November 19, 2007
Philly's Legendary Hy Lit Dies
TOWER SITE CALENDAR 2008 - NOW AVAILABLE!!!
*One of the best-loved voices in PENNSYLVANIA
radio history has been silenced.
Hy Lit died Saturday, almost two weeks after undergoing what
was supposed to have been routine knee surgery for an injury
he suffered when he fell Nov. 4, followed by what his son Sam
tells the Philadelphia Inquirer was a series of "bizarre
complications."
 Lit
was one of Philadelphia's first rock-and-roll DJs, starting his
career at age 20 in 1955 at WHAT (1340), where he quickly made
a name for himself before moving first to NBC-owned WRCV (1060)
and then, by late 1957, to top-40 giant WIBG (990), where his
achievements included introducing the city to the Rolling Stones
and the Beatles - and an amazing 73 rating for his evening show,
likely an all-time ratings record for any DJ. Lit quickly became
a TV star as well, hosting a dance show on WKBS-TV (Channel 48)
that was syndicated to other Kaiser TV stations around the country.
In 1968, Lit made a brief shift to the world of "underground"
FM radio, helping to launch a rock format on WDAS-FM (105.3)
before returning to WIBG in 1969. Later in the seventies, Lit
would work at WIFI (92.5), then at WPGR (1540) and WSNI (104.5)
in the eighties.
The next phase of Lit's long career in Philly radio began
in 1989, when he joined CBS' WOGL-FM (98.1) and became the first
voice heard on WOGL (1210) the next year. Lit remained with WOGL-FM
until 2005, when he retired from the station as part of a settlement
of an age-discrimination lawsuit against CBS.
Even after a half-century on the air, though, Lit remained
active in the business, launching a streaming radio station at
HyLitRadio.com that's
still active under Sam Lit's leadership.
Lit was an early inductee into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's
Hall of Fame, among many honors. He was 73.
|
IT'S 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
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This year's edition is a particularly
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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
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of printing, you know they've both gone up.
Even so, we still think this
year's edition is a bargain - just $18 with shipping and
handling included.
Or better yet, beat our move
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help keep NERW right here on the web, as we head into our fourteenth
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So click
right here and you can be one of the first to have
your very own Tower Site Calendar 2008! (And thank you!)
The 2008 Tower
Site Calendar is dedicated to the memory of Robert Eiselen (1934-2007),
whose digital imaging skills made even a bunch of pictures of
radio towers look almost like art. His contributions were essential
to the calendar's evolution from 2003 to the current edition,
and he will be missed dearly. |
*In other Keystone State news...
 Few
PDs are as closely identified with a cluster as Jim Rising was
with Entercom's Wilkes-Barre/Scranton station group - he was
there for the sign-on of WKRZ (98.5 Wilkes-Barre) three decades
ago, and he rose (no pun intended) to become OM of that station,
as well as market leader WGGY, news-talk WILK and AAA WDMT (102.3
Pittston), where he also served as PD. Rising resigned from the
cluster last Monday, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors
(and not only because his page of links at the WDMT website included
one to this page, in which he wrote "Scott has a great grip
on this business and is usually right." Thanks, Jim...)
In Philadelphia, WPHT (1210) now has a permanent host for
its 6-9 PM slot, as Anthony "Dr. Mazz" Mazzarelli moves
from fill-in to full-time on the show now known as "1210
Tonight." (The show is heard only from Monday through Thursday;
Friday night continues to belong to Sid Mark and his Sinatra
show.)
Wendy Rollins joins Clear Channel's WRFF (104.5 Philadelphia)
as assistant PD; the former WAVF (96.1 Hanahan/Charleston SC)
jock will also take an airshift at "Radio 104" at some
point.
Over at Radio One's WPHI (100.3 Media), the newly-syndicated
"Miss Jones" morning show (based at WQHT in New York)
hits the airwaves next Monday, with "100.3 the Beat"
as its first affiliate. (Jones spent some time working locally
at WPHI earlier in the decade.)
In Pittsburgh, the reborn "B94" has a PD, as Ryan
Mill takes the reins at CBS Radio's WTZN (93.7). Mill had been
assistant PD at the station's previous "Zone" talk
format; for his first hire as PD, he's brought in "Flick"
from WAKZ (95.9 Sharpsville/Youngstown OH) to do nights.
Another new station in northwestern Pennsylvania has new calls:
mark down WNAE-FM as the identity for Iorio Broadcasting's new
102.7 signal in Clarendon, not far from WNAE (1310) in Warren.
And Cumulus has been granted a CP to move WGLD (1440 Red Lion)
from its current temporary antenna setup to a diplex on pne of
the towers of WSBA (910 York); it'll change city of license to
Manchester Township, reducing power from 1000 watts daytime to
730 watts daytime, with 53 watts at night.
*The week's other big pair of stories came
out of the talk radio arena in MASSACHUSETTS, where the
Howie Carr/WRKO/WTKK saga came to an end (for now, anyway) with
the announcement on Thursday that Carr was ending his fight to
break out of his contract with Entercom's WRKO and would be back
on the air there the following afternoon.
 And
indeed, when 3 o'clock rolled around on Friday afternoon, there
was Howie, more or less back in his usual form, albeit sounding
somewhat constrained by management as to how much he could say
about his absence from the airwaves.
As it turned out, the final piece of the puzzle snapped into
place rather neatly: with Carr blocked from jumping over to its
morning-drive slot, Greater Media's WTKK (96.9) went right back
to that slot's previous occupant, announcing on Friday that it
had signed up as the first affiliate of Don Imus' new morning
show, syndicated out of Citadel's WABC (770 New York). While
WABC had initially said that syndication of Imus wouldn't begin
until a month or so after his Dec. 3 relaunch in New York, WTKK
says it will be on board promptly at 6 AM that day.
So what have we learned from the last few months? It appears
that even if Carr didn't get what he really wanted - WTKK's big
FM signal, free from Red Sox preemptions and from having to share
a signal with Tom Finneran's stillborn morning show - he still
won something in the end, that being a bump in his salary. WRKO
gets to breath a partial sigh of relief, having managed to hold
on to its star personality even as many of its other dayparts
are sagging. (Did we mention the morning show yet?) Over at WTKK,
we've got to think that all those weeks of Carr-lawsuit headlines
at least yielded some decent publicity, and there's sure to be
a pretty healthy curiosity bump yet to come when Imus comes back
to its airwaves. (Or perhaps it'll be Massachusetts governor
Deval Patrick doing mornings; over the weekend, his picture showed
up in place of Imus' all over the WTKK website, for some strange
reason...)
In the long run, though, it's hard (at least from where we
sit) to get very excited about the state of Boston talk radio,
post-Carr squabble. A morning battle between Carr on WTKK and
Finneran on WRKO would have sparked some excitement, and might
have inspired Carr to a fresher approach, while Carr's departure
from WRKO would have forced that station to rethink its afternoon
lineup, which might have brought some new talent to the city's
talk scene. (Or it might have meant a permanent afternoon berth
for Todd Feinburg, given the way things were going.)
Will Carr last until the 2012 end of his new WRKO contract?
Will he manage to hang on to his New England affiliate base?
Stay tuned...
Over at WBUR-FM (90.9 Boston), Tom Ashbrook won't be heard
again as host of "On Point" until after the new year.
He underwent heart surgery next week, and will be spending the
next few weeks recuperating while guest hosts fill in for him
on the radio show.
Another familiar public radio voice is back after a hiatus:
Christopher Lydon's "Open
Source" has returned, albeit as a podcast with no broadcast
component, at least for now. The show has a new home base and
funding source, as well: it's coming out of the Watson Institute
at Brown University.
And Christmas came early to Boston - last Monday at about
9 AM, to be precise, when both CBS Radio's WODS (103.3 Boston)
and Greater Media's WROR (105.7 Framingham) made the flip to
non-stop holiday tunes. WODS is a regular holiday-time convert
to the seasonal playlist, but this is the first time WROR's made
the flip. (Sister station WMJX tried it for one year a while
back.)
Over on the TV side of things, the Springfield market is finally
getting its own Fox affiliate, but not the way we'd thought it
was going to happen. LIN's WWLP-TV (Channel 22) added sister
station WFXQ-CA (Channel 28) last year, and both the call letters
and insider buzz strongly hinted that the low-power signal (presently
a simulcast of WWLP's NBC programming) would eventually become
the market's Fox outlet.
 But
then Gormally Broadcasting bought ABC affiliate WGGB (Channel
40) from Sinclair and entered into talks for a Fox affiliation
- and late last week, owner John Gormally announced that he'll
be launching "Fox 55" on a subchannel of WGGB-DT (yes,
Channel 55) by the end of the year.
The new Fox outlet will replace Hartford's WTIC-TV (Channel
61) on cable systems in Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin counties,
and it will have the Springfield market's first 10 PM newscast,
produced by the WGGB news staff. (That staff shrunk by a few
people last week; Gormally says the station was slightly overstaffed
when he took over, which seems an odd claim for a former Sinclair
outlet, and he's not saying exactly how many pink slips he handed
out in the last few days.)
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*Is there anything in radio more depressing
than pre-holiday budget cuts? Probably not - especially the one
last week that cost a veteran NEW YORK air talent his
longtime job. Al Bernstein was not just part of the inaugural
WLTW (106.7) airstaff back in 1984; he'd spent several years
at the station's predecessor, WKHK, and a decade before that
had started his career on 106.7's original occupant, WRVR. Along
the way, Bernstein also spent time at WQIV (104.3), WBLS (107.5),
WYNY (97.1) and WNEW-FM (102.7) - and then, of course, 23 years
as the late-morning host on Lite.
 Now
he's out, 33 years almost to the day since his WQIV debut, following
fellow WLTW veterans Bill Buchner, Stephen Roy and J.J. Kennedy,
and leaving Valerie Smaldone as the sole survivor among WLTW's
charter airstaff. Who'll snap up Bernstein's versatile talents?
One more note from Clear Channel's New York cluster: with
the studio move downtown to 33 Avenue of the Americas delayed,
WAXQ (104.3) had to go somewhere when its lease at 1180 Avenue
of the Americas ended - so it's operating, temporarily, out of
the WWPR facility a couple of blocks away at 1120 Avenue of -
can we just call it "Sixth Avenue," already? WAXQ and
its predecessor, WNCN, had occupied the facility at 1180 since
1975, making it one of the oldest radio studios in continuous
use in New York City. (The Power 105 studios are a busy place
in morning drive, we hear, with Ed Lover doing his WWPR show
out of the main studio, Whoopi Goldberg doing her syndicated/WKTU
show out of her own studio down the hall, and now WAXQ's Jim
Kerr in the back studio where Q is temporarily located...)
Another New York Bernstein is out of a job this week, too;
veteran program director David Bernstein, whose resume includes
stints at WOR (as well as Boston's WBZ, Hartford's WTIC and Providence's
WPRO) has parted ways with Air America Radio, where he'd been
vice president of programming for about eight months.
Down the dial, we're wondering what Mega Media was thinking
when it put out a press release last week announcing that it's
signed a five-year lease to continue programming in Russian on
Island Broadcasting's WNYZ. That's "WNYZ-LP," as in
the low-power TV signal licensed to operate on channel 6, and
while we 've previously noted the Russian programming on the
station's audio carrier at 87.76 MHz, we're still trying to puzzle
out the press release's claim that the new lease between Mega
and Island is for operation at "87.88 MHz." While that
fits neatly with the station's self-promotion as "FM 87.9,"
it doesn't seem to square neatly with any sort of licensed operation,
and neither do the reports of strong signals everywhere from
southern Connecticut well into central New Jersey. We'll be following
this one closely...
Out on Long Island, WALK-FM (97.5 Patchogue) is mourning the
death on Saturday of longtime weekender JD Howard, who'd been
a fixture on the station's Saturday afternoon shift (and on WBZO
103.1 before that.) Howard had been battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
More schedule shuffles in Buffalo: Joe Siragusa gives up most
of his nighttime airshift at Citadel's WHTT (104.1), where a
localized version of John Tesh's syndicated show started running
last Monday from 8 PM until midnight. Siragusa is still heard
7-8 PM with the "Ulitimate 80s" show on "Mix 104.1."
And the Buffalo Bisons will be playing at a new spot on the dial
next year: they've signed a three-year deal to return to the
big signal of WWKB (1520 Buffalo) after a year away at WECK (1230
Cheektowaga).
Add another station to the all-Christmas list: in the Binghamton
market, WMXW (103.3 Vestal) made the flip Nov. 9. Here in Rochester
- well, Canandaigua, anyway - Clear Channel's WVOR (Sunny 102.3)
made the flip over the weekend, while streaming listeners found
channels of holiday music available on all of the company's local
station websites.
The pre-holiday layoffs hit in southeastern
CONNECTICUT on Friday, as morning man Shawn Murphy and
PD Kevin Palana lost their jobs at Citadel's WQGN (105.5 Groton).
The Dallas-based syndicated Kidd Kraddick show is now running
in Q105's morning slot.
On the TV front, it's looking increasingly likely that Tribune
will have to sell either the Hartford Courant or its TV
stations in the market, Fox affiliate WTIC-TV (Channel 61) and
CW affiliate WTXX (Channel 20), when the FCC finalizes its new
crossownership rules. Tribune has been operating under a series
of waivers to those rules, but the likeliest scenario from the
FCC would allow newspaper-TV crossownership only in the top 20
markets (which Hartford misses by seven notches) and only involving
TV stations that are not among the top four in the market (which
would still force a sale of WTIC-TV, though not of WTXX.)
While the dust settles in that proceeding, WTIC-TV is getting
ready to launch a morning newscast, set to debut sometime in
the spring. No anchors or timeslot have yet been announced for
the new broadcast, which would join WTIC's existing 10 PM newscast.
And a correction - as several readers pointed out, the New
Britain Avenue studios that WVIT (Channel 30) has occupied for
decades are not, in fact, the station's original studios - it
went on the air as WKNB-TV in 1953 from temporary studios in
a second-floor office above a downtown New Britain storefront
before moving to its current home a few months later.
In VERMONT, our condolences go out
to everyone at WLFE (102.3 St. Albans), where morning man G.G.
Griggs was killed Tuesday night (Nov. 13) in a car crash. Griggs
had been with WLFE for four years, and had been doing mornings
for about one year. Veteran Burlington jock Louie Manno is filling
in on the morning shift for now.
 *There's
a rare cross-border format move taking place across the mouth
of the St. Lawrence River, as the "Kix" country format
migrates from US-licensed WBDR (102.7 Cape Vincent) to one of
the newest FM signals over in CANADA. John Wright, who
owns "K-Rock" CIKR (105.7 Kingston), has been programming
WBDR from his Kingston studios under a local marketing agreement
with owner Clancy-Mance Communications, which hung on to WBDR
even as it sold the rest of its Watertown/Ogdensburg cluster.
Now Wright has a second signal on the Canadian side of the
border, the new CKXC (93.5 Kingston) - and that new 93.5 signal
is now "93.5 Kix FM," simulcasting the country format
with 102.7.
It's not yet clear whether 102.7 will end up changing formats
(could this explain why it briefly applied for, but then never
used, the calls WXKK a year ago?), or whether we'll see a return
to the split simulcast that WBDR was using a few years back when
it and WBDI (106.7 Copenhagen) were simulcasting top 40 as "The
Border," with one signal carrying spots aimed at Canadian
listeners and the other carrying a U.S. spot load. Perhaps the
Canadian flag in the 93.5 logo is a clue - or maybe we're reading
way too much into this!
Meanwhile on the Kingston dial, it looks like CKLC-FM (98.9
Kingston) will officially launch today...stay tuned for the format
choice there.
Stay tuned, too, for our in-depth look at the hundreds of
new noncommercial FM applications filed all over the region in
the recent FCC window - we'll have that for you next week, we
promise. In the meantime, a happy and healthy Thanksgiving (to
our US readers, anyway), and please remember: turkeys cannot
fly.
|
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!)
November 20, 2006 -
- It's a big issue this week, full of news that we'd, frankly,
much rather not be reporting. Before we get to our usual state-by-state
roundup, we'll bring you up to speed on the week's three huge
stories: the axing of the entire WRKO news department in Boston,
the impending sale of Clear Channel (and spinoffs of many of
its divisions in the region), and the latest in the ongoing cuts
at Clear Channel's stations around the area.
- First, the bad news about WRKO news: on Thursday afternoon,
the seven staffers who made up the Entercom talk station's newsroom
were called into the offices of station management and informed,
one by one, that WRKO was moving in a different direction, replacing
its local news staff with reports from Metro Networks and increasing
the amount of Fox News Radio content being used on the air. The
moment must have felt like deja vu for several of the WRKO staffers:
back in 1995, previous owner American Radio Systems dismissed
most of the entire news staff, including news director Rod Fritz,
and contracted with Metro to provide newscasts. At the time,
Metro hired some of the WRKO news talent (including Fritz and
Pat Carroll, now at WCBS in New York), and WRKO kept a handful
of its own newspeople, including veteran anchor Listo Fisher.
- This time, it's total - Fritz and Fisher are both out of
work, as are Paul Tuthill (who joined WRKO from Worcester's WTAG
when WRKO reversed course in 1999 and rebuilt its newsroom),
Mary Blake, Sharon Smith, Marga Bessette and Deb Daigle. WRKO
says it's a cost-cutting measure, "primarily based on our
mission to build upon the core identity of WRKO-AM." The
station's statement continues: "It is a talk station, and
we need to put all of our resources into improving our talk format."
(We'd note the big bill coming due for WRKO's expensive new Red
Sox deal, too.)
- The big national trade publications are already covering
this story's national implications in far more detail than we
can, so we'll limit ourselves to the regional implications of
the spinoffs that Clear Channel announced Thursday at the same
time it revealed its plan to go private in a buyout valued at
more than $26 billion. Clear Channel says it will make the spins
regardless of whether the privatization takes place, divesting
itself of 448 radio stations in many of its sub-100 markets,
as well as its entire Clear Channel Television division.
- In MASSACHUSETTS, Charles River Broadcasting officially closed
on its sale of WCRB (102.5 Waltham) on Wednesday, handing the
keys off to Greater Media, which promptly closed on its deal
to swap WCRB's intellectual property and the signal of WKLB (99.5
Lowell) to Nassau. The move of WCRB's classical format to 99.5
(and WKLB's country to 102.5) won't take place until December
1. Boston Radio Watch reports that four WCRB staffers won't make
the move: mid-day announcer Don Spencer, creative services director/announcer
Rob Schuller, continuity manager/announcer Larry King and listener
services director Roberta Siegel.
- The big news from eastern PENNSYLVANIA was the debut of the
reborn WJJZ (97.5 Burlington NJ) Friday evening at 6, following
two days during which the former WTHK was simulcasting its new
Greater Media sister station, classic rock WMGK (102.9 Philadelphia).
The new WJJZ signed on with PD Michael Tozzi playing Grover Washington,
Jr.'s "Keep the Dream Alive," followed by several hours
with Tozzi live at the board. He'll take the 3-7 PM slot beginning
this week, followed by Dave Koz's syndicated show. No morning
or evening show has been named yet. Music director Margo Marano
will voicetrack overnights.
November 18, 2002 -
- The sale of the CBS affiliate in Erie, PENNSYLVANIA has some
citizens worried that their city will soon be served by only
two TV news operations -- and it appears their concerns aren't
far off the mark. WSEE-TV (Channel 35) recently changed hands,
becoming the first property of Initial Broadcasting of Pennsylvania,
a company controlled by Kevin Lilly, whose father, George, controls
SJL Communications, which owns Erie's NBC affiliate, WICU (Channel
12). And later this week, Initial will lay off 18 of WSEE's 66
staffers, including weekend sports guy Red Hughes and weekend
weathercaster Tina Zboch. (Weekend news anchor Kara Calabrese
is leaving of her own volition.) Also leaving is 28-year WSEE
veteran Carol Pella, who tells the Erie Times-News that she was
offered a management position but turned it down.
- WSEE wants to enter into a joint operating agreement with
WICU, which will handle some of the station's back-office and
master-control duties. Under the JOA, the stations' news operations
would remain separate, with about 25 to 30 employees remaining
at WSEE to handle those duties. WSEE is also applying to replace
its current STL tower at its Peach Street studios with a taller
tower which would also carry microwave links to the WICU studio
building.
- On the other side of the Keystone State, the ever-impatient
Citadel cluster in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton has struck again, this
time cancelling all local talk at WARM (590 Scranton), which
just returned from oldies to news-talk this past April. WARM's
local morning show employed host Rob Neyhard, newscaster Paula
Deignan and reporter Bobby Day; producer Sam Liguori was also
out the door when the show was cancelled last Friday. WARM remains
with the talk format, albeit all off the satellite; we note as
well that the 590warm.com domain, which is still linked even
from Citadel's corporate Web site, apparently expired and was
registered by someone with no connection with the station. It's
a sad story for a station that once owned the market....
- We'll start our NEW YORK news down in the big city, where
your intrepid editor spent most of last week (which is why there
was no issue last Monday) visiting transmitter sites and working
on an upcoming history of New York City FM radio. What's in the
headlines down there? We'll start with a new transmitter site
for public radio WNYC-FM (93.9), which will be on the air from
the Empire State Building any day now (if it hasn't happened
already), now that the work has been done to inject its signal
into the combiner that feeds the ERI master antenna high on the
Empire mast. WNYC had been using the Four Times Square tower
as an interim site after losing its transmission facilities at
the World Trade Center; additional work yet to come at Empire
will add WPAT-FM (93.1) to the ERI master, as well as building
a second combiner that can be used to keep the ERI antenna on
the air while work is done on the main combiner.
- What's next for poor bedraggled talker WNEW (102.7), which
did at least get a bit of publicity when it added a simulcast
of David Letterman's TV show last week? Owner Infinity brought
Eric Logan in from Chicago, where he was operations manager of
country WUSN (99.5), to be VP/programming for its New York stations,
which immediately prompted a new round of speculation that 102.7
will be playing country soon.
- On the AM dial, there's a new morning show on WWRL (1600
New York), with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (author of Kosher Sex and
advisor to Michael Jackson -- we couldn't make this stuff up
if we tried) and former Village Voice writer Peter Noel. Yes,
we airchecked it; we'll aircheck anything, you know....
- We heard digital AM radio for the first time, thanks to Tom
Ray at WOR (710); while the circumstances weren't the best (a
little speaker in a noisy control room), we can say that it does
sound pretty good on the one existing receiver in New York City
(WOR expects to get more in the next few months), and that the
sideband hash, while certainly present, wasn't quite as odious
as we'd expected (we could still hear WADS on 690 from Connecticut
while driving in Rockland County, 60 or so miles away, and a
trip down to Trenton found WPHE on 690 from Phoenixville, PA
quite audible without WOR interference.)
- Over in Syracuse, WTVH (Channel 5) has a new logo, and a
redesigned Web site to match. The honor of "first digital
TV signal in Syracuse," meanwhile, goes to Fox affiliate
WSYT (Channel 68), which signed on with its DTV signal as we
were passing through on Wednesday, Nov. 6. WSYT is using just
4 kW from its tower in Otisco for now; it hopes to move the channel
19 DTV signal to the new WSTM tower at Sentinel Heights eventually
(though we hear that tower's completion has been delayed by a
problem with the ice bridge, which apparently didn't go in straight....)
November 20, 1997-
- The last daytime-only music station in the Boston market
could soon be operating 24 hours a day. WILD (1090) is expected
to make an announcement next Tuesday that it's reached a deal
with noncomm WUMB (91.9) at UMass/Boston to share programming.
The nature of the deal remains a closely guarded secret, but
it's rumored to involve the possible purchase of full-time signal
WNFT (1150) from CBS, which must shed several of the stations
it's buying from American Radio Systems (a group that includes
WNFT).
- NERW speculates a deal like this: The UMass system gets WNFT
as a tax-exempt donation from CBS/ARS. UMass allows WILD to program
WNFT with WILD's urban format, in exchange for a portion of the
advertising revenues from 1150. WILD owner Nash Communications
then either leases out time on the 1090 daytimer, or sells it
for stick value. UMass gets a new revenue source for WUMB, in
addition to the public relations value of getting WILD its long-desired
night signal. WILD is also making noises about taking its programming
to FM; something the locally-owned urban station has long wanted
to do, but been unable to afford. (2007
note: The rumored deal never happened, and WILD remains a daytimer
on 1090.)
- In other news around MASSACHUSETTS: Oldies listeners in Boston
won't have "Austin of Boston" to wake up with any more.
The veteran WODS (103.3) jock has reportedly rejected a move
to the night shift, and will leave the CBS-owned station when
his contract is up.
- WBZ (1030) morning anchor Gary LaPierre reached out to a
national audience last week, guest hosting Paul Harvey News and
Comment on ABC. It's been more than a year since LaPierre's last
guest shot on the Harvey show.
- In MAINE, Harpswell religious station WMSJ is just a few
days away from changing frequencies. "Joy 91.9" will
become "Joy 89.3" on December 1, changing city of license
to Freeport in the process. The 91.9 Harpswell facility is up
for sale; WMSJ expects to put a better signal into Portland on
its new channel.
- We know more about Allan Weiner's shortwave application,
first mentioned in NERW several weeks ago. Weiner wants to put
his station on Britton Road in Monticello, a stone's throw from
the Canadian border -- and also the site of WREM (710), a station
he owned back when it was WOZW. It will be interesting to see
how the FCC handles Weiner, given his long history of unlicensed
operation (including one pirate that actually used the WOZW transmitter
site).
- WMMM (1260) in Westport, CONNECTICUT will soon be back on
the air. The station was donated to Sacred Heart University in
September, and has been dark ever since. WMMM was conducting
engineering tests on Tuesday, and is expected to be back for
good shortly.
- Hartford jock Michael Picozzi is coming back to the airwaves
after losing his job at WHCN (105.9); he'll join soon-to-be-Marlin-owned
WCCC FM-AM (106.9 Hartford/1290 West Hartford) for a 3-7 PM shift
as the "Picozzi and Slave Boy" show.
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