster, dance "Party 105" WDRE (105.3 Calverton-Roanoke).
Latino had worked at an earlier incarnation of 105.3 before heading
to New York and WKTU a few years back, then to XM last year.
In Albany, AllAccess reports that Paul Vandenburgh
has departed Pamal's WROW (590) as PD and morning man after a
decade at the station - and that WROW is now looking for a replacement.
Could Vandenburgh be headed back to his old stomping grounds,
the former WQBK (1300 Rensselaer, now WTMM) to relaunch it for
Regent as a talker after the collapse of its short-lived "Eve"
format?
There's a new owner at WPTR (96.7 Clifton Park) and WDCD (1540
Albany), but it's all in the family, as Donald Crawford Jr. (through
his DJR Broadcasting) pays $4,050,000 for the religious stations,
which had been owned by Crawford Sr.'s Kimtron, Inc. Kimtron
retains WDCX in Buffalo and WRCI/WLGZ in Rochester.
WYPX (Channel 55) in Amsterdam is going dark, at least for
viewers without cable or a digital TV tuner. The Paxson station
recently won permission from the FCC for an early shutoff of
its analog signal, continuing on with its Channel 50 DTV outlet.
(The spectrum now used by Channel 55 has been sold to Qualcomm,
which is using it for its nationwide MediaFLO service, already
on the air in many markets.)
And before we leave Albany, we note, somewhat belatedly, that
WGY (810 Schenectady) has quietly replaced the one-hour Jason
Keller talk show at 6 PM with another hour of Michael Savage.
Keller remains at sister station WHRL (103.1 Albany).
Brad Riter is out of his evening shift at WGR (550 Buffalo);
Alan Pergament in the Buffalo News says the dismissal
came after Riter didn't show up for a morning shift he was filling
in on.
The former WKRT (920 Cortland), now a satellite relay of Bible
Broadcasting Network's religious network thanks to an utterly
misguided application of FCC ownership caps, has lost its heritage
calls as well as the last vestiges of local programming on the
AM dial in Cortland. As of last week, the new calls there are
WYBY.
*"Fresh" came to southeast PENNSYLVANIA
last week, but it's not displacing the existing "B101"
identity of WBEB (101.1 Philadelphia). Instead, "Philadelphia's
Soft Rock Station" is simply mentioning from time to time
that it's playing "Fresh music" - and of course keeping
anyone else from grabbing the branding in the market. B101 has
a new PD, too: Chuck Knight, who's "fresh," as it were,
off 11 years as PD of WSNY (94.7) in Columbus, Ohio.
*Where are they now? NEW JERSEY's
Chris Coleman, late of WPUR (107.3 Atlantic City), is now Virginia's
Chris Coleman, as he takes on the morning show at WIGO in White
Stone, VA and operations manager duties for WIGO and sister station
WKWI in Kilmarnock.
You can have
your ad here! Click
here
for information on the most economical way to reach tens of thousands
of Northeast radio and TV people each week. |
*Now that Moses Znaimer has sold his TV
holdings, he's starting to build a radio empire in CANADA.
In addition to CFMX (103.1 Cobourg/96.3 Toronto), the classical
music station he recently bought and relaunched under new calls
CFMZ, Znaimer announced last week that his MZMedia group is buying
CHWO (740 Toronto), the 50,000-watt adult standards station that's
widely heard up and down the East Coast.
 The sale ends more
than half a century of Caine family ownership of CHWO, in both
its original incarnation as a local Oakville station on 1250
(that facility's now religious CJYE, still held by the Caines)
and, since 2000, on the 740 signal that used to be the CBC's
flagship, CBL.
While CHWO will move out of the downtown Oakville studios
that will continue to house CJYE and ethnic CJMR (1320 Mississauga),
Znaimer says the station's staff will be retained as he moves
it into a new downtown Toronto home, next to CFMZ. And the self-proclaimed
"Canadian broadcast icon" says the AM and FM stations
will have separate management teams - and that the standards
programming on CHWO will be retained. (No purchase price has
been announced.)
Can Znaimer do what so many broadcasters on the U.S. side
of the border haven't been able to pull off - keeping two formats
aimed at mostly older audiences alive and well in a major market?
If there's one thing Canadian broadcasters have learned, it's
that you never bet against Moses Znaimer. Stay tuned...
In other Canadian news, CFFX-FM (104.3 Kingston) has begun
testing, and we're hearing its classic country music all the
way across the lake here in Rochester. When the testing is done,
CFFX-FM will take over the oldies format now on CFFX (960 Kingston),
which will go silent.
Not far away in Peterborough, religious CKKK (90.5) has gone
temporarily silent, citing signal problems with the jury-rigged
transmitter and antenna that were used to move it off 99.5 over
the summer, allowing CKPT (1420) to move to FM on 99.3. "KAOS
Radio" is still streaming on the web, and planning to be
back on the air at 90.5 sometime soon.
|
From
the NERW Archives
(Yup, we've been doing this a long time now, and
so we're digging back into the vaults for a look at what NERW
was covering one, five and ten years ago this week, or thereabouts
- the column appeared on an erratic schedule in its earliest
years as "New England Radio Watch," and didn't go to
a regular weekly schedule until 1997. Thanks to LARadio.com
for the idea - and thanks to you, our readers, for the support
that's made all these years of NERW possible!)
September 25, 2006 -
- SEASIDE, Oregon - NERW's on the other side of the country
this week, attending the International Radio Club of America
convention in this most scenic resort town, and we bet some of
the folks at NEW YORK's WOR (710) might like to be this far from
home at the moment too, after a breakdown in communications led
the heavily-promoted demolition of the station's old three-tower
antenna array to be indefinitely postponed at the very last minute.
- We were there last Wednesday (Sept. 20), having flown down
for the day, and we've never seen so many people so excited to
watch a bunch of towers fall down. WOR threw a party for its
clients at its new transmitter site, about half a mile north
of the old site, and many engineers from the city's other stations
showed up to see the action as well, as did plenty of TV and
newspaper reporters from New York City and north Jersey. Right
up to the scheduled demolition time at 10 AM, excitement at the
site was running high. Cameras were trained on the old 689-foot
towers, waiting for the moment when the tower crews would cut
one side of guy wires on each towers, letting the guys on the
other two sides pull the towers down in a matter of seconds.
- Then...nothing happened. After about an hour of rumors, word
emerged that the Lyndhurst police department had called a halt
to the demolition - and after another half-hour, Lyndhurst police
chief James O'Connor appeared at the new site (in neighboring
Rutherford, N.J.) to tell the gathered reporters why he'd stopped
the demolition. O'Connor says he only learned about the demolition
at 8:30 that morning, and he was worried about what would happen
when drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike (which runs alongside
the old site, in full view of both the towers and the Manhattan
skyline to the east) suddenly saw the WOR towers come tumbling
down.
- WOR engineering director Tom Ray, who'd hoped that the demolition
would provide a celebratory cap to the years of work that have
gone into the station's relocation, says the responsibility for
notifying O'Connor and other public safety officials rested with
"another party." (NERW believes that other party would
be the developers behind Encap, the huge golf resort project
that will eventually use the old WOR site.)
- Over at the New York Post, radio columnist John Mainelli
was abruptly fired late last week, with Howard Stern taking on-air
credit for the action. At issue, apparently, is an article Mainelli
wrote that passed along the rumor that Stern's show might return
to terrestrial radio via syndication on Citadel stations. Mainelli
says (in an appearance on the Opie & Anthony show Friday
morning) that Mainelli also underestimated Stern's subscriber
base on Sirius - and that Stern complained to Post management
that Mainelli was continuing his consulting business while writing
for the paper. (As a well-known former New York PD, Mainelli's
consulting work was hardly a secret to anyone in the city, as
far as we know.) Mainelli says the Post gave him an ultimatum
- stop consulting or stop writing for the paper. "I guess
I'm fired," he told Opie & Anthony.
September 23, 2002 -
- Southeastern CONNECTICUT (and a fair chunk of southern RHODE
ISLAND as well) heard a format flip last Thursday (Sept. 19),
as the modern AC sounds of WKCD (107.7 Pawcatuck) gave way to
a harder-edged rhythmic CHR sound on "Jammin' 107.7."
The station is changing hands from AAA Entertainment to John
J. Fuller's Red Wolf Broadcasting, which also has AC WBMW (106.5
Ledyard CT) and country WJJF (1180 Hope Valley RI) in the neighborhood;
Fuller is paying $3.75 million for WKCD, and he's already running
it under an LMA that started a few weeks ago. Expect more news
on jocks and management from WKCD, soon...
- Crossing the sound to NEW YORK, Jay Diamond's time at new
talker WLIE (540 Islip) proved to be short, indeed; the former
WOR talk host left his weekend slot there (of his own volition,
he says) after just a couple of weeks.
- There's a new AM station about to hit the air in the Mohawk
Valley: we've heard reports that Michael Sleezer's new WFNY (1440)
in Gloversville is testing; by next week, perhaps we'll even
have a format to tell you about!
- One PENNSYLVANIA format change to report, and it's a small
one: WMAJ (1450 State College) dropped standards for ESPN sports,
formerly heard in that sports-crazy market on weekends via crosstown
WRSC (1390)/WBLF (970 Bellefonte).
- It looks as though one of NERW's favorite NEW JERSEY AMs
will be changing format soon: we told you a few months back that
Herbert Michaels, owner of WKMB (1070 Stirling) had died, and
now we can tell you that his estate and K&M Broadcasters
are selling the station to King's Temple Ministries, Inc. for
a reported $400,000.
- The little 250-watt daytimer (are there any "big"
250-watt daytimers?) was a last bastion of country music in central
Jersey, and still sounded like something out of the mid-70s the
last time we listened a few months back. We're expecting to hear
religion next time...
September 25, 1997-
- We'll begin this week with the first format change of the
new era at American Radio Systems. While it's almost certainly
unrelated to the pending sale to CBS, the modern AC format at
WSRI (96.7) in Rochester, NEW HAMPSHIRE came to an end earlier
this week. In its place has been a series of one-day simulcasts
of other ARS stations from the Seacoast and Boston markets (so
far, WEEI, WAAF, and WERZ have been heard there) with promises
of a brand-new format Monday morning (September 29) at 10am.
We'll let you know what shows up on 96.7 when the dust settles.
- Speaking of settling dust, we now know a bit more about the
CBS/ARS deal announced last Friday. CBS will pay $1.6 billion
in cash, while assuming another $1 billion in ARS debt, for ARS's
radio stations. Not included in the deal is the American Tower
Systems subsidiary, which stays with Steve Dodge. ATS has been
growing at an impressive rate in the last few years, and with
the need for HDTV antenna space threatening to push many FM stations
off their current towers, ATS is well positioned to pick up a
lot of business in the near future. A Boston Globe article about
HDTV last Sunday noted that WBZ-TV is planning to raise its Needham
tower several hundred feet to add room for HDTV antennas for
WBZ-TV, WGBH-TV, WGBX, and WCVB. It also noted that WHDH-TV has
plenty of room on its tower -- a consequence of channel 7's long-standing
policy not to rent tower space to anyone.
- Meantime, staffers at ARS stations across the region are
waiting anxiously to see what the sale will mean for them. The
voicemail of one ARS program director this week announced that
his department has been renamed "Eye on Programming!"
- Could a format change be in the works at Buffalo's WWKB (1520)?
The shell of the once-great WKBW is reportedly about to dump
its Real Country satellite format in favor of sports. The Buffalo
News' Alan Pergament reports the format would include The Fabulous
Sports Babe from 10-1 and Jim Rome from 1-4, with One-on-One
Sports most of the rest of the day. Rome and the Babe were formerly
heard on sister Sinclair outlet WGR (550). Meanwhile, former
'KB jock Tom Shannon is coming back to Buffalo, joining oldies
WHTT-FM (104.1) beginning October 6 for afternoon drive. This
is Shannon's second return to the market following a comeback
at 'KB in the 80s. He had been working in cable TV in Tennessee.
Afternoon jock Craig Matthews moves to evenings at Oldies 104,
displacing Ray Geska, who becomes a morning show producer for
Danny Neaverth.
You
can sponsor this weekly feature! Click here for information! |
NorthEast Radio Watch is made possible by the generous
contributions of our regular readers. If you enjoy NERW, please
click here to
learn how you can help make continued publication possible. NERW
is copyright
2007 by Scott Fybush. |
