Binghamton Broadcasters Celebrate

TOWER SITE CALENDAR 2012...ORDER NOW!

A decade ago, it was just a goofy idea: "Hey, you should put some of those tower pictures into a calendar!"

But when Tower Site Calendar 2002 appeared, it was a hit - and ten years later, the fun still hasn't stopped.

And now it's that moment at least some of you have been waiting for: the grand unveiling of our latest edition, Tower Site Calendar 2012, seen for the very first time right here!

As befits a tenth-anniversary edition, this one's special: in addition to all the great tower photos and historic dates you've come to expect from our calendars, the new 2012 edition is our first-ever themed calendar, paying special homage to the many stations that began broadcasting during radio's first big boom year of 1922.

The 2012 edition brings something else that's new to the Tower Site Calendar: the option of a spiral-bound edition that will hang flatter on your wall.

The calendars will be back from the printer any day now, so don't miss your chance to be part of the very first shipments...or to make your 2012 calendar order part of the subscription you'll soon need to continue enjoying all of the features of fybush.com.

Order now - or subscribe - 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: September 27, 2010 -

• When Radio Disney launched back in 1996, it looked to AM radio as an inexpensive, wide-coverage way to distribute its programming to dozens of markets around the country. For nearly a decade and a half, that strategy seemed to work for Disney: it acquired AMs in large and medium markets from coast to coast, purchasing and operating them inexpensively. But a lot has changed in the last few years: the AM signals that were at least marginally viable in 1996 have, for the most part, fallen completely off the radar for much of Radio Disney's target audience (not just kids themselves but also their parents), even as other distribution methods such as satellite radio and streaming have become much more prominent. Over the last year or so, Disney has begun to dismantle its AM portfolio, shutting down its signals in medium markets such as Albuquerque and Greensboro, N.C. and putting those stations up for sale. Now that trend has reached RHODE ISLAND and CONNECTICUT, where Disney will pull the plug on WDDZ (550 Pawtucket) and WDZK (1550 Bloomfield) on Thursday night at midnight. (Two other Disney AMs, WDRD 680 in Louisville, Kentucky and WBWL 600 in Jacksonville, Florida will also be silenced.)
• The Hartford-market stations came into the Radio Disney fold in 1997, when it (along with what's now WMKI 1260 in Boston) was purchased by Hibernia Communications, which flipped it to Disney and then sold them to Disney itself three years later. (Disney paid just shy of $50 million for Hibernia's six Radio Disney outlets, including a different Providence-market Disney outlet, the West Warwick-licensed 1450 that was WHRC and later WDYZ; it sold that facility a year later to buy 550, then known as WICE.) With WDDZ and WDZK gone, Disney will still have a half-dozen AM outlets in the region: in addition to Boston's WMKI, it owns WQEW (1560 New York), WWJZ (640 Mount Holly NJ/Philadelphia) and WDDY (1460 Albany), and its programming is heard on Craig Fox's WOLF/WWLF/WAMF in the Syracuse market and on Birach Broadcasting's WWCS (540 Canonsburg/Pittsburgh), though as you'll read later in today's column, there are some changes in the works in the Steel City, too.
• While WDZK prepares to shut down in Hartford, another signal that's been serving the Nutmeg State is being redirected to its state of license, NEW YORK. Citadel's WXLM (104.7 Montauk) is the latest incarnation of a news-talk format that's bounced around the dial in southeastern Connecticut, moving from WSUB (980 Groton) to the original WXLM on 102.3 in Stonington, and then to 104.7 when it swapped facilities with WMOS, the classic rocker programmed out of the Mohegan Sun casino. Now the WXLM programming is returning to the smaller 980 facility sometime next month - while 104.7 takes on a new identity serving Long Island as WELJ, an East End relay of Citadel's big WPLJ (95.5 New York). As for Connecticut, the WXLM calls took up residence on 980 in Groton late last week, displacing the WSUB calls that have been there since 1958. Once the simulcast period with 104.7 has ended, the news-talk format will displace the Spanish tropical "Caliente 980" format that's been airing there since 2006. With 1000 watts by day and just 72 watts at night, WSUB/WXLM has adequate daytime coverage of New London, but doesn't reach north into Norwich very effectively; ironically, the same was already true of the 6 kW/315' class A signal on 104.7 from Montauk.
• Before WXLM and WPLJ/WELJ grabbed the headlines at the end of the week, the big news-talk news from the Empire State came from Albany, where Clear Channel kicked off the week with a bang when it pulled the plug on modern rock "Channel 103.1" WHRL just after midnight on Monday, replacing it with news-talk as WGY-FM, a full-time simulcast of venerable WGY (810 Schenectady). It says something about just how stripped down an operation "Channel 103.1" was that only one person, morning host Jason Keller, lost his job when WHRL went away. (It should also be noted that the WHRL calls had been in place at 103.1 ever since the station signed on in 1966; only one other commercial station in the Albany market, WFLY, has kept the same calls longer.)
• It should also be noted that in a marketplace where these AM-on-FM news-talk simulcasts have become increasingly common, WGY's move represents something new for Clear Channel, which had thus far resisted the temptation to create FM simulcasts for AM stations that already enjoyed full-market signals. Even as companies such as Bonneville and CBS and Cox have begun migrating all their news-talkers to FM, there's been no WLW-FM, no KFI-FM, no WHAM-FM. Instead, Clear Channel has moved more gingerly into FM news-talk, launching new outlets (such as Pittsburgh's WPGB) in markets where it had no significant AM presence or turning to FM simulcasts in places such as Birmingham where its existing AM signals were already compromised.
• Why WGY, then? The answer may simply be that an FM facility was available with little sacrifice - or, perhaps, that the additional building penetration the new WGY-FM offers (though it's only a class A signal, it comes from a brand-new tower and antenna just across the Hudson River from downtown Albany) is just the edge WGY needs to overcome the competition from the recently-strengthened signal of talk competitor WGDJ (1300 Rensselaer). While WGY offers a mostly-syndicated talk lineup, WGDJ stays local most of the day in a market that's all about state politics - and it's already driven another competitor, Pamal's WROW (590), out of the talk format. All of which is to say that there's no reason just yet to think that the arrival of WGY-FM portends immediate flips to FM simulcasts at other Clear Channel news-talkers in the region. In some markets (New Haven, Rochester, Manchester) there's no "sacrificial lamb" available on the FM dial; in others (Harrisburg and Springfield, for instance) there's no real competitive pressure driving such a move, which suggests that Clear Channel intends to try to preserve as much of its existing AM revenue stream as it can, holding off the "death of AM" scenario for as long as possible.
• While Radio Disney slowly retreats from the AM dial elsewhere, it appears that Disney is poised to move the format to a big signal in southwestern PENNSYLVANIA. But the plan to move Radio Disney from WWCS (540 Canonsburg) to Disney-owned WEAE (1250 Pittsburgh) around the first of the year, reported late Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is notable less because of what it means for Radio Disney than for what it means to WEAE's current programming. Assuming Bob Smizik's P-G report is true (and there's no reason to think otherwise), "ESPN 1250" is becoming the first to blink in what had become an overcrowded three-way sports battle in the Steel City. While WEAE was the first to go all-sports back in 1999, when ABC/Disney acquired the station from Jacor, it was soon challenged by Clear Channel's WBGG (970) with Fox Sports - and then earlier this year by a full-time FM sports outlet, CBS Radio's KDKA-FM (93.7 the Fan).
• As it turned out, the national brand of ESPN and a lineup of local hosts that includes Stan Savran, Guy Junker and Scott Paulsen wasn't enough to overcome the one-two punch of KDKA-FM's all-local lineup and FM signal coupled with the roadblock of play-by-play rights (Pirates, Penguins, Steelers and Pitt) assembled by WBGG and its Clear Channel clustermates. Smizik reports that WEAE will let its local staff go at the end of this week, switching to the full ESPN network feed until the end of the year. That's when Disney's lease of WWCS expires, freeing up that format to be moved to 1250, and possibly freeing up ESPN Radio programming to replace Fox Sports on WBGG and starting the rumor mill spinning on the future broadcast homes of some of 1250's star talent (most notably "Stan and Guy.")

Five Years Ago: 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.)
• In southern NEW JERSEY, WDTH (93.1 Wildwood Crest) has changed calls to WEZW; expect it to break from its "Touch" urban AC simulcast with WTTH (96.1 Margate).

10 Years Ago: September 24, 2001 -

• The AM radio landscape in the Merrimack Valley of MASSACHUSETTS is about to change again, thanks to Costa-Eagle's $1.5 million sale of WCCM (800 Lawrence) to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The sale leaves Eagle-Costa with two of the valley's five AM stations: the facilities that are now running Spanish-language programming as WNNW (1110 Salem, N.H.) and WHAV (1490 Haverhill). The plan, as we understand it, is to combine their programming under the WNNW calls on the 1490 facility, with the English-language WCCM programming and calls moving to 1110.
• The move will effectively take the Eagle-Costa stations out of contention in Lowell, where WCCM had been trying to compete with Lowell-licensed WCAP (980) with programming that included Lowell Spinners baseball. As a daytimer, the new WCCM 1110 won't be able to carry Spinners' night games, and its day signal is hard to hear in Lowell even under the best of circumstances. As for the AM 800 signal, with 1000 watts by day and 244 watts at night, it's not heard well outside the central Merrimack Valley, which leads us to wonder why the Archdiocese is spending all this money on a facility its leaders won't even hear at their suburban Boston headquarters. Could a move south be in the offing? (This isn't the Archdiocese's first broadcast effort, by the way; back in the 1960s, it owned WIHS-TV 38, ancestor of today's WSBK!) The switches are expected to take place sometime around January 2002. (The purchase never happened, and WNNW eventually moved to 800, with WCCM taking the 1490 spot.)
• MAINE will have a broadcast Fox affiliate after October 7 - at least for viewers in the Bangor area. WCKD-LP (Channel 30), which has been running as a UPN affiliate under LMA with ABC affiliate WVII (Channel 7), will switch to the Fox affiliation when Portland's WPXT (Channel 51) dumps Fox for WB.
• We'll start our NEW YORK news, of course, down in Manhattan, with the latest on the recovery efforts at the World Trade Center. On the TV side, WCBS-TV (Channel 2) filed with the FCC on Wednesday to make its auxiliary site at the Empire State Building its primary site. From Empire, WCBS runs 45 kilowatts visual ERP at 389 meters above average terrain. There's not much new to report on the other stations that used the World Trade Center. We're still hearing from viewers in outlying areas such as Long Island and Connecticut that the signals on the other VHF stations from their hastily-constructed backup sites at Empire and the Armstrong tower in Alpine, N.J. are proving hard to receive. Of the FM stations, we're told WNYC-FM (93.9) is running in mono with less than a kilowatt from Empire, with most of its programming still being simulcast on the Board of Education's Brooklyn-based WNYE-FM (91.5), an arrangement that some are speculating will become permanent.

15 Years Ago: New England Radio Watch, September 25, 1996

• The ubiquitous Dr. Laura Schlessinger has added yet another New England outlet. Hartford's WTIC (1080) has bumped Hartford Courant columnist Colin McEnroe from his mid-morning slot and dropped in Dr. Laura instead. McEnroe will be heard doing commentaries on TIC's morning and afternoon drive shows, as well as on a Sunday night talk show. Across town at WDRC (1360), Bob Grant has been dropped from the schedule, reportedly because programmers there don't think his abrasive talk fits with WDRC's standards format. Phil Callan moves from middays to PM to fill Grant's timeslot. And at WHCN (105.9), new owner SFX is moving towards classic rock, both to pull WHCN away from its new stablemate, modern-rocker WMRQ (104.1), and to go after ARS's 70s rocker, WZMX (93.7).
• A bit further south in Connecticut, Quinnipiac College seems to be making big plans for its newly-purchased AM. The former WXCT (1220) in Hamden is now dark, but will reportedly resurface sometime in January with the WQUN calls. Quinnipiac has been advertising in the trades for a GM/PD, a morning host/operations manager, and two newspeople to work alongside the student staff. The station's in good hands; NYC radio veteran Lou Adler is apparently the driving force behind the project.
• Two dark stations that probably won't return: WLVC (1340) Fort Kent and WSJR (1230) Madawaska, way up there in northern Maine. It's been two and a half years since these stations were on the air, and their authority to remain silent expired a year ago. The FCC is asking owner Lamoille Broadcasting for a written explanation of why the licenses shouldn't be revoked.
• Back on the air, and with a much-improved signal, is Holliston High School's WHHB(FM) in Holliston, Mass. The station has finally made good on its plans to move from 91.5 to 99.9, and from a short tower atop the high school to a taller cellular-phone stick down the road.