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June 2, 2003
Vox Adds Berkshires Pair
By SCOTT FYBUSH
 *The
radio scene in western MASSACHUSETTS took another
step toward consolidation late last week, when Vox Media, which
bought WBEC (1420/105.5 Pittsfield) last year for $4.3 million,
turned that pair into a cluster.
Vox will pay about $3 million to buy WUHN (1110) and WUPE
(95.9) from Philip Weiner, who has owned a piece of the stations
since 1977 and has owned them outright for the last 15 years.
Right now, WUHN carries satellite classic country on its 5000-watt
daytime signal, while WUPE carries an AC format on its class
A FM signal. Expect some changes when Vox takes over, to better
complement the news-talk format on WBEC(AM) and the CHR of "Live
105" WBEC-FM...and we'd expect to see a consolidation of
studio facilities between WUPE/WUHN (now east of downtown on
Housatonic St.) and WBEC (west of downtown on Jason St.)
The deal leaves just two other commercial operators in Berkshire
County: locally-owned WBRK (1340/101.7) in Pittsfield and the
Berkshire Broadcasting combo of WSBS (860 Great Barrington) and
WNAW (1230)/WMNB (100.1) in North Adams.
Meanwhile in Springfield, a few Radio People on the Move:
Scott Laudani is moving south from his PD post at Saga's WLZX
(99.3 Northampton), taking over the PD reins at sister station
WAQY (102.1 Springfield). Laudani will continue to oversee WLZX
as well until a replacement is made. Across town at WHYN (560
Springfield), Brad Shepard is the new morning man, returning
to a market where he did seven years of wakeup duty at WMAS.
More recently, Brad (a veteran of Rochester radio) has been doing
fill-ins at WSRS/WTAG in Worcester and WWLI in Providence.
 The "Party"'s
over on 890 in Boston; Mega pulled the plug on Air Time Media's
LMA of WBPS (890 Dedham) last Thursday night (5/29) at 6, flipping
the calls to WAMG and the format to Spanish tropical "Mega."
Sound familiar? The calls and format move down from 1150 Boston,
which Mega is selling to Salem. 1150 picks up the WBPS calls
for now, as it continues to simulcast "Mega" until
the sale closes - but expect yet another call change there soon,
cementing 1150's hold on the "most callsigns in Boston radio
history" title. (NERW counts nine different ones: WCOP,
WACQ, WHUE, WSNY, WMEX, WROR, WNFT, WAMG and now WBPS!)
Some of Air Time's "Talk Party" programming will
show up on WBNW (1120 Concord) and WPLM (1390 Plymouth) beginning
this week.
*A VERMONT note (though it's
actually across the lake in Westport, New York): WCLX is back
to 102.5 after just a couple of weeks on its new 102.9 frequency.
Seems a problem with FCC paperwork (on Washington's end, not
WCLX's) left the station without authorization for the new frequency,
so it was either go dark or go back to 102.5; we're told the
issue will soon be resolved and WCLX will go back to the clearer
102.9 signal.
*A management shakeup at Clear Channel in
CONNECTICUT: Paula Messina moves from market manager at
CC's Hartford cluster to a new position of regional sales VP
for the company's New York Trading Region, which stretches from
Rochester, Syracuse and Binghamton down to the Hudson Valley
and across to western New England. CC regional VP Manuel Rodriguez
will add market manager responsibilities in Hartford to his portfolio.
 *Plenty
doing in CANADA this past week (after all, it wasn't a
holiday there) - and most of the action was in the nation's capital,
where CHUM Group pulled the plug on CHR "Kool 93-dot-9"
CKKL (93.9 Ottawa) at 9:39 AM on Friday.
 In its place, starting
at noon, is "Bob," a classic hits/hot AC mix that describes
itself as "80s, 90s and Whatever," with a format and
nickname borrowed from CHUM's CFWM (99.9) out in Winnipeg.
The station is running jockless for a week, but most of the
Kool airstaff is expected to be back when the station goes live
again later in June.
Down the hall at Media Market Mall, though, Tracy Hill is
out in mornings at CJMJ (Majic 100.3); no replacement has been
named yet.
Meanwhile in Oshawa, Milkman
Unlimited reports that the ownership change at CKGE (94.9)
and CKDO (1350) took place on Friday. Corus staffers Malcolm
Sinclair (PD), Shawn Turner (MD), Mark Orton (ND) and several
others, including CKGE's morning show, are out the door, with
only four full-timers moving over to the Durham Radio Group.
Over in London, CKDK (103.9 the Hawk) has a new morning show,
as Kyle "Sarge" McCone moves to middays and is replaced
by Pete Newman and Lisa Brooks. Paul Damon moves from afternoons
to mornings on CFPL-FM (95.9, "FM96") to replace Newman,
while Jeff McArthur moves from FM96 mornings to afternoons.
In Kitchener, CKGL (570) has replaced the local Ken Vanlith
show with the syndicated Dr. Joy Browne.
Up in Montreal, top-rated morning host Normand Braithwaite
is taking a year off from his "Y'e trop d'bonne heure"
show on CKOI (96.9), but he'll be back in September 2004 (with
a contract running through 2008); Gildor Roy takes over in the
meantime.
And over in the Maritimes, we hear CFAN (790 Miramichi-Newcastle
NB) is having some trouble getting its new FM signal to tune
up properly - so expect the AM signal to remain on the air through
the summer.
*In NEW YORK, the Metropolitan TV
Association (MTVA) has signed a deal to locate all of the city's
major TV transmitters on the new skyscraper that will rise on
the World Trade Center site. The pact will put 11 analog and
11 digital signals on the air from the new tower - both the stations
that were on WTC (2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 31 and 47) and two that
never were (41 and 68) - thus easing the load on the Empire State
Building once the new site is ready. The target date is 2008,
but this is New York, after all...
 Meanwhile at 4 Times
Square, the work continues to create a new auxiliary facility,
ensuring that broadcasters will never again find themselves as
completely off the air as they were after 9/11.
That's the old tower being lifted off the roof last week;
now the work can begin on a new 385-foot mast - and we'll keep
bringing you pictures as the work continues.
Out on Long Island, Freddie Colon has said goodbye to the
Empire State. The veteran of WKTU (both versions), WTJM and other
New York stations had been doing afternoons at WALK-FM (97.5
Patchogue); now he's heading out to Tucson to do mornings at
KGMG, one of the few remaining "Jammin' Oldies" stations
out there.
WLIR (92.7 Garden City) has a new slogan - "Modern Hit
Music" - but it won't get its own PD. Jon Daniels (PD of
sister station WDRE) and Andre Ferro (PD of sister station WXXP)
have been named permanent co-PDs of the station.
Sorry to report the passing of Andre Bernard, 25-year veteran
music host at WNYC-FM (93.9); he died May 22 of a heart attack
at age 78. Also sorry to report that Peter Kanze, one of the
driving forces behind both "WABC Rewound" and "The
Airwaves of New York," lost his job last week as advisor
to Westchester Community College's WARY (88.1 Valhalla).
Moving upstate, WCKL (560 Catskill) is silent; word is that
it will be back at the end of June under its new owner, Black
United Fund of New York.
And in Auburn, WDWN (89.1) has resumed running World Radio
Network programming in off-hours; that programming had disappeared
during studio renovations last year that moved the Cayuga Community
College station into a trailer.
*In NEW JERSEY, Millennium and Nassau
have resolved their squabbling, clearing the way for Nassau to
buy WEMG-FM (104.9 Egg Harbor City) from Mega and for Millennium
to buy WCHR-FM (105.7 Manahawkin) from Nassau. Will Nassau's
"Hawk" format stay put on 105.7 when the dust clears?
Stay tuned...
*And just a couple of PENNSYLVANIA
notes: religious WPEL (1250/96.5) in Montrose marked its fiftieth
anniversary last week, still going strong; across the state line
in Canton, Ohio, Bob & Tom have landed in mornings on WRQK
(106.9).
But the week's big news, ultimately, comes
from outside our region. Today is the FCC's vote on modifying
ownership restrictions, a move some are describing as "historic."
Last week, we began exploring some of the bigger issues that
surround ownership limits; in this week's NERW Mini-Rant,
we offer a few final thoughts before the FCC votes:
For whatever reason, this particular round of debates over
ownership limits (remember, this is supposed to be a review of
the 1996 Communications Act that takes place every two years)
has attracted far more attention than any previous changes to
the status quo.
It seems to us that there are two groups paying particular
attention this time around. One, heard most often on radio message
boards and anywhere else the industry's worker bees gather, is
made up of those who actually work - or worked - in radio or
TV. Many of them look around the industry as it is now and still
hope to see the industry as it was 30 years ago - live DJs spinning
records at 3AM in the dimly-lit control rooms of 250-watt graveyard
AM stations, newscasts every hour, the whole works.
Your editor is just as fond of that romantic vision of radio
as anyone, and just as pleased to find the handful of stations
where that dream still lives. But if that fantasy ever really
existed (the "news" was too often hastily ripped from
the teletype and tossed off as a forced obligation to be disposed
of to get back to the records; the talented DJs whose names we
still remember now existed amidst a whole lot of mediocre overnight
jocks long forgotten; "mom and pop" too often didn't
have the cash to keep the paychecks from bouncing), it's far
gone now, and nothing the FCC can or will do on Monday will bring
it back.
Let's face it, "disc jockey" - or any other occupation
that puts someone behind the mike or in front of the camera -
has never been the sort of career that employed more than a few
thousand people in America. (Why do you think so many of them
know each other?)
Whether it was 4,000 or so stations in the sixties with an
average of five or six jocks each, or more than 15,000 stations
today with an average of one or two, there has never been a guarantee
of a good job or lifetime employment in the business. It's cold
comfort to the many talented people now out of work - and we'll
grant that there is a problem with an industry so
consolidated that getting fired from one station can get someone
blackballed from hundreds more around the country - but it doesn't
seem to us like something the FCC can or should be trying to
fix.
Along a similar tack are the complaints of those who say the
lifting of ownership caps has made it impossible for "mom
and pop" owners to get into broadcasting.
It's true that anyone of average (or even much better than
average) means can't afford to spend the tens or hundreds of
millions of dollars to buy a major station in a major market
- but that was just as true in 1960 as it is today.
Far outside the major markets, though, plenty of moms and
pops are doing just fine, operating far below the radar of even
the smallest "big" groups. I've been fortunate, over
the last few years, to get to know some of these folks - Dennis
Jackson, with his nifty small-town FM stations in places like
Farmington, N.H. and Windham, N.Y.; Bob Bittner, with his incredibly
lucky timing that landed him an AM bargain in the heart of Boston
12 years ago; Kevin Fennessy and Joe Reilly, reviving dead AM
signals in a forgotten corner of northeast Pennsylvania; Stanley
Coning, keeping the beautiful music dream alive on a station
he built himself in Eaton, Ohio. It hasn't been easy for any
of them, but they've managed to find niches in the business,
just as generations of small owners did before them.
What's missing now, I fear, is the vast middle ground. Back
in the "good old days," or so I'm told, the floors
(and hospitality suites) of the NAB convention and other gatherings
swarmed with medium-sized station and group owners. As we explored
last week, these were not always - or even often - people dedicated
solely to broadcasting. Car dealers, insurance agents, real estate
developers, even newspaper publishers - they each had a chance
to buy four or five or six stations among the 5,000 or so, and
many took an outsized pride in their little pieces of the pie.
When those national ownership caps fell away - one of the
earliest results of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, you may
recall - station prices rose, the car dealers and real estate
developers took the profits they deserved for their many years
of hard work in the business (the timing, it turned out, was
perfect; many owners who had built their stations in the boom
times of the fifties were primed for retirement, while others
who had grabbed the Docket 80-90 FM expansion - or should we
say overbuilding? - of the eighties were struggling and happy
to cash out) and the mega-groups took over. Like so many other
aspects of American life, the local radio station went from being
owned by someone in or near the community to being a branch office
of a national conglomerate.
That's not always a bad thing - see our comments above about
how our memories of the "good old days" are sometimes
clouded - but it certainly leads to emptier floors at the NAB
and a certain intangible lack of local pride in broadcasting.
We'll come back to this point.
First, though, it's necessary to address the other group that's
making its voice heard in the latest round of ownership rulings:
the activist groups.
We've heard a lot of them this past week, staging small but
noisy demonstrations outside radio stations in big cities (and
we've already addressed the interesting question of why one company
gets all the negative attention that should rightly be spread
among several) and garnering at least some coverage in the print
media.
What is it they want? To some extent, the street crowd appears
(at least from a distance) to be made up of the same groups that
will protest anything just for the sport of it. Behind the scenes,
though, that unlikely coalition (whose members range from the
National Rifle Association to NOW) seems to have one idea in
common: that changing the ownership rules, especially as they
apply to multiple stations in major markets, will somehow affect
the content of the media they consume.
That's an interesting theory, to be sure, but not one borne
out very well by a study of the history of American broadcasting.
For more than eighty years, no matter how broadcast ownership
and regulation has been structured - individual experimenters,
single-station owners, dominant national networks, the 7/7/7
rule or today's deregulatory world - broadcasting in America
has never been a place where deep discussion of issues
and controversy has been a common part of programming. Unlike
Britain, where annual license fees on radios and TVs fund the
serious and anything-but-commercial programming of the BBC's
Radio 4, or Canada, where an ever-shrinking pool of government
funding helps to keep the CBC going, we simply have no tradition
of in-depth coverage of news and issues.
Those in search of such programming have always been forced
to turn away from the big commercial media properties, whether
to small operations like Pacifica or, more recently, to large
national providers like NPR (whose extensive corporate underwriting
and sympathetic coverage of big business should, yet somehow
never does, belie the claims that it's exclusively the domain
of left-wingers) or C-SPAN.
Just about everything else - whether it's Dateline
or Rush Limbaugh or the morning shift on WINS - is as much a
part of the entertainment industry as it is the "news"
business.
And just as those who wanted a deeper look at the issues sixty
years ago had a choice of several daily newspapers and national
magazines, today's serious news consumer has hundreds of choices,
in print and on the Web, of deeper news and opinion sources of
every possible political bent. Anyone who, in 2003, depends solely
on broadcast news for their daily diet of information and opinion
gets exactly what they deserve.
(This is, we suspect, one reason why the whole deregulation
story has been met with a vast public yawn of indifference: most
Americans understand that commercial TV and radio exist primarily
to provide them with entertainment. The question of whether that
entertainment is produced by the networks or by a wealthy independent
producer, or whether the DJ introducing that major-label pop
star is in town or 800 miles away, is far less important than
the question of "is there anything good on?" And if
there isn't, or if the listener or viewer wants something out
of the mainstream, there are of course now many thousands of
other entertainment choices, from independent cinemas to niche
cable channels to downloaded MP3s, to choose from, and ample
evidence that they're being chosen as a viable alternative to
mainstream commercial media.)
That said, we have to give some credit to ABC's Nightline for
at least trying to delve into this particular issue in its 22
minutes last Tuesday night (including 10 seconds of our good
friend and colleague, consultant Donna Halper.) Among the points
briefly made on the show, by both Ted Koppel and Barry Diller,
was one that gets to the heart of the real change that deregulation
has wrought:
"We used to be afraid of the FCC."
As recently as a generation ago, the medium-sized broadcasters
of the world (remember them, a few paragraphs ago?) indeed lived
in fear of M Street. Just enough licenses were pulled (albeit,
too often, for reasons that were overtly political) to persuade
everyone else to comply with "voluntary" industry codes
about providing public service programming, airing contrasting
points of view (though rarely in any depth), limiting advertising
inventory and so on. Even if it was at the point of a poorly-concealed
gun aimed at the industry from Washington, regulation truly affected
broadcast content in a way barely imagined today. We'd contend
that it even contributed to that sort of local pride in broadcasting
that's now mostly gone. Those sorts of regulations are not, we'd
note, even being contemplated in the present set of debates,
which seem focused primarily on local ownership caps and cross-ownership
rules.
But even before ownership limits were deregulated, Congress
and the FCC (which, let us not forget, operates primarily at
the whim of Capitol Hill) took their hands off content. The Fairness
Doctrine was first out the window, followed quickly (and very
quietly) by the gutting of rules that made it possible (if unlikely)
to successfully challenge an existing owner's license. Add to
that the transition, never mentioned outside the trade media,
from allotting new licenses through public hearings to a straightforward
auction process, and it becomes clear that by the time we reached
this juncture in the deregulation process, the well-meaning folks
with the protest signs on Sixth Avenue and Rockville Pike and
Fleet Street are a few years too late.
(Comments are always welcome at rant@fybush.com;
please let me know whether it's OK to publish them and whether
you'd like your name used. We'll run some of them here later
this week.)
We'll be back next Monday with some comments on whatever plan
the FCC does devise, plus the rest of the week's news. See you
then!
 *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.
*The twelfth edition of the M
Street Radio Directory will soon go to the printer,
and we'll have a special offer for NERW readers coming within
a few weeks. Stay tuned!
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is copyright
2003 by Scott Fybush. |