NorthEast Radio Watch 6/9/2025: Urgency Grows for Public Media

In this week’s issue… Public broadcasters plead for help – Connoisseur restructures leadership – Pennsylvania AM goes dark – Succession plan for veteran college radio manager

By SCOTT FYBUSH

*It’s a turbulent time to be a manager in public broadcasting right now. As we’ve been saying for months now, there’s nothing an industry needs more than certainty about funding and regulation, and this past week was an especially bad one on both counts.

On the regulatory side, we’re now down to two FCC commissioners with the abrupt exit of Republican commissioner Nathan Simington, leaving the Commission with just chairman Brendan Carr and Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez, far short of the quorum it needs to do much of anything when it comes to policy moves.

And on the funding side for public media, the White House is pushing ahead with its attempt to claw back the federal funds already allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Is it legal? That’s unclear. Will it happen anyway? Nobody knows, but it’s not safe to assume it won’t – and that means public broadcasters are continuing to push their audiences to reach out to lawmakers to show their support for the medium.

In the meantime, some public broadcasters continue to make cutbacks ahead of an uncertain future. It happened again last week at Boston’s GBH, which laid off 45 of its employees, about 6% of its total staff, in a move station CEO Susan Goldberg said was due to “federal funding cuts, rising costs of doing business, and the need to evolve our work to meet audiences’ needs.”

Those cuts included Laura Carlo, the morning host of classical WCRB (99.5) and a veteran of the classical station going all the way back to its pre-GBH days as a commercial station on 102.5. For now, there’s no morning host listed on the Classical CRB schedule.

On the Cape and Islands, Steve Junker lost his job as managing editor of news and host of the Friday “News Roundup” that was the flagship local show on WCAI/WNAN/WZAI.

*Across the border in RHODE ISLAND, there was an optimistic note from the merged Rhode Island PBS and “The Public’s Radio”: a year after they came together under one board, the joint radio/TV operation will take on the new name “Ocean State Media” this fall, in a move CEO Pam Johnston noted leaves out the word “Public.”

“We heard that from audiences, both those that we have and those that we don’t yet have, that that was an interesting word, and so we listened,” she told TPR host Ian Donnis.

“Lots of people felt as though they didn’t feel invited into an organization with public in their name, who knows what the connotations are. They come from a variety of different societal places, but it came back as a theme,” she said.

No logo has been announced yet, and the transition is expected to take several months as radio completes its move into the RIPBS headquarters.

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*Howard Hoffman is a legend in New York radio, going all the way back to the 1970s at stations such as WPIX, WABC, WQHT and (for those who know) the fictional WVWA in Pound Ridge. But that, of course, is no guarantee these days of keeping a job in the current radio environment, and so we’re sorry to report that iHeart has parted ways with Hoffman after a six-year run as creative services director at talker WOR (710) and the iHeart Broadway channel.

He’s still got the rest of his production and VO business going, of course, continuing a career that also included many years as the production guru for KABC in Los Angeles and ABC Radio, and we’re quite sure we haven’t heard the last of him.

*For many, many broadcasters in western New York, the path into the business led through SUNY Brockport and WBSU (89.1) – and for decades, that’s meant learning from station advisor and general manager Warren Kozireski.

“Koz,” who is himself a 1982 Brockport graduate, was saluted Saturday night at a dinner and roast that brought out a huge contingent of WBSU alumni to salute their mentor.

Now we also know who’ll be succeeding him as general manager: Matt Wilson, a 2019 Brockport alum, will start on the job June 20, spending five weeks working alongside Kozireski for a smooth handoff to the next generation of WBSU.

*There’s a management shift at Connoisseur Media’s legacy clusters as it gets ready to swallow up the much bigger Alpha Media: COO David Bevins, who’s also served as general manager for Connoisseur’s Long Island stations, is handing off that role to Kristin Okesson, who will add Long Island duties to her current role as general manager of Connoisseur’s CONNECTICUT cluster. The move will free up Bevins to devote all of his time to integrating the Alpha properties into Connoisseur as that deal moves forward.

*In Hartford, Tom Shattuck did his last show on Audacy’s WTIC (1080) Friday after being told his contract wasn’t being renewed.

Shattuck came to WTIC four years ago after a varied journalism career that included producing and hosting at Boston’s WRKO and WTKK and newspaper work with the Boston Herald (and its Boston Herald Radio stream) and the Lowell Sun. 

In place of the local midday show, WTIC has added a third hour of the Brian Kilmeade show at 11 AM, followed by Erick Erickson from noon to 2, moving up from a delayed evening airing.

*It was Hall of Fame induction time for the MASSACHUSETTS Broadcasters Association last week, with a big crowd in Framingham on hand to honor this year’s class.

The group for 2025 included the late Ed Ansin, longtime owner of WHDH-TV and WLVI in Boston and WSVN in Miami; Bruins announcer and WEEI host Dale Arnold; Carol Cutting, the owner of WEIB in Northampton and the first Black owner of a Massachusetts radio station; Red Sox Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley, who’s been part of the Sox’ NESN TV coverage since his retirement in 1998; veteran news anchor and news director Rod Fritz, whose career included stops at WHDH, WRKO, WEEI and most recently at WBZ; WMEX (1510) owner and longtime Boston DJ Larry Justice; former WKLB (102.5) middayer Carolyn Kruse; and veteran TV anchor Randy Price, who recently retired from WCVB (Channel 5) after a nearly 50-year career.

*In VERMONT, there’s a change of control at WTNN (Eagle Country 97.5) in Bristol, as John Fuller buys out the 50% of Impact Radio that had belonged to his partner Arthur Belendiuk. The $100,000 deal will give Fuller full ownership of WTNN, along with the 14 stations his Full Power Radio group owns in southern New England.

*In Lancaster, PENNSYLVANIA, WLAN (1390) has been off the air since May 25, with owner iHeart telling the FCC that it has lost the ground lease on the station’s tower site off Fruitville Pike. Will iHeart bother to bring the AM signal back from a new site now that it’s moved the “Rumba” format to an HD subchannel of sister station WRFY (102.5 Reading) in order to feed the “Rumba 100.5” translator in Lancaster?

*In Philadelphia, it’s launch day for the new “Unfiltered with Ricky Bo and Bill Colarulo” afternoon show on Beasley’s WPEN-FM (97.5 the Fanatic).

The new 2-6 PM show pairs existing afternoon host “Ricky Bo” Botallico, former Phillies relief pitcher, with former midday host Bill Colarulo, alongside producer Sylvana Kelleher. It replaces “Best Show Ever?” (which apparently wasn’t?) after the ouster of Botallico’s previous co-host, Tyrone Johnson.

Broadcast People on the Move in CANADA: In Ottawa, Will Aiello is the new co-anchor on CTV Morning Live (seen on the market’s CTV2 station, CHRO), where he’ll start next week. Aiello returns to his hometown of Ottawa from CTV’s CKCO in Kitchener, where he was the weekday weatherman.

In Montreal, Andie Bennett is leaving the “Melnick in the Afternoon” show on CKGM (TSN 690) after more than 20 years with the sports station. Bennett says she needs more time with her family; she’s a single mom to a son with autism.

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