September 13, 2010

More Flips on the Jersey Shore

• MAINE
• NEW HAMPSHIRE
• MASSACHUSETTS
• VERMONT
• RHODE ISLAND
• CONNECTICUT
• NEW YORK
• NEW JERSEY
• PENNSYLVANIA
• CANADA
• CLASSIFIEDS
• FROM THE ARCHIVES

*Radio listeners in Monmouth and Ocean counties on the NEW JERSEY shore might be forgiven if they're a little confused by the end of this week. It was back in 2005 when Press Communications killed off the top-40 "B98.5" format on WBBO (98.5 Ocean Acres), turning the station first into a simulcast of modern rock WHTG-FM (106.3 Eatontown) and eventually taking it country as WKMK, "Thunder Country," after flipping WHTG-FM to top 40 as "Hits 106" and adding a new simulcast on 106.5 in Ocean County, a station now known as WBBO. (Even loyal NERW readers can be forgiven for getting a little confused by now...)

On Wednesday, Press will hit a big cosmic "undo" button on several of those moves. The Ocean County 98.5 signal will return to top 40 as "B98.5," and we'd expect the WBBO calls to move back there at some point soon, too. And in exchange, "Hit 106" will be replaced on both signals (106.3 in Monmouth and 106.5 in Ocean) by "Thunder Country."

The move will fill a format void in Monmouth, which has been without a country station since the demise of the old "Y107" quadcast in 2002; it's likely that the station will find country fans elsewhere on the southern side of the New York metro as well, given the absence of the format in the core of the market.

Unfortunately, the return of B98.5 comes without most of its personalities, since Press let much of the "Hits 106" airstaff go last week. Among the casualties were Matt Knight, who started out 11 years ago at the old B and eventually became PD/afternoons at "Hit 106," and night guy Shawn Palmer.

The 98.5/106.3 flip is set for 3 PM on Wednesday.

*The New Jersey Radio Museum, which continues to build out its new headquarters in Dover, has named a "South Jersey Vice President," and it's none other than "Big Jay" Sorensen, whose radio career has included notable stops at WNBC and more recently at WJRZ (100.1 Manahawkin), and who's currently heard on fill-in duty at WCBS-FM.

*Our colleagues over at Ohio Radio Watch lovingly called it the "Glunt Radio Empire" - but now the last vestiges of the small radio group assembled by the late Youngstown, Ohio steel magnate Harold Glunt have been dispersed to new owners. We told you last week about Chris Lash's plans for Glunt's two Ohio signals, WRTK (1540 Niles) and WANR (1570 Warren) - and now Glunt's heirs have sold his three stations just across the state line in PENNSYLVANIA.

EMF Broadcasting, the nation's most active station buyer, is paying $225,000 for those stations: WEXC (107.1 Greenville), WGRP (940 Greenville) and WLOA (1470 Farrell). EMF is not known as an AM operator, and broker Ray Rosenblum, who arranged the deal, says those AMs will go to another buyer once the transfer closes. WEXC, meanwhile, had already flipped to EMF's "K-Love" contemporary Christian network Friday night, just hours after the sale was announced. (WGRP is also apparently simulcasting "K-Love" for now, at least temporarily.)

For EMF, the purchase extends the K-Love network north and west from what's already become a stronghold in Pittsburgh, where EMF is leasing WPKV (98.3 Duquesne); for now, K-Love has little presence to the north in Erie or to to the west in northeastern Ohio, though sister network Air 1 operates WCVJ (90.9) in Jefferson, Ohio, feeding translators in Akron and suburban Cleveland.

*Just down the road in Meadville, WGYY (100.3) has named an interim PD to fill the gap left behind by the death of Ron Smith, who was known as "James Pond" on the air at "Froggy." Bob Domingo moves down I-79 from Erie, where he had been PD for WTWF (93.9 Fairview).

In Phillipsburg, there's a happy ending to the Sheldon Sharpless story. After almost half a century on the air at (and a few years as owner of) WPHB (1260), Sharpless was ousted from the station's morning show back in June. That prompted an outpouring of community support for Sharpless, and as of last Tuesday morning he's back on the air at WPHB, just in time for his 75th birthday a few weeks from now.

Over in the Harrisburg-Lancaster area, Tom Taylor's Taylor on Radio-Info reports a bankruptcy auction for two AMs has ended with the creditor, WP Media Lending, taking control of both signals. WWII (720 Shiremanstown) had belonged to Hensley Broadcasting, and is still on the air with a religious format; WVZN (1580 Columbia) has been on and off the air in recent years, and is apparnetly silent again after being on with Spanish-language religion. It's now being offered for sale again through Ray Rosenblum in Pittsburgh.

And speaking of silent 1580s, WRDD (1580 Ebensburg) has told the FCC it's silent.

In Philadelphia, the FCC shot down a request from WNWR (1540) to deny a license to cover for the DTV operations of KYW-TV (Channel 3/RF 26) and WPVI-TV (Channel 6/RF 6). WNWR claimed that the new DTV tower that KYW and WPVI erected in 1998 caused distortion to the directional pattern from the AM 1540 site, just a few hundred yards away.

That argument might have held more water with the FCC if WNWR hadn't filed an application in the meantime (in 2003, to be exact) for a modification of its directional pattern - and if it hadn't certified, in its application for a license to cover that modification, that the directional array proofed out correctly.

The FCC did suggest that any additional tower construction at the crowded Roxborough tower farm might include a requirement that WNWR be relicensed under the "method of moments" system that replaces the traditional field proof with computer calculation of a station's directional pattern - and that anyone building a new tower might have to share the cost of that relicensing with WNWR.

*Between the Labor Day holiday and the somber 9/11 anniversary, it was a quiet week downstate in NEW YORK, leavened only slightly by the latest chapter in the increasingly tedious "where's Howard Stern going next" saga. (For those still paying attention, Stern's now hinting that he'll leave Sirius/XM when his contract is up at the end of this year, possibly moving his show to some sort of subscriber-based podcast format.)

Upstate, it was a little more exciting - at least at Citadel's Buffalo cluster on Thursday morning, where a four-alarm fire that destroyed a nearby warehouse forced the studios and offices of WGRF (96.9), WEDG (103.3) and WHTT (104.1) to be evacuated for several hours at the height of morning drive, running on automation until it was safe for staffers to return.

After more than 30 years with Buffalo's WBFO (88.7), Mark Wozniak is retiring, effective October 1 - but WBFO listeners will continue to hear Mark's familiar voice in the afternoon, hosting the local segments of "All Things Considered," since he'll continue in a part-time capacity with the station while shedding his traffic director duties.

Down the road in Rochester, WXXI (1370) has named a new local "All Things Considered" host. Taking the place of Rachel Ward (who's now the editor of the statewide "Innovation Trail" journalism project based at WXXI) and of your editor, who's been holding down the fort on an interim basis all summer, will be Hélène Biandudi. She comes to Rochester later this month from CBS News in New York, where she's been the executive assistant to the executive producer of "48 Hours." Biandudi is also the co-founder of the online news site Imprint-TV.com.

On TV, Rochester's WHAM-TV (Channel 13) launched local HD news a little early, debuting its new set and new logo with its Sunday night 6 PM news in a "soft launch" before the advertised start of HD news today.

WHAM's shift to HD is just the first of several changes in the Rochester TV news scene this week: tomorrow, WROC-TV (Channel 8) launches its new 4 PM newscast anchored by Matt Molloy.

*There was a time when the death of John Kluge would have been huge national media news - but if time has somewhat dimmed the fame of the station owner who was once the richest man in America, it's all the more reason to retell his remarkable story. Kluge was eight years old when he immigrated to the U.S. from Germany, and just 32 when he put his first radio station, WGAY (1050) in Silver Spring, Maryland on the air in 1946. Over the next decade, Kluge built up large cluster of medium-market stations (including WINE/WINE-FM in Buffalo, ancestors of today's WUFO and WEDG) - but his meteoric rise began in the late fifties with the purchase of the Metropolitan Broadcasting company, made up of the remains of the DuMont TV empire, WABD (Channel 5) in New York and WTTG (Channel 5) in Washington.

WABD was soon renamed WNEW-TV as Kluge paired it with WNEW (1130) and the new WNEW-FM (102.7), and the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company became Metromedia, quickly rising to the top echelon of American broadcasters.

Kluge added more independent TV stations to his roster, including Chicago's WFLD (Channel 32) and Los Angeles' KTTV (Channel 11), bringing a new era of professionalism and profitability to the world of independent TV. It was Metromedia that introduced the full-fledged 10 PM newscast (first at WTTG, and soon afterward at WNEW), and Metromedia's TV production arm became a major force in that side of the business as well.

Kluge also kept trading up his radio holdings until he'd built one of the most imposing radio groups in America. In addition to WNEW and WNEW-FM in New York, Kluge's Northeast roster included WIP and WIP-FM in Philadelphia. An early proponent of freeform FM, Kluge's stations were dominant forces in that new format in the late sixties and seventies - not just WNEW-FM and what soon became WMMR ("MetroMedia Radio") in Philadelphia, but also influential West Coast stations such as KSAN in San Francisco and KMET in Los Angeles.

In one of Kluge's last big TV acquisitions, Metromedia set a new single-station sales record in 1982 with the $220 million purchase of Boston's WCVB (Channel 5) from the Boston Broadcasters group that had put the station on the air a decade earlier. Three years later, Metromedia again stunned the industry when it sold its TV stations to Rupert Murdoch for $3.5 billion, giving him the nucleus for what would soon become the Fox network. (WCVB, the lone non-independent in the group, was resold to present owner Hearst.)

The Metromedia radio properties were spun off as well in the late eighties, with many of the FM stations eventually forming the core of a new Westinghouse FM group, and Kluge, by then in his eighties, moved into non-broadcast ventures including cellular telephones and restaurants.

By the time of Kluge's death last Tuesday, just shy of his 96th birthday, he'd been out of the broadcast spotlight for nearly a quarter of a century, but his legacy of quality broadcasting should be long remembered in the industry.

Cox Radio has once again modified its plans to move WCTZ (96.7 Port Chester) from the station's longtime home atop the tower of sister station WSTC (1400) in Stamford, CONNECTICUT. Cox's original proposal for the station would have moved the transmitter across Long Island Sound to the north shore of Long Island; it subsequently modified the proposal to instead relocate "Coast 96.7" to a tower in Yonkers owned by the Archdiocese of New York.

Now Cox has returned to the FCC with a new application to relocate WCTZ. This time, the station would move to a three-bay antenna atop the Trump Plaza building in downtown New Rochelle, where it would run 3.1 kW/462'. From there, 96.7 would put a 70 dBu signal over southern Westchester, all of the Bronx and the northern portions of Queens and Nassau while delivering a predicted 60 dBu to most of Manhattan, as well as big chunks of Queens, Nassau, Fairfield and Bergen counties.

(If you're keeping score at home, WCTZ is one of three class A FM signals north of New York City that have plotted moves taking them closer to the big city. Bill O'Shaughnessy's WVIP 93.5 New Rochelle completed its move, and is now operating from the WFUV tower in the Bronx; Cumulus-owned WFAS-FM 103.9 Bronxville has constructed and tested new facilities at the WFUV site but continues to operate full-time from Westchester for now, and it's not clear when or if it will actually pull the trigger on its move-in.)

*The relentless march of the syndicated morning shows rolls on: in New Haven, Clear Channel's WKCI (101.3 Hamden) replaces Michael Maze's local morning show with New York-based Elvis Duran, starting today.

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*Western MASSACHUSETTS has a new NPR news/talk outlet. The former Deerfield Academy station, WGAJ (91.7 Deerfield), was just hours away from having its license expire for a full year of silence when it made it back on the air Thursday afternoon (Sept. 9) under new calls WNNZ-FM. Under its new owner, the WFCR Foundation, the 100-watt station is relaying the programming of WNNZ (640 Westfield), the secondary news-talk service programmed by Amherst's WFCR (88.5).

Returning 91.7 to the air came with a host of technical challenges, reports WFCR chief engineer Charles Dube: with no line-of-sight path from WFCR's Amherst studios to the transmitter site, WFCR is using an audio-over-IP path to Deerfield Academy, then sending the signal over the old WGAJ STL path to the transmitter site. And up on the hill, the old WGAJ tower was deemed unfit for continued use, which meant the installation of a new tower and a new Jampro antenna. The new WNNZ-FM is operating under program test authority at half-power (50 watts) until the FCC issues a license to cover for its new facility.

*There's an all-star lineup of inductees into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame on Thursday - need we even attach much by way of description to names such as Johnny Most, Gary LaPierre, Dale Dorman, Tom Ellis, Ken Coleman, Robert J. Lurtsema, Robin Young or "Big Brother" Bob Emery? Those luminaries will be joined by some regional stars, too - WCCM's Bruce Arnold, WBUR "Con Salsa" host/producer Jose Masso and WIZZ (1520 Greenfield) owner Phil Drumheller, aka "Phil D" from WHYN's top-40 days.

But the list of 17 inductees (you can see them all here) also includes some names that will be rather less familiar to many current broadcasters, including that of Wilmer C. Swartley, Jr. He joined the staff of Westinghouse in 1939, came to Boston in 1940 to work at WBZ, and was the founding general manager of WBZ-TV in 1948. And no, his induction is not posthumous: at the age of 102, Swartley is very much alive and sharp as a tack, and your editor had the pleasure of meeting him and talking about WBZ's history recently. A few tickets to the event, being held Thursday at the Quincy Marriott, are still available at the MBHOF website.

*VERMONT's oldest TV station is adding an additional early-evening newscast. WCAX (Channel 3) in Burlington has long danced to its own drummer where early news is concerned; it's one of the last stations in the country to run an hour of local news at 6 and the CBS network news at 7. That unusual schedule continues - but as of tonight, the 5 PM "Dr. Phil" is being replaced by two more half-hour newscasts, anchored by Roger Garrity and Bridget Barry-Caswell at 5 and by Kristin Carlson and Mike McCune at 5:30. In the meantime, WCAX has put its 10 PM broadcast (seen on its 3.2 DTV subchannel) on hiatus.

*NERW's roving New England correspondent Jeff Lehmann (he's also one of the editors at our sister site TopHour.com) checks in with a bit of news from NEW HAMPSHIRE: WLMW (90.7 Manchester) is back on the air with satellite-fed AFA religious programming after having been silent since at least early June.

*The big news out of CANADA late last week was yet another ownership change at one of the nation's biggest media companies. BCE Inc., parent company of Bell Canada, plans to pay C$1.3 billion (and assume C$1.7 billion or so in debt) to take full ownership of CTV. BCE bought a majority interest CTV and the Globe and Mail back in 2000, paying C$2.3 billion for both; it later spun off much of its interest in CTVglobemedia to other shareholders.

Now BCE wants to regain full ownership of CTV, buying the 85% of the company it doesn't own from a group that includes the Woodbridge Company (the Thomson family), the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and Torstar, the parent of the Toronto Star. Under the deal, the Thomson family will retake control of the Globe and Mail, though BCE will retain a minority interest in the national newspaper. Ivan Fecan, CTV's CEO, announced to employees that he's speeding up his retirement, originally planned for 2012; he now plans to stay through the transition process and then depart in a year or so. Fecan started with Baton Broadcasting, the predecessor of today's CTV, in 1994 and shepherded the company's eventual takeover of most of CTV's affiliates, the purchase of CHUM Ltd. and the sale to BCE in 2000.

In Toronto, CJCL (FAN 590) has picked a new morning host, at least temporarily: Andrew Krystal will hold down that post for the next three months and perhaps longer, reports the Toronto Star's Chris Zelkovich. CJCL has also mended fences with ESPN, returning the national network to its overnight hours after a previous affiliation agreement expired back in June.

Over at CHUM-FM (104.5 Toronto), Barry Stewart is out as assistant PD/music director, ending a 33-year career with the station. Joey Brooks adds interim music director duties to his afternoon shift there.

Out in Windsor, the small Francophone community is celebrating the return of more local programming on Radio-Canada's CBEF (540). Last Tuesday, CBEF introduced a new local show that runs from 6:35-7:30 on weekday mornings, hosted by Charles Levesque. He'd been the host of the local morning show on CBEF that was cancelled as part of budget cuts in 2009. The show's cancellation prompted complaints to Canada's commissioner of official languages, whose investigation found that "CBC/Radio-Canada had not fulfilled its obligations under Part VII of the Official Languages Act because it failed to consult the French-speaking community in southwestern Ontario beforehand; it did not consider the adverse impact of its decision on the community; and it did nothing to try to mitigate the negative impact of its decision." The June 2009 cuts reduced CBEF's local staff from eight to two.

And we close this week with another one of those "far too early" obituaries. Craig Smith never spent much time actually working in radio or TV, but over the last decade or so he nevertheless became a very important part of the broadcast community in southern Ontario. In 2001, Smith took over moderation of the Southern Ontario/Western NY Radio-TV Forum ("SOWNY," or the "Big Yellow Board") from founder Dale Patterson, and in the years since then he'd built the board into one of the most active regional broadcast communities on the web.

Craig had been in poor health in recent months, and his time ran out last weekend. He died peacefully last Monday night. He was just 54; he's survived by friends all over the dials in Toronto and vicinity, and by the "Big Yellow Board," which will live on in his absence.

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