C&K Out, Imus In at WABC

IT'S THE 2008 TOWER SITE CALENDAR!

Think the arrival of the new phone book is an exciting time of year? (We do, actually, with apologies to Steve Martin, but that's not the point.)

Here's a really exciting spot on the calendar - in fact, it is the calendar. Yes, the 2008 Tower Site Calendar is back from the printer and ready for shipping all over the US and beyond.

This year's edition is a particularly fine one, if we do say so ourselves. From the cover photo of KAST in Astoria, Oregon to the back cover shot of the Blaw-Knox diamond tower at WBNS in Columbus, this year's calendar features 14 all-new full-color shots of famous broadcast sites far and wide. There's KROQ in Los Angeles, KFBK in Sacramento, WESX in Salem, WGAN in Portland, Black Mountain in Vegas, Mount Spokane in Spokane, and many (ok, several) more.

If you've been following our adventures, you know that the 2006 and 2007 editions of the calendar sold out. If you've been following postal rates and the cost of printing, you know they've both gone up.

Even so, we still think this year's edition is a bargain - just $18 with shipping and handling included.

Or better yet, beat our move to mandatory subscriptions (also coming later this fall) and get a free calendar with your $60 subscription to NERW for 2008. (Remember, the proceeds from both the calendar and the subscriptions help keep NERW right here on the web, as we head into our fourteenth year of news and analysis.)

So click right here and you can be one of the first to have your very own Tower Site Calendar 2008! (And thank you!)

You can have your ad here! Click here for information on the most economical way to reach tens of thousands of Northeast radio and TV people each week.

November 7, 2006 -

• After serving a two-day suspension over the summer for using an anti-gay slur against a MASSACHUSETTS state official, WRKO (680 Boston) mid-morning talk host John DePetro was probably on thin ice at the Entercom station. On Thursday, another DePetro remark sent him crashing through that ice, ending his career at WRKO and getting his board operator, Jimmy Kiesling, fired as well.
• This time, the comment concerned the Green Party candidate for governor, Grace Ross, who DePetro referred to as a "fat lesbian" while reviewing the previous night's televised debate. In a prepared statement, Entercom Boston executive VP Jason Wolfe said, "In the context of what (DePetro) said and the tone with which he said it, the comments were completely inappropriate, derogatory, and will not be tolerated," pretty much slamming the door on any possibility of DePetro returning to the air.
• The talk host, who came to Boston from Providence's WHJJ (920) in 2004, says he plans to sue Entercom for wrongful dismissal, noting that his language didn't violate any FCC content guidelines. And there's plenty of speculation that WRKO was looking for any excuse to send DePetro packing, given his sagging ratings and complaints from advertisers. (What's more, the impending arrival of Red Sox broadcasts at WRKO are giving the station a powerful incentive to steer clear of the sort of controversy that's seemed to follow DePetro for years.) Evening talk host Todd Feinburg filled in on DePetro's former 9-noon shift on Friday and will do so again this week; no permanent replacement has been named.
• Up in MAINE, Bangor's WVII-TV (Channel 7) is in the news again, just a few weeks after the perennial last-place station announced it will prerecord its late newscasts. (Wonder how that'll work on election night?) Last week, WVII made the New York Times after a staff member leaked an e-mail from general manager Michael Palmer that ordered the newsroom to stop reporting on global warming until "Bar Harbor is underwater," comparing the story to the Y2K scare from a few years ago and complaining that a story about the opening of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" movie amounted to a commercial for the film. Palmer didn't respond to the Times' inquiries, and a NASA scientist who talked to the paper noted that "that the people of Maine will have at their disposal other sources of information," though he was perhaps unaware of just how dominant those "other sources" are in the Bangor market when compared to WVII and its Fox sister station, WFVX-LP (Channel 22).
• The ongoing Clear Channel cutbacks hit in PENNSYLVANIA last week, as five people in the Philadelphia cluster lost their jobs. The Inquirer reports that WIOQ (102.1) APD/MD Marian Newsome-McAdam and her husband, Q102 imaging director Franklin McAdam, are out. So are WDAS-FM (105.3) overnight guy Jerry Wells, WUSL (98.9) public affairs host Tiffany Bacon and WUSL newscaster Heshimu Jaramogi. The cluster's WUBA (Rumba 104.5) has hired a new PD, Juan Arroyo, a midday jock, Issa Lopez, and an afternoon jock, Johnny Machete.
• Our top stories in NEW YORK this week are all about market concentration: in Rochester, the Justice Department says it will allow Entercom's acquisition of the CBS Radio cluster here (as well as the CBS Radio stations in Cincinnati, Austin and Memphis) to move forward, provided Entercom spins off three of the seven FM signals it will end up with. Entercom tells the Justice Department that it plans to spin WRMM (101.3), WZNE (94.1 Brighton) and WFKL (93.3 Fairport), which would leave it with its existing WBEE-FM (92.5) and WBZA (98.9) as well as CBS' WCMF (96.5) and WPXY (97.9), but the agreement allows it to substitute alternate signals with Justice Department consent
• In the Ithaca market, meanwhile, Saga Communications is paying Citadel $4 million for WIII (99.9 Cortland), one of the last commercial competitors to its four-station Ithaca cluster (news-talk WHCU 870, progressive talk WNYY 1470, AC WYXL 97.3 and country WQNY 103.7). Saga will sell WIII's sister station, news-talk WKRT (920 Cortland), to Bible Broadcasting Network (which, ironically, has been trying for quite a while now to sell its station in Rome, WYFY 1450.) Will the community activists in Ithaca who protested what they said was over-concentration when Saga bought its existing cluster protest the WIII deal as well? We'd bet on it.

November 11, 2002 -

• The atmosphere can be a tricky thing sometimes, especially near the coast and especially during the summer. Just ask Boston's WCVB-DT (Channel 20) and the Camden County, N.J., public safety department, which have been sharing the 506-512 MHz chunk of the UHF spectrum for the last few years. It was never a problem when WCVB-DT was operating a few hours a day, but earlier this year, when the tower work on the Needham tower WCVB shares with WBZ-TV/DT and WGBH/WGBX was completed and WCVB-DT was able to go full-time at full power, officers down in South Jersey started to notice interference to their two-way radio system, which they tracked down to the new DTV signal more than 250 miles to the northeast.
• Last week the dispute hit the media, with Ocean County (even closer to the coast than Camden County) joining in a complaint to the FCC about interference to their radio systems, which operate in the "T-Band," first allocated a couple of decades ago on what were then largely unused channels 14-20 in the UHF-TV spectrum. (How unused? So much so that several low UHF TV allocations, such as 14 in Worcester, 16 in Providence and 18 in New Brunswick, N.J., were deleted and reassigned for public safety use.)
• DTV, of course, changed all that, with every scrap of the UHF TV spectrum being pressed into use during the lengthy transition from analog to digital. In Boston, it's not just 20; channel 19 is in use by WGBH-DT and channel 18 is allocated for WMFP-DT.
• In other words, the spectrum that T-band users have had pretty much to themselves is about to get full, and it doesn't appear that the FCC did its homework when making the allocations there, or in other parts of the DTV spectrum. (Just ask WHRO-DT Norfolk VA and WBOC-TV Salisbury MD, which are battling over channel 16, or WOOD-TV Grand Rapids MI and WMVS-DT Milwaukee, which are fighting over channel 8.) The culprit appears to be the FCC's modeling mechanism, which does not fully account for the effects of unusual propagation, especially over water. (Notice a common thread in all these DTV disputes?)
• Any DXer knows that there's nothing completely predictable about propagation at almost any frequency below 800 MHz (as we type this, we're watching an E-skip pileup on channel 3 that's bringing in stations from Memphis, Springfield MO, Harrisburg IL and Eufaula OK, perfectly normal behavior in mid-July but quite unusual in early November), and every reason to think that a 500 MHz signal with a megawatt of power from Boston will often ride the tropospheric ducts down to New Jersey in the summertime. But those are the sort of questions that should have been asked before a license was issued, not after millions of dollars were spent to put up a licensed signal on channel 20 in Boston.
• How will this all get resolved now that the damage has been done? The good news is that there's no reason to expect WCVB-DT to remain on channel 20 forever; when the DTV transition is complete, the digital signal will likely replace WCVB's analog on channel 5. You can read more thoughts on digital transitioning down at the bottom of this week's column. In the meantime, we'll be following this closely to see how the FCC gets itself out of the hole it's dug. (2007 note: WCVB-DT will indeed stay on Channel 20 - we didn't know back in 2002 how bad low-band VHF would be for digital TV - and the T-band issue has never been fully resolved, as far as we're aware.)

October 30, 1997-

• The last part of the legendary jock lineup at Boston's WBCN (104.1) will leave the airwaves after Friday's show. Mark Parenteau was fired from the CBS-owned modern rocker this week after two decades as BCN's afternoon-drive host. [Editor's note: he actually left Thursday.]
• Parenteau, midday jock Ken Shelton, and morning guy Charles Laquidara were the cornerstones of the WBCN lineup through much of the seventies and eighties. Laquidara was moved to classic rocker WZLX (100.7) two years ago, while Shelton also spent two years at WZLX before being let go from the then-Infinity group in 1995. Replacing Parenteau in the 3-7 slot will be evening jock Nik Carter, a move presumably designed to cater to the younger audience WBCN has sought since shifting to modern rock a few years back.
• Parenteau kept a promise to present an award at the Achievement in Radio (AIR) awards this week, joking about his dismissal as he went. AIR honorees included WBZ (1030) morning veteran Gary LaPierre, who received the lifetime achievement award; Loren (Owens) and Wally (Brine) of WROR-FM (105.7 Framingham) for best morning show; Nancy Quill of WMJX (106.7) for best midday show; and WBOS (92.9 Brookline)'s Julie Devereaux for best evening show.
• Elsewhere in MASSACHUSETTS: The FCC has approved the transfer of WNRB (1510 Boston) from Communicom to One-on-One Sports; expect a format change there soon. Cape and Islands Public Radio's new 90.1 in Woods Hole has been granted the calls WHMV -- NERW thinks it's either a tribute to their favorite record store, or it stands for "Woods Hole and Martha's Vineyard." WPZE (1260 Boston) has reverted to a simulcast of WEZE (590) as it awaits the arrival of Radio Disney -- "any day now" is the word we're hearing on that format change.
• On the pirate front: NERW hears from Mike Malone of the late "WDOA" (89.3 Worcester) that the FCC agents who shut the station down last week told him they were operating under orders from the highest levels of the FCC -- new chairman Bill Kennard flexing his muscle, perhaps? Speculation in the pirate community is that the FCC is using pirates' web pages to find them; could that be why the Rebel Music Radio page has disappeared, while the supposedly-silent Boston pirate at 105.3 was still being heard late last week by at least one NERW reader?
• And meantime, Cambridge city council candidate Ian McKinnon turned to pirate radio for his campaign, running "Radio Free Cambridge" from a local art gallery during the weekend leading up to Election Day. A confusing (or should that be just plain confused?) article in the Cambridge TAB explained how the station began broadcasting Sunday night...then went on to say "no frequency has been chosen for the station." Perhaps operating a radio station with no frequency was what doomed McKinnon's election bid; he drew only 264 votes, falling far behind the nine incumbents, all of whom won re-election without benefit of pirate radio.