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April 14, 2003
"Blink" and it's a whole new station
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*We're back from Las Vegas - and there's
no question what the big story was back home in our absence:
the relaunch of NEW YORK's WNEW (102.7) following two
months of stunting and several months of pointless meandering
before that.
Unless you've been under a rock for the last week or so, you
no doubt know by now that the new nickname is "Blink 102.7"
and the format is a mixture of entertainment news, talk and a
sort of hot AC-rhythmic CHR hybrid aimed at women ages 18-30,
with actor Kiefer Sutherland handling imaging duties and Viacom
properties MTV and VH1 contributing plenty of corporate synergy
to the mix. And you've probably heard that former WPIX (Channel
11) morning personality Lynda Lopez is doing mornings with her
boyfriend Chris Booker...and that the afternoon show will come
from Hollywood...and that they're holding an "open call"
for a night show...and that they're using AOL Instant Messenger
("blinkline") to take requests.
So what else can we tell you? Just that we heard Blink for
the first time during an early Saturday morning layover at JFK
on the way back from the coast, and that absent the live talent
(though we're grateful at least for the disappearance of the
infomercials that once marked WNEW's weekend lineup) it sounded
not much different from the stunting format that had been running
since February. Oh - and that pink logo? We're already hearing
it called "Barbie Radio" on the message boards...
Meanwhile down on the AM dial, Richard Bey is out the door
at WABC (770), which realigns its evening schedule to give Monica
Crowley a solo hour from 6-7, followed by two hours of Savage
from 7-9 and an hour of KABC's Larry Elder from 9-10.
And across the hall, big congratulations to Scott Shannon
of WPLJ (95.5), who was inducted into the NAB's Radio Hall of
Fame out in Vegas. He garnered big applause when he showed the
audience the little GE transistor radio that got him hooked at
the age of 12; you can read more about it in your editor's coverage
for the NAB
Daily News...
On the noncomm dial, WFUV (90.7 New York) is cutting back;
it's eliminated Delphine Blue's nighttime gig and replaced it
with automated AAA music, citing budget cuts.
 Just outside the
city limits, there was big action in our absence at the former
Big City quadcast, with three of the four "Rumba" 107.1
stations returning to the air with new formats (and, in one case,
new calls!)
Up in Westchester, WYNY (107.1 Briarcliff Manor) is being
LMAd to Pamal, which flipped the calls to WXPK and launched the
expected simulcast with top 40 WSPK (104.7 Poughkeepsie) last
week. With new imaging as "K104-K107," WXPK (and aren't
those calls awfully close to New York's "K-Rock" WXRK?)
has been enjoying an unusually good reach into the city with
the temporary absence of WWZY (107.1 Long Branch NJ) from the
airwaves. (More on Long Branch in a moment...)
Out on Long Island's East End, WWXY (107.1 Hampton Bays) returned
to the air with a simulcast of Jarad's modern AC WLIR (92.7 Garden
City); Jarad will pay $2 million to buy WWXY from Nassau, which
paid $43 million for all four "Rumba" stations from
Big City just a few months ago.
Heading upstate, there could be a new 50 kilowatt AM station
in the North Country, if Tim Martz gets his way. He's applying
to convert little WICY (1490 Malone) from a 1000-watt fulltimer
on 1490 to a daytimer on 1500, running 50,000 watts during daylight
hours and 43,000 watts during critical hours from three 150-foot
towers on Finney Road, east of Malone.
While we're up that way, we note call letters for the future
"K-Love" station in Dannemora: it'll appear on 89.7
as "WKVJ" (and we hope it does a legal ID more often
than the "K-Love" outlet we were listening to in San
Diego, which did a legal once in 12 hours of taping!)
Here in Rochester, everyone's back on the air after the ice
storm that we were more than happy to have missed (it took a
number of smaller FMs off the air, as well as causing problems
to WXXI 1370, we're told) - and one station was sold in our absence.
It's religious/ethnic WWWG (1460 Rochester), for which Catholic
broadcaster Holy Family Communications is paying $300,000. (The
seller is Tony Brandon's Winton Road Broadcasting, which is interesting;
we had thought that the Brandons had closed a deal a few years
ago to sell 3WG to "HHH Broadcasting.")
NERW expects to hear 3WG's programming shift to a simulcast
(or close to it) of Holy Family's WLOF (101.7 Attica), which
serves the Buffalo market; we wonder what will happen to all
the Spanish-language programming that had been heard on 3WG recently.
(We also wonder about the long-term status of WWWG's three towers
on South Winton Road, which are apparently not part of this deal,
perhaps explaining the lowish price.)
On the FM dial, Clear Channel did some call swapping to get
WFXF for 107.3 in South Bristol, which now has calls to match
its classic hits "Fox" format (its old WLCL calls move
down to Atlanta and the Canton-licensed 105.7 signal, which is
now "Cool" oldies.)
On the DTV front, the antenna is up for WOKR-DT (Channel 59)
in Rochester, which promises to be the first ABC DTV outlet on
the air in upstate New York when it signs on in a few weeks,
with sister station WIXT-DT (Channel 17) in Syracuse following
close behind. And we're seeing a nice clear picture now from
Syracuse's WCNY-TV (Channel 24), now relocated from the WIXT
tower to the new WSTM stick on Sentinel Heights (and now accompanied
by WCNY-DT 25, which made its target date of April 4.)
On the talent side, former WUHF (Channel 31) sports guy John
DiTullio has landed a new TV gig; we saw him over the weekend
on our own alma mater, cable's R News (and he's still heard with
NERW reader Brother Wease in the mornings on 96.5 WCMF, too);
meanwhile at WOKR (Channel 13), they're saying goodbye to weekend
anchor Brian Washington, who's off to Greenville, S.C. And behind
the scenes, a chance encounter on the RTNDA side of the NAB convention
produced the news that our old R News colleague Sean Macnamara,
lately news director at KCOY (Channel 12) in Santa Maria, California,
is back upstate as news director of "News 10," the
new Time Warner cable news channel that will debut this fall
in Syracuse, Ithaca, Oswego, Rome and the St. Lawrence Valley...
Down in the Southern Tier, Scott Pettibone arrives at the
Backyard cluster in Elmira/Corning as OM/PD; he was in Jacksonville,
Florida at WPLA (93.3) before moving north.
And in Buffalo, the Buffalo Broadcast Pioneers (which your
editor is supposedly a member of, although he's not getting any
mailings!) has announced its 2003 Hall of Fame inductees: Meet
the Press host Tim Russert, pioneering TV anchor Harry Webb,
former WBEN owner Larry Levite, former WBEN producer Tom Whalen,
WBEN talk host (and veteran DJ) Sandy Beach and former WIVB anchor
Carol Jasen. The induction ceremony will take place at the Tralfamadore
Cafe on Tuesday night, May 20, with WGRZ anchor Mary Alice Demler
and WJYE jock Joe Chili presiding; we hope to be there!
 *From NEW
JERSEY comes a new station sale and a station sale on hold,
and both involve Millennium Communications. The company has slapped
a temporary restraining order on Nassau for its proposed purchase
from Mega of WEMG-FM (104.9 Egg Harbor City); Millennium says
it violates a noncompete deal that Nassau signed when it sold
its Jersey Shore cluster to Millennium last year. Meanwhile,
Millennium is selling top 40 WBBO (98.5 Ocean Acres) to Press
- and that's not the only station Press is picking up at the
Jersey Shore. It's also lined up to be the buyer (from Nassau,
no less) of WWZY (107.1 Long Branch), which is silent for the
moment. Expect Press to move 107.1 back to its original tower
site in Long Branch, reversing the move Big City made a couple
of years ago, which improved the 107.1 signal in Brooklyn and
Queens at the expense of Monmouth County reception.
Meanwhile out in northwestern New Jersey, Nassau rolled out
the new format on the one piece of the 107.1 quadcast it plans
to keep: WWYY (107.1 Belvidere) signed back on as "Lite
107," aiming into the Easton/Bethlehem PA area with a soft
AC format.
*A quiet couple of weeks in PENNSYLVANIA,
to be sure, but we can report two silent AM stations: WAAT (750
Olyphant) in the Scranton market is temporarily dark while it
changes hands from Kevin Fennessy (who keeps WFBS 1280 in Berwick)
to Holy Family; while down in Shenandoah (off I-81 between Hazleton
and Harrisburg), WMBT (1530) went dark on March 29, though we
hear there's interest in putting it back on the air soon.
 *How
many CONNECTICUT AM stations are still operating
with their original call letters? There's one fewer this week,
as WNTY (990 Southington) drops the calls it's used since signing
on in 1969 to become WXCT. The talk format doesn't change at
what's now "The X," although the schedule changes just
a bit, flipping Dr. Laura and Neal Boortz so that both air live
(Boortz from 10-noon, Laura from 3-5 PM). Those with longish
memories will remember WXCT as the calls on 1220 Hamden before
its current incarnation as WQUN...
 *You
couldn't pass a flat surface out at NAB in Las Vegas without
seeing a piece of RHODE ISLAND: a flier (shown at right)
advertising the upcoming bankruptcy auction of WALE (990 Greenville).
Now that the planned sale of the station to Jerry Evans' Moon
Song Broadcasting has fallen through, this "50,000 watt"
(by day, anyway, with a very directional signal that goes east
to Providence and then over the ocean - and drops to 5,000 even
more directional watts after dark) station is hitting the auction
block on May 20 in Phoenix.
Will it find a buyer? It certainly got plenty of attention;
those signs were tacked up everywhere (including the men's
room) at the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Hilton nearby.
(And would it be too snarky to suggest that "useful operation"
of 990 would be an exciting change from the leased-time-phoned-in-talk
that's been running on WALE for years now?)
Meanwhile, Clear Channel found a nickname that can stick at
WSNE (93.3 Taunton); after a brief fling with "Star,"
thwarted by Entercom's use of the nickname up in the Boston market
at WQSX (93.7 Lawrence), the hot AC station is now "Coast
93.3."
*Not much was going on in our absence in
MASSACHUSETTS, either, it seems: over at WAAF (107.3 Worcester),
Jay Ferrara is out at night, replaced by the syndicated Lovelines,
which has already tried the Boston waters on both WFNX and WBCN.
At Greater Media, WROR (105.7 Framingham) has parted ways with
Ken Shelton after a brief run at the classic rocker. And our
good friend Bob Bittner has bowed to public demand and announced
that he'll keep doing "Let's Talk About Radio," the
show about radio that your editor helped to create almost a decade
ago. Instead of a weekly half-hour, "LTAR" will now
run once a month for an hour on Bob's WJIB (740), Sunday morning
at 11 - and yes, we'll make it a point to get to Boston this
summer to co-host a show or two!
Congratulations to Keating Willcox, who finally has WNSH (1570
Beverly) up at full power from his Endicott College site after
years of work and months of occasional signal outages - and congratulations
to our former WBZ colleague Carl Beane, who's been named stadium
announcer for the soon-to-be World Champion Boston Red Sox! (It's
only April. We can dream.)
In Charlton, the Bay Path Regional Vocational Technical School
wants to sell its silent WBPV (90.1 Charlton) to Heirwaves, the
religious broadcaster that's been running WNEB (1230) in Worcester;
Heirwaves will pay $237,000 for the station and lease tower space
from the school.
And while it's technically in Merrimack, NEW
HAMPSHIRE, Boston-market WNEU (Channel 60) debuted its new
Telemundo programming last week. Also on the air, at low power,
is WUNI-DT (Channel 29), Univision's DTV signal for Boston.
*Speaking of the Granite State, oldies WQLL (96.5 Bedford)
has parted ways with longtime morning host Dorien Jaye; no word
yet on a permanent replacement. And over in Hanover, WGXL (92.3)
is now carrying the morning show from Burlington Clear Channel
sister WEZF (92.9).
*In MAINE, Chris Chaos has exited the morning show
at "Kiss" (WMEK 99.9 Auburn), heading down south to
Fayetteville, N.C. and a PD gig at WQSM (98.1). And we hear Chuck
Igo will be the permanent replacement for the late Bob Anderson
in mornings at WYNZ (100.9 Westbrook); while nobody can fill
"the Dean"'s shoes, we can't imagine a better choice
than Igo, nor anyone who'll more appreciate the short commute
after all those long drives down to Boston!
*And in VERMONT, is that a new station Burlington will
soon be hearing at 102-point-nine? More next week...
*Finally, a few quick notes from CANADA: Tom Rivers
has departed CHWO (740 Toronto), and he's now back home at CHUM
(1050) doing afternoons. Meanwhile, CHWO has a new morning host
to replace the late Tom Fulton; Bob Dearborn will take over that
shift on April 28.
And up in Quebec City, CHYZ (94.3 Ste-Foy) wants to boost
power from 239 watts to 6000 watts.
*That's it for this catch-up week; much more next Monday!
 *Have
you ordered your Tower Site Calendar 2003 yet? That spiffy
image of the WBEN transmitter site on Grand Island is just one
of a dozen exciting images...and it's accompanied by many others
(including Providence's WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont; KOMA
in Oklahoma City; the legendary WSM, Nashville; WGN, Chicago
and many more), more dates in radio history, a convenient hole
for hanging - and we'll even make sure all the dates fall on
the right days!
This year's calendar is currently shipping! Calendars
are in stock, and orders placed now will ship within 24 hours!
And this year, you can order with your Visa, MasterCard, Discover
or American Express by using the handy link below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW subscription
pledge a little early: support NERW/fybush.com at the $60 level
or higher, and you'll get this lovely calendar for free!
How can you go wrong? (Click here
to visit our Support page, where you can make your NERW contribution
with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
International orders: Calendars are US$18 to Canada,
US$20 to the rest of the world, postage included. Send checks/international
money orders (in US dollars) to the address above, or e-mail
for credit-card ordering information.
*And we're also happy to announce that
our good friends at M Street have released the 11th edition of
the M Street Radio Directory. With the disappearance
of the old Vane Jones log and the declining accuracy of the Broadcasting
Yearbook, the M Street directory is widely regarded as the most
accurate, most comprehensive source of information on the US
and Canadian radio scene - and we're thrilled to be able to offer
it to you at a substantial discount!
The directory includes power, frequency, ownership, key personnel,
formats, ratings and much more information for every radio station
in the U.S. and Canada, and now runs almost 900 pages in an 8.5"
x 11" softcover book. List price is $79 (plus $7 shipping/handling),
but if you order through fybush.com/NorthEast Radio Watch, you
can get this invaluable resource on your shelf for $69 (plus
$7 s/h) - a $10 savings! And your purchase benefits the continued
publication of NERW and Tower Site of the Week, so everybody
wins!
You can order in either of two ways: to order by major credit
card, call 1-800-248-4242, ask for Irene, and tell her
you want the "NorthEast Radio Watch" discount. Or,
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92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester NY 14618. Either way, you'll put
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in print today on your bookshelf.
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2003 by Scott Fybush. |