Danny Stiles, RIP

TOWER SITE CALENDAR 2011 - NOW DISCOUNTED!

Maybe you need an extra copy for the wall of your shop. Maybe you gave your first copy away as a gift. Maybe the year just got away from you and you forgot to order your Tower Site Calendar 2011.

Whatever the reason, do we have a deal for you!

We didn't quite sell out of this year's calendar...and so now that it's March, we're offering our remaining supply for just $12 postpaid. (That's a 33% discount from the original list price of $18!)

Tower Site Calendar 2011 features more than a dozen great images of radio and TV broadcast facilities all over the country (and even beyond - this year's edition takes us to Mexico!)

Thrill to a night shot of KFI's new tower! Check out the WAEB Allentown array just after it lost a tower - or enjoy the history at venerable sites like those of KID in Idaho Falls, WCAP in Lowell, KTKT in Tucson and Rochester's Pinnacle Hill.

But wait - there's more! We also have a small supply of the new FM Atlas, 21st edition back in stock, as well as a limited supply of Tower Site Calendar 2010 - plus signed calendars, back isues and much more in the fybush.com store!

Orders of 20 or more calendars get an even bigger discount. We'll even add a bow or a gift card upon request. But don't wait...supplies are limited, and the calendar will sell out soon!

Order now at the fybush.com Store!

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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, ten and - where available - fifteen years ago this week, or thereabouts.

Note that 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.

One Year Ago: March 15, 2010 -

• Legendary WABC jock Ron Lundy died this afternoon. Lundy had a series of mini-strokes a couple of weeks ago, his wife Shirley tells Ted David - and Ted tells the New York Radio Message Board that Lundy went into cardiac arrest after becoming dehydrated. Lundy was put on a ventilator; he rallied briefly on Sunday, but suffered another heart attack on Monday. Lundy was 75.
• Back in the sixties, when Joey Reynolds was fired from his high-profile job doing nights at Buffalo's WKBW (1520), he supposedly said his farewell to the station - and his hometown - by nailing his shoes to the door of the PD's office with a note marked "fill these!" There were no shoes tacked to any doors in NEW YORK last week when Reynolds lost his most recent job as overnight host on WOR (710); this time, the job was already filled thanks to a shift in the city's talk syndication scene. The dominoes started to fall a couple of weeks ago when Citadel took its overnight hours on WABC (770) in-house, replacing Premiere's "Coast to Coast AM" with Doug McIntyre's "Red Eye Radio," based at sister station KABC in Los Angeles. Premiere wasn't about to let one of its flagship shows go without an affiliate in market number one, and its options were relatively limited: there was apparently some talk with Salem's new talker, WNYM (970 the Apple), but the much more desirable option was Buckley's much larger signal at WOR, which will become the new home for George Noory's 1-5 AM show beginning April 5. And that in turn knocked Reynolds out of his overnight hours after 14 years at WOR, where he'll do his last show the night of April 2.
• For Reynolds, there's already something new on the horizon: he'd been planning to take his show to TV. There's already a website up for "All Night with Joey Reynolds," which will be broadcast "from Times Square" and seen on NBC's "New York Nonstop" channel, WNBC-DT 4.2, "starting March 2010." (This is hardly Reynolds' first go-round with a station called "WNBC"; he was a star personality on the old WNBC radio in the eighties, of course.)
• After more than 40 years at Oswego's WRVO (89.9), general manager John Krauss is retiring, effective April 1. Krauss was the first voice heard on the station when it signed on as a 10-watter back in 1969, and he worked his way up through the ranks as morning host and news director before becoming general manager in the nineties. No replacement has been named yet. Krauss will be honored at a series of WRVO events, including a June appearance by another recent public radio retiree, NPR's Carl Kasell.
• Up north, the oldies on WGIX (95.3 Gouverneur) are history: the station flipped from "Oldies 95.3" to country last week as "The Wolf," with new calls WLFK in place.
• In eastern MASSACHUSETTS, the transition to "Rush Radio 1200" at WXKS (1200 Newton) went pretty much without a hitch...well, unless you ask the poor receptionist at Limbaugh's former affiliate, WRKO (680 Boston). Word is that the front desk at Entercom Boston was deluged with callers who apparently hadn't gotten the word about the show's new home up the dial - and that they weren't especially polite about it, either.
• One other bit of Entercom news: WEEI is finally getting a Boston FM home - but only for listeners who own HD radios. The sports talk will soon be appearing on WMKK (93.7 Lawrence)'s HD3 channel, complete with Red Sox play-by-play. (Which reminds us: "Baseball on the Radio" begins next Monday right here on NERW...)
• In Waltham, the old WRCA (1330) transmitter site is coming down. The two 306-foot towers were the last remnant of broadcast activity at 750 South Street, the longtime home of WCRB. But with WCRB-FM (now on 99.5 Lowell) having moved its studios into the WGBH complex in Brighton, and with the AM station having moved its transmitter to the new 1200/1330/1600 triplex in Oak Hill, Newton, there was no longer a need for the Waltham towers. One tower was mostly dismantled last week; the other was to have come down over the weekend, but bad weather delayed that work.

Five Years Ago: March 13, 2006 -

• It's been a pretty quiet year in MAINE's biggest radio market, but just in time for spring, things are heating up in Portland. On Thursday (March 9), Saga pulled the plug on adult contemporary WMGX (93.1 Portland), reimaging the station as "Coast 93.1" and adding more current tracks to become a hot AC. While Saga launched the station without jocks, most of WMGX's airstaff will return next week, including the morning show with Tim, Jaime and Eva.
• The "Coast" moniker was used before - briefly - in the market; when WWGT (97.9) became WCSO in 1991, it was "Coast" until WQSS up in Camden complained, at which point it became "Ocean 98," before returning to its old WJBQ calls a few years later. (And kudos to Saga for paying tribute to the long history of WMGX with a nice montage of the station's past, leading right into the 2 PM format change!)
• NEW JERSEY is already awash in former WCBS-FM personalities, and now two more of them have morning gigs. At Greater Media's WMGQ (98.3 New Brunswick), Steve O'Brien starts his new morning show today. In addition to CBS-FM, O'Brien's career has included stops at New York's WYNY, WPLJ and WABC, WIBG in Philadelphia, WPOP in Hartford and WKNR in Detroit. (He's also done TV, at New York's WNYW and WNBC.) Meanwhile, over at "The Breeze" (WWZY 107.1 Long Branch/WBHX 99.7 Tuckerton/WKOE 106.3 Ocean City), Mike Fitzgerald starts today as PD, and he's doing in mornings as well, joining his former WCBS-FM colleague Joe McCoy, who's consulting the Press Communications station.
• The big news out of NEW YORK was, of course, attorney general Eliot Spitzer's suit against Entercom for alleged violations of the payola laws at its stations in Buffalo (primarily WKSE, where former PD Dave Universal has become something of a poster child for the payola investigators) and Rochester (where country WBEE-FM somehow got tangled up in this mess, too.)
• Spitzer, who's the front-runner in the race for governor this fall, has already won high-profile settlements in his payola investigations of several record labels, but Entercom is the first broadcaster he's directly targeted. The suit offers evidence that top Entercom management, up to and including CEO David Field, pressured local programmers to meet ambitious goals to replace slashed promotional budgets with money provided by record companies or independent promoters, money that Spitzer alleges could only have come from what amounted to the sale of airplay.
• The suit also presents details of several of the promotional plans that Entercom offered to record labels, in which their songs would be played during paid "CD Preview" and "CD Challenge" segments, regardless of whether they belonged on the playlist, thus adding to the number of spins counted by the BDS and Mediabase monitoring services. (There's an especially notable e-mail from WBEE's Billy Kidd complaining about how disruptive the segments were becoming to the station's programming.)
• The case is unlikely ever to see the inside of a courtroom; the conventional wisdom is that Entercom will join the record companies in settling the suit before it can go to trial, especially with the license renewal process underway in New York right now. Spitzer's likely to file suit against other broadcasters as well, and at some point the FCC could yet get involved as well.

10 Years Ago: March 12, 2001 -

• You know it's a slow week when...a format change in Glens Falls, NEW YORK tops the news -- and it's not even much of a surprise. Vox Media did some call-letter swapping a few weeks back, moving the WHTR calls that go with the "Wheels" oldies format from 107.1 in Hudson Falls to 93.5 in Corinth, heretofore a country station under the WZZM-FM calls. When 107.1 then got the calls "WFFG," speculation ran rampant that the "Froggy" name and country format that's hopped all over the northeast was about to set down roots in the region. Sure enough, that's just what Vox did today (March 12), installing "Wheels" on the 93.5 spot (continuing an oldies battle with WCKM-FM 98.5 Lake George) and launching "Froggy 107." In addition to a better signal, the new dial position sits just below Albany country behemoth WGNA-FM (107.7), which regularly shows well in the Glens Falls ratings. We hear both stations will be doing more live and less off the satellite...ribbit.
• Another format change long ago given away by the calls: in Watertown, the R&B oldies finally vanished from AM 1410, giving way to sports "ESPN 1410 - The Winner," matching the WNER calls that replaced WUZZ a few months ago. Also in Watertown, WTOJ (103.1 Carthage) finally gets a license to cover its power increase (to 1800 watts from 870).
• From PENNSYLVANIA comes word of the imminent demolition of a radio landmark. The garage on Penn Avenue in Wilkinsburg where Frank Conrad put amateur station 8XK on the air in 1920 will soon be removed to make way for a fast-food restaurant, and the National Museum of Broadcasting/The Conrad Project is trying to raise the money needed to dismantle the building and put it in storage for future restoration. What's the big deal about an old garage? Only that 8XK evolved, later in 1920, into a little station called KDKA down the road in Pittsburgh. Whether or not you buy the Westinghouse PR machine's "first radio station" claim, there's no doubt that Conrad's work was significant and that the loss of the garage would be a tragedy. We'll keep you posted as efforts continue to raise the needed money...

15 Years Ago: New England Radio Watch, March 14, 1996

• The mega-opolizing continues in northern New England. Saga Communications has agreed to pay $10 million for Ocean Coast Properties' WPOR AM-FM. The AM is a 1kw fulltimer on 1490, the FM is a full B on 101.9, and they simulcast country except when the AM breaks away for local sports play-by-play. Saga already owns news-talk WGAN 560, hot talk WZAN 970, classic rock WMGX 93.1, and oldies WYNZ 100.9 in the Portland market, so this deal makes it far and away the dominant owner up there. Only Fuller-Jeffrey comes close, with modern rock WCYY 94.3/WCYI 93.9, AOR (and blowtorch grandfathered-100kw) WBLM 102.9, and pending acquisition of hot AC WZPK 103.7.
• A few new sets of calls: WBLQ 99.3 on Block Island RI has applied for WERI-FM, to match the calls of new owner Philip Urso's WERI 1230 in nearby Westerly RI. Urso's southern-RI holdings now include WERI, WERI-FM, Newport's WADK 1540 (which is not off the air, despite reports to that effect in one hobby periodical) and WOTB 100.3, and modern-rocker WDGE 99.7 Wakefield-Peace Dale, which is a Providence rimshotter. Meanwhile up in southern Vermont, the WSSH calls that recently vanished from the Boston area have reappeared, on the CP for 101.5 Marlboro VT (formerly WAIG). This station looks like it might actually be on the air soon; it's applied for a slight power increase as well.
• A few more station sales: WHOU-FM in Houlton ME, a class A on 100.1, goes from a bankruptcy trustee to local County Communications for $31,500. WHOU had been co-owned with dark WTOX 1450 and WHMX 105.7 Lincoln. And Biddeford, Maine's WIDE 1400 goes from Witham-Rhodes Communications to Saco Bay Communications group for $80K.