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May 27, 2003
WALE Sold; Flips to Spanish
 By SCOTT FYBUSH
*The era of "dollar-a-holler" talk
programming on RHODE ISLAND's WALE (990 Greenville) came
to a close at seven o'clock Wednesday morning, when North American
Broadcasting handed over the keys to Cumbre Communications, which
won WALE's bankruptcy auction in Phoenix on Tuesday for a whopping
$2.35 million.
For the price, Cumbre gets a station that's seen much better
days. Though it claims "50,000 watts" of power, its
signal never matched up to the boastful coverage maps handed
to prospective talk hosts (see the example above). While the
maps claimed coverage of Boston and beyond, WALE's daytime signal
heads east into Providence and out over the fishes - and you
don't even want to ask about the night signal, assuming anyone
bothered to make the switch on time. (Station personnel were
reportedly told, should an FCC inspector show up, to offer to
get a manager - and then head for the back door and keep walking!)
Add to that the talk programming that arrived over bad voice-grade
phone lines (usually sold under deceptive pretenses to starstruck
folks with no radio experience who were told "we want to
make you a talk host"), and it's likely that nobody much
noticed, or mourned, when NABC's programming ended on WALE last
week.
And it's probably just as well that Cumbre is targeting a
completely fresh audience as it takes over 990. WALE is now broadcasting
in Spanish, competing with WPMZ (1110 East Providence) and some
of the leased-time programming on WRIB (1220 Providence) and
serving an audience that lives in some of the areas 990's signal
reaches best. (At night, the signal won't get to the Hispanic-rich
audiences in places like Pawtucket, but by day it should be fine.)
We hear Cumbre beat out some better-known names, including
Nassau and Salem, to get 990; we hope the high price proves to
be worth it!
Meanwhile, at the other end of the state, the "Washington
County Chamber of Commerce" (a group created specifically
to apply for an LPFM license) was granted 96.9 in Ashaway, down
near Westerly. The "Chamber of Commerce" is headed
by members of the family of Chris DePaola, licensee of full-power
WBLQ (88.1 Westerly).
And we're sorry to report the passing of C. Robert Ogren,
who died May 18 at age 59. Ogren worked as an engineer at Boston's
WLVI, WCVB and WBZ before becoming vice-president for engineering
at WPRI (Channel 12), a post he held for a dozen years before
returing last year.
 *In
MASSACHUSETTS, Pat Whitley is back to a full-time weekday
gig on WRKO (680 Boston), taking over the 9-noon slot that Doreen
Vigue and Darlene McCarthy have been holding down as the "Daytime
Divas."
Some Radio People on the Move in Worcester: Gordon Smith parted
ways with Citadel's WXLO (104.5 Fitchburg) on Friday; the station
promptly named Jay Beau Jones acting PD, and he's expected to
get the gig permanently. (Down the hall, WORC-FM 98.9 was holding
a nifty "WORC Reunion," bringing back some of the old-time
personalities from WORC 1310's top-40 days gone by...)
Meanwhile at Clear Channel, Tom Holt has taken over assistant
PD/music director duties at WSRS (96.1 Worcester) from Jackie
Brush; Brush stays on in middays and Holt keeps doing afternoon
drive.
Where are they now? Former WAAF personality Rocko has surfaced
in Cleveland, where he's now part of the morning team at WMMS
(100.7); speaking of WAAF, it's been granted another CP to make
the move from Asnebumskit Hill in Paxton to the WUNI (Channel
27) tower in Boylston; the clock is now ticking to a May 2006
deadline to complete that move.
*One new LPFM grant in NEW HAMPSHIRE:
The "Seacoast Arts and Cultural Alliance" was granted
106.1 in Portsmouth.
 *In Randolph,
VERMONT, WWWT (1320) flipped format last week, switching
from satellite oldies to a simulcast of news-talk WSYB (1380).
The move comes just a few months after sister station WCVR (102.1)
dropped country to begin simulcasting Burlington rocker WCPV
(101.3 Essex NY).
A few more LPFM grants: the Vermont Department of Transportation
gets 98.3 in Derby and 99.3 in Orleans; "Voice in the Kingdom
Radio" gets 96.1 in Newport - and the wonderfully-named
"Spavin Cure Historical Group" gets 98.1 in Enosburg
Falls. That sent us to Google, whereupon we learned that Enosburg,
hard by the Canadian border, was known a century ago for producing
"Kendall's Spavin Cure," a popular patent medicine
of the day. And "spavin," should you still be curious,
is a common degenerative bone disease in horses. Aren't you glad
you asked?
*Into NEW YORK we go, where radio
geeks near and far had their dials set on 770 Monday to catch
this year's "WABC Rewound," the excellent annual Memorial
Day tribute to WABC's days of Musicradio greatness. A sad note
this year: even as "Rewound" honored WABC morning man
Harry Harrison, who went on to WCBS-FM (101.1) and a long stint
there that just ended a few months ago, we received news of the
passing of his wife, "Pretty Patti" Harrison, who died
May 20 after a fight with cancer.
 Speaking of Harrison's
old CBS-FM morning slot, the station made it official last week:
Dan Taylor, who had been the station's midday man and Harrison's
interim replacement, is now the permanent morning host there.
Taylor's New York career began at WCBS-FM back in 1978, with
long stops at WHN, WNBC and WYNY along the way.
Randy Davis gets the nod to fill Taylor's old 9 to noon slot
on weekdays.
On the tower front, the FAA has thrown a wrench into the Metropolitan
Television Alliance's plans for a 2000-foot TV tower in Bayonne,
New Jersey; after some aspects of an initial FAA review came
back negative, the MTVA put its application on hold and is now
reportedly investigating erecting a temporary tower on Governors
Island while awaiting the construction of a 1776-foot skyscraper
at the World Trade Center site.
 No holdups, meanwhile,
over at the Durst Organization's Four Times Square site: this
week, we see some of the deconstruction taking place there, as
steelworkers remove the old mast that supported the FM antenna
there.
Once that mast has been dismantled, construction will get
underway on the new 385-foot ERI tower set to rise above the
roof; we'll keep providing pictures of the progress here at NERW
- and we'll try to get back to snap a few of our own later in
the summer.
Out on Long Island, AAA Entertainment applies for new calls
for its 92.9 Southampton CP: mark down WWHL(FM) instead of WCSO(FM)
for the station, due on the air this summer.
In Albany, WAMC (1400) has officially changed status from
commercial to noncommercial.
North of Syracuse, in Fulton, WAMF (1300) is recovering from
a fire that destroyed the Schuyler Commons shopping plaza, home
to its studios, last Sunday (May 18). Don DeRosa's station was
able to resume broadcasting from its transmitter site on Lakeshore
Road, but the studios (including a new digital audio system that
had just been installed the previous day) are apparently a total
loss.
Up in Watertown, translator W281AA (104.1) changes hands from
Clancy-Mance to Katharine A. Ingersoll; the translator had been
relaying Clancy-Mance's WTOJ (103.1 Carthage), last we heard.
In Rochester, Kevin LeGrett has parted ways with Infinity
Broadcasting, where he was GM of the four-station cluster that
includes WPXY, WZNE, WCMF and WRMM. He's headed to Citadel, where
he'll become a regional vice president based in Buffalo and overseeing
Buffalo, Syracuse, Ithaca and Binghamton.
And we leave the Empire State with this mystery: Granite Broadcasting's
WKBW-TV (Channel 7) in Buffalo won't let the revived "KB
Radio" (WWKB 1520) share its call letters - but it'll gladly
let Jim Carrey plaster his new movie Bruce Almighty with
WKBW references and logos? Discuss...
 *Another
AM station in CANADA is entering its final weeks. CFJR
(830 Brockville) signed on the transmitter of CFJR-FM (104.9)
last week, simulcasting its AC format as "104-9 'JRFM and
830 CFJR." Testing of the new transmitter is scheduled to
last several months; the AM station should go silent at the end
of the summer, we hear.
At the other end of Lake Ontario, CFBU (103.7 St. Catharines)
at Brock University is back on the air after going silent in
July 2002. The station has apparently resolved its dispute with
the Brock student government, and new operations manager George
Sanford is promising more community-oriented programming on the
revived signal.
*Just one note from NEW JERSEY: the
American Institute for Jewish Education's new LPFM on 107.9 in
Lakewood takes the WMDI-LP calls.
*In PENNSYLVANIA, Entercom applies
to boost day power on WOGY (1300 West Hazleton) from 500 to 5000
watts.
 Just across the
state line in West Virginia, a small plane struck the tower of
public radio WVPM (90.9 Morgantown) and public TV WNPB (Channel
24/DTV 33) last Wednesday, killing pilot Ken McLeod of Mississauga,
Ontario.
While the tower remained standing, it suffered serious damage
where the plane hit it. WVPM and WNPB remain off the air a week
later, and TV translator service to the northern tier of West
Virginia, from Wheeling to Martinsburg, was disrupted for several
days by the loss of the microwave links that came from the WNPB
tower.
*Finally this week, with just a few days
until the FCC sits down June 2 to figure out what to do about
the broadcast ownership rules, we offer this NERW "Mini-Rant":
This round of the ongoing debate about "how big is too
big" has attracted far more media attention than previous
debates (including the 1996 Telecommunications Act that started
the latest cycle in the process.)
That's a good thing - and there's a very sound argument to
be made that the mainstream broadcast media still haven't devoted
anywhere near the amount of attention the issue deserves - but
it's also managed to tangle the public discussion with plenty
of issues that can't really be laid at the feet of ownership
consolidation.
Take, for instance, Minot, North Dakota, where we've been
hearing incessantly about that train derailment last year. You
know the one - it released a cloud of ammonia gas over the town
early one morning, sending 300 people to the hospital.
The officials in Minot apparently tried to activate the Emergency
Alert System, but it didn't work, so they called the local radio
stations to try to get word out to the public. And because six
of those radio stations are owned by Clear Channel, and because
that cluster was running unstaffed at that middle-of-the-night
hour, the incident has gone down in legend as the symbol of all
that's purported to be "wrong" with the current ownership
limits.
Is it a good thing that most (not "all," as some
commentators would have it - of six FM and three AM stations
in Minot, Clear Channel owns four FMs and two AMs) of Minot's
radio stations are under common ownership? Probably not; it was
a quirk in the way the ownership limits were written that allowed
Clear Channel to consider several distant stations as part of
the Minot market, and that quirk is likely to be eliminated when
the rules are rewritten next week.
But let's imagine for a moment that this train crash had taken
place on the same cold January morning 35 years earlier, in the
winter of 1967. According to the Broadcasting Yearbook we
just pulled off the shelf here, Minot had the same three AM stations
in 1967. One (KHRT 1320, the one Clear Channel doesn't own today)
was a daytimer and would not have been on the air yet in those
early-morning hours in 1967. The Yearbook doesn't say,
but it's reasonable to guess that KCJB 910 and KLPM (now KRRZ)
1390 might well have signed off overnight back then as well.
And nobody even mentions TV when l'affaire Minot comes
up in the ownership-limits discussion - but today Minot is served
by five TV stations, at least three of which have some form of
local news (even though they're largely run as satellites of
stations in Bismarck and elsewhere). Were they staffed early
on that cold January morning in 2002? Would the two that existed
in 1967 (KMOT channel 10 and KXMC channel 13, the latter then
co-owned with KCJB radio) have been on the air overnight, or
had anyone home back then? Probably not.
So what actually happened in Minot, after nobody answered
the phone at the radio stations? It turns out that the police
eventually called station managers at home - and they in turn
called people in to get the word out to the public, which is
pretty much the same way it would have been handled in 1967.
Your editor began his broadcasting career, by the way, at
just the sort of mom-and-pop individually owned radio station
that the proponents of lower ownership limits would hold out
as the antidote to the evils of consolidation. Guess what happened
when I walked out the newsroom door at noon on Saturday? The
newsroom was unstaffed until 5 o'clock Monday morning, and had
anything happened overnight, when the station was off the air,
the phone would have gone just as unanswered as it did in Minot
more than a decade later.
What went wrong in Minot, in other words, had very little
to do with media consolidation. Had the EAS system worked properly,
the same automation technology that made it possible to lock
the door on six radio stations and walk away overnight would
in fact have gotten word of the emergency on the air much faster
than it might have been conveyed in 1967, regardless of whether
Minot was served by five broadcast voices under four owners (as
it was in 1967) or by 14 broadcast voices under seven owners
(as it was in 2002).
Focusing so intently on Minot also contributes to the perception
outside the broadcast community that a single company is somehow
responsible for everything that's not quite right in broadcasting
today.
We've written before about the demonization of Clear Channel,
and since we're not completely unconflicted on that issue these
days (your editor is also the editor of 100000watts.com, which
is owned by a small affiliate of Clear Channel), we'll leave
it at these two points: first, that Clear Channel's radio operations
are far less centralized than those who criticize the company
would admit, and there is a great deal of variation in the way
each market is managed (much more so than in other, much more
centralized, companies); and second, that whatever else the company
has or has not done, it employs some of the most talented engineers
in the business, particularly in the AM arena, where it has cleaned
up literally hundreds of substandard facilities that had been
neglected under those vaunted, but frequently cash-strapped "mom
and pop" owners. Enough said.
 Something has
changed, though, over the decades - but it has to do with the
aspect of the ownership rules least likely to be tweaked next
Monday.
A few months ago, a friend loaned me a stack of issues of
Broadcasting magazine from the late fifties and early
sixties.
If your only experience with that publication is the flimsy
Broadcasting & Cable that carries on the name
today, focused mostly on TV programming, these magazines would
be an eye-opener.
Back then, Broadcasting was the unquestioned magazine
of record in the industry, covering in excruciating detail every
aspect of the FCC's deliberations, programming issues, engineering
developments and much more.
Some of the issues of that time seem downright antiquated
to us now (will people ever pay to watch TV? will FM ever become
more than a niche medium? should cigarette ads be allowed on
the air?), but others - including what was then a debate about
whether a single owner could hold both one AM and one
FM in a market (!) - still ring fresh today.
But the biggest difference, by far, comes simply from looking
at the ads and reading some of the articles: many broadcast owners
of the day, bound by the restrictive "7+7+7" ownership
limits, took a level of pride in their stations that's almost
impossible to find today.
Look at the cover of the 1971 Broadcasting Yearbook
- for something like a decade and a half, it was a (no doubt
very expensive) advertisement from the Steinman Stations, Clair
McCollough, President. The exact lineup of stations varied over
the years; in 1971, the group was down to just WGAL in Lancaster
(market 44) and WTEV in New Bedford-Providence (market 29 - and
a station mired deeply in third place, at that.)
Yet there they are, proudly showing off for the rest of the
industry - and we can surmise that they spent just as much time
promoting themselves in their communities and doing the kind
of public service that was then mandated by the FCC and encouraged
by now-obsolete industry guidelines like the Television Code.
 Today, WGAL is a
small cog in the big Hearst-Argyle TV family, far outshadowed
by big-market cousins like WCVB in Boston; WTEV has become WLNE,
part of Freedom Broadcasting, and the ad on the cover of the
1998 Yearbook, the most recent in the collection
here, belongs (fittingly enough) to an investment bank.
I don't recall what Steinman did beyond broadcasting, but
for many owners back then, broadcasting was a sideline to a more
profitable business, whether insurance (WTIC, WBT) or heavy manufacturing
(Westinghouse) or flour milling (Fisher).
In hindsight, we can look at those days and those owners and
believe that broadcasters were all more enlightened, that
the airwaves sparkled with live, local content and that everyone
in the business enjoyed high pay and lifetime job security.
In reality, if you ask anyone who was around in those days,
it was anything but: for every high-minded corporate owner who
treated the broadcast division as a showpiece, there was a Gordon
Brown, the skinflint owner of WSAY in Rochester and WNIA in Buffalo,
operating from unpainted studios with lousy equipment and forcing
jocks to use house names like Mike Melody so they could be replaced
or reassigned at will - his will.
Voicetracking? Automation? All familiar techniques, even then,
especially at beautiful music FM stations. Only the technology
has changed - and for the better. (Unless you enjoy trying
to maintain an old punch-card, reels-and-carts automation system,
that is...)
National, cookie-cutter programming? Ladies and gentlemen,
Bill Drake... (and yet there are many, even today, who will hold
up 68 WRKO or 93 KHJ as being among the best top-40 radio stations
of all time, and they'd have a point.)
Newspaper/TV/radio cross-ownership? In the sixties, it was
still commonplace - and often resulted in extensive local news
coverage in all three media - just look at WHDH radio, television
and the Boston Herald-Traveler.
There is, in other words, very little that's new under the
sun; there is much that would have changed in the last decade
in the industry regardless of ownership limits, as witness the
audio capabilities of the PC we're writing this on - and perhaps
that's why we're having a hard time getting as worked up as some
of the activist groups about what the FCC may or may not decide
to do on Monday.
That said, a few peeks into the NERW crystal ball:
- Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership: The FCC has issued
so many waivers to this rule already that it will have little
choice but to make those cross-ownerships permanent and open
the door for a few more. It's hard to see that such cross-ownership
was such a bad thing while it existed, or that its return will
change the industry that much; as it stands, the synergies that
existing cross-ownerships have attained have been fairly limited.
- Multiple Network Ownership/TV Ownership Caps: Here,
the activists are most likely to score a win; it's not likely
that the Commission would allow NBC and CBS, for instance, to
come under common ownership. There will be some loosening of
TV ownership caps in big markets (giving NBC, for instance, a
triopoly in Los Angeles), but the anachronistic rule that should
be eliminated - counting UHF stations as having only half the
coverage of VHF stations against the national ownership cap -
won't go away, thus making a mockery of the 35% national ownership
cap that will probably be retained.
- Radio/TV Cross-Ownership: Again, the synergies that
existing cross-ownerships have achieved are pretty minimal -
some call-letter changes, some cross-promotion, some joint sales
efforts. If more such cross-ownerships are allowed - and it's
likely they will be - it won't change most of the things that
the activists are complaining about.
- Radio Ownership Caps: It would be interesting to see
a return to a national ownership limit. Forcing the sale of existing,
successful clusters in an intact way would bring new owners into
the business in a way that would give them a shot at being successful
(and would increase the likelihood of an owner taking the sort
of pride in a small group of stations that was common in the
Steinman Stations days.) That won't happen in this proceeding,
though; instead, we may see a nibbling away at the existing caps
on ownership within each market. But the damage there, such as
it is, is already done; forcing owners to shed one or two stations
from a cluster would likely fill the market with third-rate facilities
that have little or no chance of succeeding as stand-alones.
Meanwhile, the hearings on Monday will, by design, fail to
address some of the bigger problems facing radio today. There
will be no discussion of the outdated FM allocation rules that
create, under the guise of "first local service" to
suburban communities, a glut of FM signals serving big markets
at the expense of rural areas. The question of translator abuse,
and the application of wildly different allocations rules to
physically identical translator and LPFM facilities, will not
surface. There will be no talk of reimposing public service or
ascertainment requirements (absent which "first local service"
is utterly meaningless), nor will there be any discussion of
limiting the number of minutes of advertising a broadcaster can
carry in an hour, thus alleviating the programming clutter that's
driving many listeners away from radio completely (and turning
too many of the very limited TV broadcast facilities into nothing
but infomercials and home shopping.) And we won't hear any honest
discussion about the future of the medium-wave spectrum and alleviating
the interference that (even absent IBOC) already renders too
many stations afterthoughts in their own communities.
Begin addressing some of those issues, and we'll begin
rousing ourselves from the comfy new chair Mrs. NERW just provided
here at NERW Central and getting worked up about the whole thing.
See you next Monday!
(The preceding is solely the opinion of the editor. Responses
are, of course, always welcome at rant@fybush.com.)
 *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: 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
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2003 by Scott Fybush. |