NERW Update: Boston Gets EDM, CC Gets WOR
In this week’s issue… “Harbor” yields to “Evolution” – Clear Channel blows out WOR staff – Family back in Philadelphia – CityTV granted in Montreal
By SCOTT FYBUSH
A SCHEDULING NOTE: Barring major breaking news, this will be your last regular NERW column for 2012. We’ll be back with our regular weekly columns on Monday, January 7, 2013 – but you’ll want to check out fybush.com all through the holidays, because NERW’s Year In Review 2012 begins rolling out in daily installments right here, starting Monday, December 24! (Want to share your message with NERW’s loyal readers? A few exclusive daily sponsorships are still available for a rate so low you won’t believe it…contact Lisa right now at lisa@fybush.com for all the details.)
*If any broadcaster has perfected the art of nuclear-level security surrounding a format flip, it’s Clear Channel in eastern MASSACHUSETTS. For several months after announcing its purchase of the former WFNX (101.7 Lynn) earlier this year, Clear somehow managed to keep almost everyone from sniffing out its plans to install an automated adult hits format on what became “101.7 the Harbor,” WHBA.
And after just five months with that format, Clear Channel pulled out an even bigger surprise on Thursday night at 6, when it abruptly drained “The Harbor” and flipped WHBA to electronic dance music (EDM), essentially using the signal as a terrestrial simulcast of “Evolution,” the company’s online dance station that’s been running for the last few months on the iHeartRadio platform.
There are few groups of music fans as passionate about their genre as EDM aficionados, who were celebrating the terrestrial launch of “101.7 the Evolution” within minutes after the surprise flip. But there were also cautionary voices pointing out that Clear Channel’s commitment to the format in Boston may be only temporary. So what gives – is this a stunt or for real?
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*Good news, everybody! A new shipment of the 2013 Tower Site Calendar is back from the printer, and on its way out to YOU! (You can even get yours by Christmas if you order right away!)
This is the 12th edition of our annual calendar, which features photos of broadcast towers taken by Scott Fybush on his travels.
The 12-month wall calendar boasts a full-color photo each month of a well-known broadcast transmitter site.
This year’s edition includes sites in Florida, Wisconsin, Kentucky, California, Iowa, Idaho, Las Vegas, Colorado, Boston, Cleveland, Albuquerque, upstate New York and western Massachusetts. We’ve also redesigned the calendar to make it more colorful (don’t worry; the pictures are still pristine) and make the spiral binding our standard binding — your calendar will hang even better on your wall now! And of course, we still have the convenient hole for hanging.
Order 20 or more for a 10% discount! And while you’re at the Fybush.com store, check out the new National Radio Club AM Log and the final stash of FM Atlas editions.
For more information and to order yours, click here!
I listened to as much as I could stand of WHBA, and it’s sad that anyone attending college would tune in to this dreck. My parents didn’t go to college, but they listened to Rogers and Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Cole Porter (who like Wagner wrote his own words and music) and others of their ilk. (What is an ilk anyway). To call this cr*p primitive is to insult primitives. There was a motion picture last year called “Cave of Lost Dreams” about cave-paintings even older than the ones at Lascaux. They also found a bone with holes in it that may have been an Ur-flute. It had intervals close enough to Western music that one could play an close approximation to the “Star Spangled Banner”. Thus some of the earliest humans aspired to musical sounds with a range of pitches close to an octave. If it weren’t for auto-tune, WHBA’s selections wouldn’t have any intervals at all.
On the Rochester note, does anyone know exactly how many years Don Alhart needs to log to get the national longevity record?
Thank you for the great site and am so excited to finally be a subscriber!
Happy to have you here! Don’s been at channel 13 since 1966, if memory serves. I’m not sure there’s anyone active right now with a longer run at a single station. He’s still got a few years to go to beat some now-retired talent like KTLA’s Stan Chambers, who was with the station from 1947 until 2010. (But Stan was a reporter, not an anchor, and he was only very part-time at the end.)