NERW 11/19/2012: Jeff Kaye, RIP – and Erie’s new CHR
In this week’s issue… Remembering Jeff Kaye – “Happi” launches in Erie – Binnie, Shapiro shuffle Nassau signals – LMA in northern PA – Univision flips NYC Spanish FM – Geoff Fox gone at WTIC-TV – WCSH/WLBZ news director out
By SCOTT FYBUSH
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*You’ve probably never heard of a guy named “Martin Krimski.” But under his broadcasting alter ego, “Jefferson Kaye,” he was one of the most prominent voices in top 40 radio in the 1960s and 1970s in Boston and Buffalo, then an important part of the full-service landscape in Buffalo, and eventually one of the nation’s top voice-over talents from his base in New Jersey.
On Friday, he died in Binghamton, where he had been living in recent years to be closer to his family as he battled cancer.
After serving in the Air Force during the Korean War, Kaye began his radio career in Providence in the late 1950s, where Krimski became “Jeff Krimm,” then “JK the DJ” on WHIM (1110) and WRIB (1220). By 1961, his rich pipes had caught the attention of Boston’s WBZ (1030), which brought him on board as part of the Westinghouse station’s transition from the middle-of-the-road “Live Five” to a more aggressive top-40 format. Kaye quickly made a mark for himself on WBZ, moving up from overnights to weekday afternoons. And he distinguished himself as well as the host of Sunday night’s “Hootenanny,” the show that brought folk music to a large and passionate audience around New England and helped to make performers like Joan Baez into household names.
In 1966, Kaye moved from Boston to Buffalo’s WKBW (1520), where he’d achieve his greatest radio fame. Starting out as the night jock riding KB’s big 50 kilowatt directional signal all across the northeast, Kaye soon moved into the program director chair, where he played a huge role in shaping the tight sound of “one of America’s two great radio stations” during its heyday. Kaye was the driving force behind WKBW’s celebrated “War of the Worlds” recreation in 1968, as well as a second version in 1971.
Kaye could be gruff – broadcaster Bob Savage still treasures Kaye’s 1969 memo announcing his hiring as a weekend jock at KB and warning fellow staffers, “If you see him in the halls, don’t bother speaking to him or developing any close ties….he may not last.” But he was meticulous about every element of the station’s on-air sound, and he kept WKBW at or near the top of the ratings throughout his tenure.
In May 1974, Kaye moved to WBEN (930) to become the afternoon host and then only the third morning man in that station’s history, replacing the legendary Clint Buehlman after his four-decade run. It was through Kaye’s work on Buffalo Bills broadcasts on WBEN that he came to the attention of NFL Films, where he eventually succeeded yet another legendary broadcast talent, “Voice of God” John Facenda. Kaye moved from Buffalo to New Jersey, building a voiceover career that also included several decades as the on-air voice of Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV (Channel 6).
Kaye retired from NFL Films in 1990 as his health began to decline. In 2002, Kaye was inducted into the Buffalo Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and he made other appearances from time to time as well, including a cameo in a 1998 Buffalo “War of the Worlds” recreation on WGRF and WEDG. In 1993, your editor was privileged to bring him back to WBZ’s airwaves as a guest on a special history edition of David Brudnoy’s talk show. That audio has been out of circulation for nearly two decades now, but I’m pleased to be able to offer it to NERW subscribers – just go pay a visit to our new Audio Archives page to hear the hour when we brought Jeff and Carl deSuze back together for what would be their last time on WBZ’s airwaves.
Jeff Kaye would have turned 76 next month. Funeral services will be held this morning in Binghamton, and donations in his memory can be made to the American Cancer Society, Southern NY Region, 13 Beech Street, Johnson City, NY 13790.
*The week’s other big story comes from northwestern PENNSYLVANIA, where something rare happened last week: the launch of a brand-new signal in a sizable market as a competitive stand-alone commercial station.
It’s happening, of course, in Erie, where Rick Rambaldo made a name for himself in the late 1980s when he bought a sleepy rimshot FM station and built it into “Rocket 101,” WRKT (100.9 North East), then grew that single station into one of the biggest clusters in the market before selling to what’s now Connoisseur Media.
As of Friday at noon, Rambaldo and his partner, auto dealer Dave Hallman, Jr., are actively competing against Connoisseur and Townsquare with their new Erie Radio Company LLC. That’s the new name for what started out as “First Channel Communications,” which paid just over $1.3 million at an FCC auction last year for a new class A signal on 92.7 licensed to Lawrence Park, just east of Erie.
If you’ve been following those spectrum auctions, you know that most of the signals being auctioned are pretty iffy, squeezed into the last remaining open corners of the dial in remote areas. This one’s a bit of an exception, made possible by changes in the FM protection rules between the U.S. and Canada that once protected the signal of London, Ontario’s CJBX (92.7) on Lake Erie’s south shore. CJBX no longer receives protection from interference within the U.S., but it still puts a potent signal into much of the area around Erie, and that means the new Lawrence Park 92.7 will itself likely suffer interference outside the immediate Erie area, especially in the hills to the south and especially in the summertime.
WEHP’s tower atop South Shore Towers
Still, a new signal is a new signal, and Erie Radio is making the most of it. Over the last few weeks, Rambaldo’s been building a brand-new transmitter site atop a luxury apartment building on the lakefront just west of downtown, and from all indications he’s doing it right. There’s a new 73-foot tower in place atop the South Shore Towers, with an ERI directional antenna and a Nautel HD transmitter…and not only is there an Omnia processor, but Omnia head honcho Frank Foti himself appears to have made the drive over from Cleveland to be there in person for the station’s launch.
So what’s Erie Radio doing with its new signal? We already knew the new calls – WEHP – and now we know those calls stand for “Happi,” Rambaldo’s tag for a new top-40 format that puts the new 92.7 in direct competition with his old NextMedia/Connoisseur station, WRTS (Star 103.7) and with Townsquare’s “i104.3,” a more recent entry heard on WXKC (99.9)’s HD2 and a centrally-located translator. But while i104.3 is totally automated and Star has been depending on out-of-market talent such as Ryan Seacrest, “Happi” will be going local once its studio is ready in a few weeks.
Here’s what we know so far about the airstaff: former WRTS morning host Shari McBride will be Happi’s operations manager and morning co-host, alongside newcomer “Beeber,” who’s inbound from North Carolina. “Girl” will do middays, “Brody” will be the afternoon host, and evenings will give local YouTube star Katie Santry her first radio gig. (She’s already been doing videos for the station, including one showing the tower being hoisted to the rooftop by crane.)
There’s no website or streaming audio feed just yet; those will presumably be coming along with Happi’s new downtown studio, which will be at 1229 State Street, just four blocks south of the storefront studios Rambaldo built for NextMedia in the old Boston Store.
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From the NERW Archives
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: November 21, 2011 - The CRTC has picked winners in the battle for open AM channels in Montreal, and a big player has lost out. Cogeco, which originally hoped to reactivate the silent 690 and 940 frequencies for French- and English-language traffic channels subsidized by the provincial government, didn’t get either; instead, 690 goes to Bell Media, which will move English-language sports CKGM (“TSN Radio”) there from 990. 940 goes to the Tietolman-Tetrault partnership, which will launch a French-language news-talk station there – and 990 won’t go dark, instead going to Evanov for a French-language station aimed at Montreal’s gay community. Much more later this week on NERW…— Our big story as we start this holiday-shortened week comes, for once, from somewhere outside our usual NERW territory – but the developments at CBS Radio’s cluster in Washington, DC have plenty of relevance to NEW YORK and PENNSYLVANIA as well. In January, CBS will flip one of its Washington-market FM signals, WLZL (99.1), from Spanish hits “El Zol” to all-news, with a heavy helping of influence from its New York City stations. The Acela-corridor connection starts in the program director’s office, already occupied by Robert Sanchez, who came to Washington after working as assistant news director at WCBS (880) in New York, as well as earlier at WINS (1010). Down the hall in the general sales manager’s office, there’s another WINS veteran: Danny Bortnick has been working as local sales manager at CBS Radio’s WXRK/WWFS in New York, and if that last name sounds familiar, there’s a reason: his father is Chuck Bortnick, who’s the regional VP for Cumulus Radio in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. But the Big Apple connections don’t end with the staff: there’s also the matter of the new all-newser’s callsign – yes, it will flip to the legendary WNEW calls that were a staple in New York radio from 1934 until 2007, when CBS parked the calls in Florida for future use. (As our colleague Dave Hughes down at DCRTV.com notes, it’s only fair play – the WFAN calls that have become synonymous with sports radio at CBS in New York had an earlier run in Washington on AM, FM and TV. And we’d note that the station that became WTOP in Washington started out in the 1920s as WTRC in…Brooklyn!) CBS has already started the callsign move, putting the WNEW calls on its 1580 AM talk signal in the Washington market, long known as WPGC and more recently being used to park a heritage DC call, WHFS. The launch of the new “WNEW” in Washington will put CBS in an unfamiliar position as the all-news underdog against an established competitor, and therein lies more irony: WTOP-FM (103.5), now owned by Hubbard, has been a stalwart CBS Radio affiliate for many decades and is the descendant of a former CBS owned-and-operated station, the old WTOP (1500), which went from CBS to the Washington Post in 1954. It was the Post that launched the all-news format on WTOP in 1968, though it was only under later owners (Outlet and then, most prominently, Bonneville) that the station found its way to the top of the ratings and revenue. In recent years, WTOP has become the highest-revenue station in the nation (reportedly some $60 million last year), so it’s not hard to see why CBS covets a piece of that ad revenue – but until now it’s been loath to disrupt a solid affiliate relationship with WTOP, and it’s been lacking a full portfolio of available FM signals to use in Washington as well. Even the class B 99.1 signal won’t quite be full-market: it rimshots Washington from the east, missing out on much of the suburban commute from Virginia that’s at the core of WTOP’s listenership. And here’s where the next NERW-land connection comes in: CBS is bolstering its signal roster in Washington with the $8.5 million purchase of Family Radio’s WFSI (107.9 Annapolis MD), which will become the new home of the “El Zol” Spanish-language format under an LMA starting December 1. WFSI was one of two stations Family put up for sale earlier in 2011 to help cover the costs of the extensive outreach campaign the California-based religious network was running to promote founder Harold Camping’s prediction that the world was going to end in October. The other station being sold is Philadelphia-market WKDN (106.9 Camden NJ), and despite reports that it, too, was headed to CBS Radio ownership, so far there’s been no announcement about WKDN’s future. *Elsewhere in NEW YORK, Equinox Broadcasting keeps growing in Binghamton, thanks to some very innovative use of translators and HD Radio subchannels: they’r now running HD2, HD3 and HD4 channels on WRRQ (106.7 Port Dickinson). 106.7-HD2 is a simulcast of Equinox’s oldies station, WCDW (100.5 Susquehanna PA), 106.7-HD3 launched over the summer as soft AC “Sunny 107.1,” simulcasting on analog translator W296BS from Ingraham Hill – and as of last week, there’s now a 106.7-HD4, AAA “The Drive,” with a simulcast on analog translator W283AG (104.5). Operations manager Steve Shimes tells NERW he believes it’s the first cluster anywhere to run music-formatted HD/translator combos all the way up to HD4; we know of at least one other group in the region (Jeff Andrulonis’ Colonial in Olean) that’s using HD2/3/4 to feed translators, but mostly with talk and sports formats. *Radio People on the Move: after a dozen years in the PD chair at WMAS-FM (94.7 Springfield), Rob Anthony exits the Citadel-turned-Cumulus station later this week, moving over to Clear Channel as a regional programming manager overseeing Springfield, Worcester, Manchester and Portsmouth. Those markets were missing from Clear Channel’s big announcement of regional programming oversight last month. Where are they now? Steve Murphy, an original staffer at WFCC (107.5 Chatham) and more recently PD of the late, lamented WFMR in Milwaukee, is heading for California in the new year to become music director at KDB (93.7 Santa Barbara), one of the last remaining commercial classical stations in the nation. Murphy will continue to voicetrack for the World Classical Network based at WFCC, where he’s still heard in morning drive. *Things are getting funny in CANADA: RadioInsight.com reports Astral’s CKSL (1410) in London, Ontario has registered the domains “1410Funny.com” and “Funny1410.ca” for an upcoming format flip to full-time comedy. Astral has been running programming from the 24/7 Comedy network during overnight hours at CFRB (1010 Toronto). *On TV, there’s one fewer over-the-air signal serving Toronto, Hamilton, London and Ottawa: Quebecor has surrendered its license for CKXT, the former “Toronto One” that operated on channel 52 in Toronto beginning in 2003.Original owner Craig Media struggled to find ratings and revenue for the station in the crowded Golden Horseshoe marketplace and eventually sold it to Quebecor, which rebranded it as “Sun TV” and continued to struggle with the station. Earlier this year, the company shut down what was left of “Sun TV” and turned its attention to a new all-news channel, Sun News, which was simulcast on CKXT starting in April. The CRTC questioned the rationale for the simulcast, and Quebecor agreed to surrender the broadcast license, shutting down the over-the-air transmitters at the end of the day on October 31. Meanwhile, a surviving Toronto DTV station wants a better RF channel: CJMT (“Omni.2″) has asked the CRTC for permission to move from RF channel 51 to 40, where it says it can put out a better signal from the CN Tower. Five Years Ago: November 19, 2007 - *One of the best-loved voices in PENNSYLVANIA radio history has been silenced.Hy Lit died Saturday, almost two weeks after undergoing what was supposed to have been routine knee surgery for an injury he suffered when he fell Nov. 4, followed by what his son Sam tells the Philadelphia Inquirer was a series of “bizarre complications.”
In 1968, Lit made a brief shift to the world of “underground” FM radio, helping to launch a rock format on WDAS-FM (105.3) before returning to WIBG in 1969. Later in the seventies, Lit would work at WIFI (92.5), then at WPGR (1540) and WSNI (104.5) in the eighties. The next phase of Lit’s long career in Philly radio began in 1989, when he joined CBS’ WOGL-FM (98.1) and became the first voice heard on WOGL (1210) the next year. Lit remained with WOGL-FM until 2005, when he retired from the station as part of a settlement of an age-discrimination lawsuit against CBS. Even after a half-century on the air, though, Lit remained active in the business, launching a streaming radio station at HyLitRadio.com that’s still active under Sam Lit’s leadership. Lit was an early inductee into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia’s Hall of Fame, among many honors. He was 73. *Few PDs are as closely identified with a cluster as Jim Rising was with Entercom’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton station group – he was there for the sign-on of WKRZ (98.5 Wilkes-Barre) three decades ago, and he rose (no pun intended) to become OM of that station, as well as market leader WGGY, news-talk WILK and AAA WDMT (102.3 Pittston), where he also served as PD. Rising resigned from the cluster last Monday, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors (and not only because his page of links at the WDMT website included one to this page, in which he wrote “Scott has a great grip on this business and is usually right.” Thanks, Jim…) *The week’s other big pair of stories came out of the talk radio arena in MASSACHUSETTS, where the Howie Carr/WRKO/WTKK saga came to an end (for now, anyway) with the announcement on Thursday that Carr was ending his fight to break out of his contract with Entercom’s WRKO and would be back on the air there the following afternoon.
As it turned out, the final piece of the puzzle snapped into place rather neatly: with Carr blocked from jumping over to its morning-drive slot, Greater Media’s WTKK (96.9) went right back to that slot’s previous occupant, announcing on Friday that it had signed up as the first affiliate of Don Imus’ new morning show, syndicated out of Citadel’s WABC (770 New York). While WABC had initially said that syndication of Imus wouldn’t begin until a month or so after his Dec. 3 relaunch in New York, WTKK says it will be on board promptly at 6 AM that day. So what have we learned from the last few months? It appears that even if Carr didn’t get what he really wanted – WTKK’s big FM signal, free from Red Sox preemptions and from having to share a signal with Tom Finneran’s stillborn morning show – he still won something in the end, that being a bump in his salary. WRKO gets to breath a partial sigh of relief, having managed to hold on to its star personality even as many of its other dayparts are sagging. (Did we mention the morning show yet?) Over at WTKK, we’ve got to think that all those weeks of Carr-lawsuit headlines at least yielded some decent publicity, and there’s sure to be a pretty healthy curiosity bump yet to come when Imus comes back to its airwaves. (Or perhaps it’ll be Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick doing mornings; over the weekend, his picture showed up in place of Imus’ all over the WTKK website, for some strange reason…) In the long run, though, it’s hard (at least from where we sit) to get very excited about the state of Boston talk radio, post-Carr squabble. A morning battle between Carr on WTKK and Finneran on WRKO would have sparked some excitement, and might have inspired Carr to a fresher approach, while Carr’s departure from WRKO would have forced that station to rethink its afternoon lineup, which might have brought some new talent to the city’s talk scene. (Or it might have meant a permanent afternoon berth for Todd Feinburg, given the way things were going.) Will Carr last until the 2012 end of his new WRKO contract? Will he manage to hang on to his New England affiliate base? Stay tuned… Over on the TV side of things, the Springfield market is finally getting its own Fox affiliate, but not the way we’d thought it was going to happen. LIN’s WWLP-TV (Channel 22) added sister station WFXQ-CA (Channel 28) last year, and both the call letters and insider buzz strongly hinted that the low-power signal (presently a simulcast of WWLP’s NBC programming) would eventually become the market’s Fox outlet.
The new Fox outlet will replace Hartford’s WTIC-TV (Channel 61) on cable systems in Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin counties, and it will have the Springfield market’s first 10 PM newscast, produced by the WGGB news staff. (That staff shrunk by a few people last week; Gormally says the station was slightly overstaffed when he took over, which seems an odd claim for a former Sinclair outlet, and he’s not saying exactly how many pink slips he handed out in the last few days.) *Is there anything in radio more depressing than pre-holiday budget cuts? Probably not – especially the one last week that cost a veteran NEW YORK air talent his longtime job. Al Bernstein was not just part of the inaugural WLTW (106.7) airstaff back in 1984; he’d spent several years at the station’s predecessor, WKHK, and a decade before that had started his career on 106.7′s original occupant, WRVR. Along the way, Bernstein also spent time at WQIV (104.3), WBLS (107.5), WYNY (97.1) and WNEW-FM (102.7) – and then, of course, 23 years as the late-morning host on Lite. Now he’s out, 33 years almost to the day since his WQIV debut, following fellow WLTW veterans Bill Buchner, Stephen Roy and J.J. Kennedy, and leaving Valerie Smaldone as the sole survivor among WLTW’s charter airstaff. Who’ll snap up Bernstein’s versatile talents? *There’s a rare cross-border format move taking place across the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, as the “Kix” country format migrates from US-licensed WBDR (102.7 Cape Vincent) to one of the newest FM signals over in CANADA. John Wright, who owns “K-Rock” CIKR (105.7 Kingston), has been programming WBDR from his Kingston studios under a local marketing agreement with owner Clancy-Mance Communications, which hung on to WBDR even as it sold the rest of its Watertown/Ogdensburg cluster.Now Wright has a second signal on the Canadian side of the border, the new CKXC (93.5 Kingston) – and that new 93.5 signal is now “93.5 Kix FM,” simulcasting the country format with 102.7. It’s not yet clear whether 102.7 will end up changing formats (could this explain why it briefly applied for, but then never used, the calls WXKK a year ago?), or whether we’ll see a return to the split simulcast that WBDR was using a few years back when it and WBDI (106.7 Copenhagen) were simulcasting top 40 as “The Border,” with one signal carrying spots aimed at Canadian listeners and the other carrying a U.S. spot load. Perhaps the Canadian flag in the 93.5 logo is a clue – or maybe we’re reading way too much into this! Ten Years Ago: November 20, 2002 - The sale of the CBS affiliate in Erie, PENNSYLVANIA has some citizens worried that their city will soon be served by only two TV news operations — and it appears their concerns aren’t far off the mark. WSEE-TV (Channel 35) recently changed hands, becoming the first property of Initial Broadcasting of Pennsylvania, a company controlled by Kevin Lilly, whose father, George, controls SJL Communications, which owns Erie’s NBC affiliate, WICU (Channel 12). And later this week, Initial will lay off 18 of WSEE’s 66 staffers, including weekend sports guy Red Hughes and weekend weathercaster Tina Zboch. (Weekend news anchor Kara Calabrese is leaving of her own volition.) Also leaving is 28-year WSEE veteran Carol Pella, who tells the Erie Times-News that she was offered a management position but turned it down. WSEE wants to enter into a joint operating agreement with WICU, which will handle some of the station’s back-office and master-control duties. Under the JOA, the stations’ news operations would remain separate, with about 25 to 30 employees remaining at WSEE to handle those duties. WSEE is also applying to replace its current STL tower at its Peach Street studios with a taller tower which would also carry microwave links to the WICU studio building. On the other side of the Keystone State, the ever-impatient Citadel cluster in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton has struck again, this time cancelling all local talk at WARM (590 Scranton), which just returned from oldies to news-talk this past April. WARM’s local morning show employed host Rob Neyhard, newscaster Paula Deignan and reporter Bobby Day; producer Sam Liguori was also out the door when the show was cancelled last Friday. WARM remains with the talk format, albeit all off the satellite; we note as well that the 590warm.com domain, which is still linked even from Citadel’s corporate Web site, apparently expired and was registered by someone with no connection with the station. It’s a sad story for a station that once owned the market…. We’ll start our NEW YORK news down in the big city, where your intrepid editor spent most of last week (which is why there was no issue last Monday) visiting transmitter sites and working on an upcoming history of New York City FM radio. What’s in the headlines down there? We’ll start with a new transmitter site for public radio WNYC-FM (93.9), which will be on the air from the Empire State Building any day now (if it hasn’t happened already), now that the work has been done to inject its signal into the combiner that feeds the ERI master antenna high on the Empire mast. WNYC had been using the Four Times Square tower as an interim site after losing its transmission facilities at the World Trade Center; additional work yet to come at Empire will add WPAT-FM (93.1) to the ERI master, as well as building a second combiner that can be used to keep the ERI antenna on the air while work is done on the main combiner. What’s next for poor bedraggled talker WNEW (102.7), which did at least get a bit of publicity when it added a simulcast of David Letterman’s TV show last week? Owner Infinity brought Eric Logan in from Chicago, where he was operations manager of country WUSN (99.5), to be VP/programming for its New York stations, which immediately prompted a new round of speculation that 102.7 will be playing country soon. On the AM dial, there’s a new morning show on WWRL (1600 New York), with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (author of Kosher Sex and advisor to Michael Jackson — we couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried) and former Village Voice writer Peter Noel. Yes, we airchecked it; we’ll aircheck anything, you know…. We heard digital AM radio for the first time, thanks to Tom Ray at WOR (710); while the circumstances weren’t the best (a little speaker in a noisy control room), we can say that it does sound pretty good on the one existing receiver in New York City (WOR expects to get more in the next few months), and that the sideband hash, while certainly present, wasn’t quite as odious as we’d expected (we could still hear WADS on 690 from Connecticut while driving in Rockland County, 60 or so miles away, and a trip down to Trenton found WPHE on 690 from Phoenixville, PA quite audible without WOR interference.) Over in Syracuse, WTVH (Channel 5) has a new logo, and a redesigned Web site to match. The honor of “first digital TV signal in Syracuse,” meanwhile, goes to Fox affiliate WSYT (Channel 68), which signed on with its DTV signal as we were passing through on Wednesday, Nov. 6. WSYT is using just 4 kW from its tower in Otisco for now; it hopes to move the channel 19 DTV signal to the new WSTM tower at Sentinel Heights eventually (though we hear that tower’s completion has been delayed by a problem with the ice bridge, which apparently didn’t go in straight….) Fifteen Years Ago: November 21, 1997 - The last daytime-only music station in the Boston market could soon be operating 24 hours a day. WILD (1090) is expected to make an announcement next Tuesday that it’s reached a deal with noncomm WUMB (91.9) at UMass/Boston to share programming. The nature of the deal remains a closely guarded secret, but it’s rumored to involve the possible purchase of full-time signal WNFT (1150) from CBS, which must shed several of the stations it’s buying from American Radio Systems (a group that includes WNFT). NERW speculates a deal like this: The UMass system gets WNFT as a tax-exempt donation from CBS/ARS. UMass allows WILD to program WNFT with WILD’s urban format, in exchange for a portion of the advertising revenues from 1150. WILD owner Nash Communications then either leases out time on the 1090 daytimer, or sells it for stick value. UMass gets a new revenue source for WUMB, in addition to the public relations value of getting WILD its long-desired night signal. WILD is also making noises about taking its programming to FM; something the locally-owned urban station has long wanted to do, but been unable to afford. (2007 note: The rumored deal never happened, and WILD remains a daytimer on 1090.) In other news around MASSACHUSETTS: Oldies listeners in Boston won’t have “Austin of Boston” to wake up with any more. The veteran WODS (103.3) jock has reportedly rejected a move to the night shift, and will leave the CBS-owned station when his contract is up. WBZ (1030) morning anchor Gary LaPierre reached out to a national audience last week, guest hosting Paul Harvey News and Comment on ABC. It’s been more than a year since LaPierre’s last guest shot on the Harvey show. In MAINE, Harpswell religious station WMSJ is just a few days away from changing frequencies. “Joy 91.9″ will become “Joy 89.3″ on December 1, changing city of license to Freeport in the process. The 91.9 Harpswell facility is up for sale; WMSJ expects to put a better signal into Portland on its new channel. We know more about Allan Weiner’s shortwave application, first mentioned in NERW several weeks ago. Weiner wants to put his station on Britton Road in Monticello, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border — and also the site of WREM (710), a station he owned back when it was WOZW. It will be interesting to see how the FCC handles Weiner, given his long history of unlicensed operation (including one pirate that actually used the WOZW transmitter site). WMMM (1260) in Westport, CONNECTICUT will soon be back on the air. The station was donated to Sacred Heart University in September, and has been dark ever since. WMMM was conducting engineering tests on Tuesday, and is expected to be back for good shortly. Hartford jock Michael Picozzi is coming back to the airwaves after losing his job at WHCN (105.9); he’ll join soon-to-be-Marlin-owned WCCC FM-AM (106.9 Hartford/1290 West Hartford) for a 3-7 PM shift as the “Picozzi and Slave Boy” show. |
Lit was one of Philadelphia’s first rock-and-roll DJs, starting his career at age 20 in 1955 at WHAT (1340), where he quickly made a name for himself before moving first to NBC-owned WRCV (1060) and then, by late 1957, to top-40 giant WIBG (990), where his achievements included introducing the city to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles – and an amazing 73 rating for his evening show, likely an all-time ratings record for any DJ. Lit quickly became a TV star as well, hosting a dance show on WKBS-TV (Channel 48) that was syndicated to other Kaiser TV stations around the country.
And indeed, when 3 o’clock rolled around on Friday afternoon, there was Howie, more or less back in his usual form, albeit sounding somewhat constrained by management as to how much he could say about his absence from the airwaves.
But then Gormally Broadcasting bought ABC affiliate WGGB (Channel 40) from Sinclair and entered into talks for a Fox affiliation – and late last week, owner John Gormally announced that he’ll be launching “Fox 55″ on a subchannel of WGGB-DT (yes, Channel 55) by the end of the year.
While you are talking about WBIN I will report that they hired Rick Zach (K1RJZ) as their new chief engineer beginning next week.
That’s great news for Rick! He’s a good guy.
“The big addition for Great Eastern will be the monster signal of rocker WHDQ, which will eventually move from its current Claremont studio into Great Eastern’s West Lebanon offices.”
Actually, WHDQ moved out of the Claremont location and into the Nassau West Lebanon cluster back in 1997!
WTSV always remained at the Claremont tower site.
As was stated re; the TV Coalition; It could certainly be argued that probably only about 30% of programs shown on any given U.S. net affiliate…as seen by a Canadian cable viewer, are ACTUALLY seen on the U.S. station. The networks in Canada, including the regional “independant” ones, try to air as much U.S. content as possible, even during the day, and air it at the same time so as to prevent the viewer from seeing the yankee broadcast. I recall way back when…before this concept became the norm, that Canadian stations used to air alot of their U.S. shows a day or two before the American airing, or at least at a different time. Now, unless the viewer is close to the border with an antenna, they have no choice.