May 3, 2010
Corus Exits Quebec
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*Since being spun off from the Shaw media
empire in 1999, Corus Entertainment has become one of the biggest
broadcasters in CANADA. But despite heavy investments
in Quebec, Corus was never quite able to make its operations
in the second-largest province pay off - and last week the company
announced that it's exiting Quebec, selling 11 stations to Cogeco
Incorporated and putting a twelfth up for sale.
 Cogeco
will pay Corus C$80 million for its four-station Montreal cluster
(sports-talk CKAC 730, English-language AC CFQR 92.5, rocker
CKOI 96.9 and talker CHMP 98.5) along with nearby CIME (103.9
St. Jerome), as well as Quebec City's CFEL (102.1 Montmagny)
and CFOM (102.9), Sherbrooke's CKOY (104.5) and CHLT (107.7),
CJRC (104.7) in Gatineau-Ottawa and CHLN (106.9) in Trois-Rivieres.
Cogeco already owns five signals across the province: the
"Rythme FM" network of CFGL (105.7 Montreal), CJEC
(91.9 Quebec City), CFGE (93.7 Sherbrooke) and CJEB (100.1 Trois-Rivieres),
along with CJFM (93.3 Quebec City). Its purchase of the Corus
stations will put Cogeco over the two-FM-per-language ownership
limits in Quebec City, Montreal and Sherbrooke, which means another
round of station sales is likely.
Meanwhile, Corus is still seeking a buyer for CKRS (98.3 Saguenay)
- and licking its financial wounds after its Quebec adventure,
which involved nearly C$300 million in station purchases from
the old Metromedia and Power Broadcasting groups back in 2000.
(Some of those stations were outside Quebec and have remained
with Corus; two of the big signals that came from Metromedia,
Montreal's Info690 CINF and 940 CINW, were simply pulled off
the air earlier this year when Corus declared them unprofitable.
It's still not clear whether those licenses have been officially
revoked, or whether they might yet be sold as part of Corus'
exit from the province.)
MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: Corus'
exit from Quebec radio turns out not even to be the big media
deal of the week north of the border. On Monday morning, Shaw
Communications, the media giant from which Corus was spun off
back in 1999, announced that it's paying C$2 billion to buy the
over-the-air and specialty cable holdings of Canwest Global Communications,
including the Global television network. Much more next week...
*Is Joe Scarborough history on NEW YORK
radio? The MSNBC "Morning Joe" host was off the
air last week at WABC (770) and his other Citadel syndication
outlets, but there were plenty of conflicting stories about his
radio future. The official story from Citadel and Scarborough
himself is that the show, which aired in the 10 AM-noon slot
between Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh, is on a temporary hiatus
while it's being "retooled" as a three-hour show. But
behind the scenes, there are plenty of questions about that story
- not least the question of what three-hour slot Scarborough
and co-host Mika Brzezinski could possibly occupy on a schedule
that's pretty well locked down with syndicated offerings straight
through to early evening. (And there's no way that Scarborough
and Brzezinski could do an evening or late-night show while still
hitting the MSNBC TV airwaves every morning at 6...)
For now, Mark Simone is filling in on the 10-noon shift at
WABC.
(Meanwhile, as fans of "WABC Rewound" had pretty
much come to expect after last year's web-only edition, there
will be no Rewound on WABC at all this Memorial Day; instead,
there will be an extended offering over at Allan Sniffen's Rewound Radio.)
One other New York City radio move: WKTU (103.5 Lake Success)
has named a midday replacement for Diane Pryor, who left the
station in January. Filling the slot is Wendy Wild, who'd been
doing weekends at WKTU and sister station Z100.
On TV, Azteca America has a new affiliate in New York: it's
now being seen on the 63.6 subchannel of WMBC-DT (licensed to
Newton, NJ); the WMBC subchannel has replaced previous Azteca
affiliate WNYN-LP (Channel 39) on DirecTV as well.
*Upstate, the pitched battle between Ithaca's two commercial
radio contenders took another interesting turn last week when
the FCC issued a $10,000 Notice of Apparent Liability to Saga
Communications over irregularities in the operation of its translator
W240CB (95.9).
The problems began in the fall of 2008, when Finger Lakes
Radio Group moved WFLR-FM (95.9 Dundee) to 95.5 in Odessa, relaunching
the station as top-40 WFIZ from an Ithaca translator site and
displacing the Saga translator that had been W238AA (95.5), relaying
WYXL (97.3). Saga filed to move the translator to 95.9, and somewhere
along the way WFIZ complained to the FCC that the translator's
antennas were not at the correct height on the tower. Finger
Lakes asked the FCC to revoke the translator's license, but the
Commission ruled last week that the discrepancy doesn't rise
to the sort of character issue that would merit license revocation.
Meanwhile, Finger Lakes amended its complaint to raise a new
issue, asking the FCC to examine the question of whether Saga
violated local ownership caps by putting programming from WYXL's
HD subchannels on two other translators in Ithaca. (In particular,
Saga launched a top-40 format on 97.3-HD2 and W277BS 103.3 just
days after WFIZ launched in the fall of 2008.)
 The FCC
didn't buy the argument; it says HD Radio operators are encouraged
to offer separate programming on their subchannels, and that
"there is no current prohibition on FM translator stations
re-broadcasting the alternate program streams aired on the parent
station’s digital transmissions. Accordingly, we find Finger
Lakes’ argument meritless."
*The investment firm of WallerSutton is finally selling off
the last of the radio assets it ended up with after the collapse
of the Route 81 Radio group it funded. WS2K Radio, the licensee
that took over the Route 81 stations in receivership, recently
exited Wilkes-Barre/Scranton - and last week, it announced a
sale of its Elmira/Corning stations. Route 81 paid Eolin Broadcasting
$4.5 million for the stations back in 2003; no price has yet
been announced for the latest deal, which puts the cluster in
the hands of Vision Communications, which owns Corning Fox affiliate
WYDC (Channel 48) and Rochester's My Network outlet, WBGT-LP
(Channel 26).
Vision gets AM news-talk simulcast WENY (1230 Elmira)/WENI
(1450 Corning), sports outlet WCBA (1350 Corning), AC "Magic"
simulcast WENY-FM (92.7 Elmira)/WENI-FM (97.7 Big Flats) and
oldies WGMM (98.7 Corning); the stations are already neighbors
to WYDC, whose offices are just down Corning's Market Street
from the radio cluster's storefront studios.
In Syracuse, Dan Austin is moving on. CNYRadio.com
reports that the Citadel GM is leaving the cluster after two
years (and a slew of recent format changes) to become director
of sales for CBS Radio's Seattle stations. No replacement has
been named yet.
The tiny hamlet of Glen Spey, in the hills of Sullivan County
near the Delaware River, will be getting a new radio station
soon. The Stephen Demchuk Foundation applied for 110 watts on
89.5 in Glen Spey during the FCC's noncommercial FM application
window back in 2007. Last week, the FCC picked the Demchuk application
as a "tentative selectee" in one of 26 groups of mutually-exclusive
applications, choosing it over a Honesdale, PA application from
Scranton's WVIA and a Port Jervis application from a Taiwanese
community group.
*And there's an obituary this week from Buffalo: Pat Fagan,
who anchored the news on WGR-TV (Channel 2, now WGRZ) in the
fifties and sixties and hosted the station's "TV Dance Party,"
died April 24 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Fagan came to radio
in the late forties when the newspaper where he worked, Lockport's
Union Sun & Journal, put WUSJ (1340, now WLVL) on
the air; he later worked at WEBR in Buffalo and did some acting
on WBEN-TV (Channel 4, now WIVB) before moving to Erie in 1952
to become news director at WICU-TV (Channel 12). Fagan returned
to Buffalo to help launch Channel 2 in 1954; in 1968, he moved
to New York City to work on NBC Radio's "Monitor" and
later at ABC News. Fagan later worked on Long Island's east end
as news director and then as general manager of WWRJ (95.3 Southampton,
now WHFM) before moving to Florida in 1981, where he continued
to work in radio well into the nineties. Fagan was 83.
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*For the second time in just over a year,
CBS Radio has reversed course, returning a local talk host to
the New England airwaves after a high-profile dismissal. Last
year it was Steve LeVeille at Boston's WBZ, and now Jim Vicevich
is back in the late-morning talk chair at WTIC (1080) in Hartford,
CONNECTICUT, just a month after the host and the station
parted ways after they were unable to agree on a contract.
 WTIC
had been filling in with a variety of guest hosts in the 9-noon
slot for the last few weeks (including former WCCC-FM jock Sebastian)
before reaching a new deal with Vicevich. "Everything sort
of came together in the last 48 hours," Vicevich wrote in
a blog post last Sunday, hours before returning to the WTIC airwaves.
Down the road in the New London/Norwich market,
John Fuller wants to boost power on one of his FM signals. He's
applying to pump WBMW (106.5) up from its present 3.1 kW/450'
to 12 kW/472' DA, moving it from its present transmitter site
in Ledyard to the tower in North Stonington that's already home
to sister station WWRX (107.7). To make the move possible, WBMW
and WWRX would swap cities of license, with 106.5 becoming licensed
to Pawcatuck and 107.7 to Ledyard. The upgrade from class A to
B1 will give "Soft Rock 106.5" improved coverage into
Westerly, Rhode Island - and a stronger signal on the coast along
Long Island Sound as well.
*A NEW HAMPSHIRE low-power FM station
is about to move down on the dial, and up in power. The Seacoast
Arts and Cultural Alliance, which operates WSCA-LP (106.1 Portsmouth),
applied back in 2007 for a full-power license in Dover on 89.5,
where it ended up in a mutually-exclusive group with a Madbury
application from the Granite State Educational Fellowship. Last
week, the FCC awarded a tentative preference for the channel
to the WSCA folks, contingent on the divestiture of the LPFM
license.
*In last week's column, we told you about
the impending sign-on of the new shared-time operation on 91.7
in Maynard, MASSACHUSETTS between a powered-up WAVM at
Maynard High School and Boston's WUMB - and we mentioned that
the WAVM power increase was made possible by the resolution to
a three-way battle for the channel that also yielded a new, as
yet unbuilt, construction permit for 91.7 in Lunenburg. Now that
Lunenburg CP is changing hands from Bishop, California-based
Living Proof to Fitchburg-based Horizon Christian Fellowship,
which also owns WJWT (91.7) in Gardner and WFGL (960) in Fitchburg.
The $150,000 sale (paid for in monthly installments over seven
years) will also reset the clock on the Lunenburg construction
permit, which was due to expire July 25 but can be extended an
extra 18 months by the sale.
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*The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is always
a controversial topic among broadcasters, but it was especially
contentious last week in NEW JERSEY, when state officials
apparently botched an Amber Alert activation Wednesday night,
disrupting programming on many Garden State stations (and a few
in adjacent parts of New York and Pennsylvania) for the better
part of an hour.
 The
trouble started with an alert about a missing girl in Elizabeth,
N.J. that was issued just after 7 PM with garbled audio and a
missing end-of-message indication. Realizing that something had
gone wrong, officials then issued the statewide alert again at
7:20 - and at 7:26, and 7:34, and 7:41, and 7:44, and 7:48, and
at 8:05 PM, taking over not only radio programming but also TV
stations and cable systems. New Jersey State Police officials
say they're still trying to figure out what went wrong.
(The EAS system worked better in two other emergencies later
in the week, when much of greater Boston was put under a boil-water
advisory and then on Saturday night when an attempted bombing
shut down New York's Times Square.)
*The fight to keep one of western PENNSYLVANIA's
big public radio voices on the air is heating up. Pittsburgh
Public Media, the management group at WDUQ (90.5 Pittsburgh)
that hopes to buy the license from Duquesne University, says
it will submit a second bid to the university after its first
bid for the station was rejected. At issue is the value of the
station, a number university officials have pegged in the $10
million range. In today's market, that figure is widely viewed
as too high (especially in light of St. Joseph Missions' $9 million,
three-station deal for the Sheridan Broadcasting stations in
Pittsburgh last yeat), but Duquesne appears to believe that with
multiple suitors for the station - and no immediate financial
pressure to make a bargain-priced sale - that it can eventually
get its price.
The Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters will hand
out its Radio Broadcaster of the Year award tonight to Altoona's
Dick DiAndrea, saluting the WFBG (1290) morning man at a dinner
at the Hotel Hershey just a few days after he marked a half-century
on the air.
DiAndrea started at WTRN (1340 Tyrone) on May 1, 1960, and
in the five decades since he's worked at WFBG, WVAM (1430 Altoona),
WALY-FM (103.9 Bellwood) and most recently back at WFBG, where
he co-hosts with Charlie Weston.
The week's other Keystone State news also comes from Altoona,
where DiAndrea's former WALY morning co-host Roger Corey is returning
to the airwaves. This time, Corey's at WBRX (94.7 Cresson), hosting
mornings on "Mix 94.7."
|
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. Thanks to LARadio.com
for the idea - and thanks to you, our readers, for the support
that's made all these years of NERW possible!)
May 4, 2009 -
- There are some weeks when it's enjoyable to write this column.
This is not one of those weeks - and not just because the Official
NERW Laptop suffered a massive operating-system meltdown Wednesday
night, forcing your editor to spend most of Thursday and Friday
rebuilding it from scratch. (Public service announcement: back
up your data - and since you probably won't, burn yourself a
Knoppix CD or DVD now so you have it around when you really need
to recover the data you can't get at any other way.) No, this
was an unpleasant week to write NERW because, yet again, we're
leading off with two of the stories we like least: massive staffing
cuts at a big broadcast group, and noisy headlines about a noisy
talk host in the eye of a controversy over something he said
on the air.
- First, the job cuts: last week brought round two of Clear
Channel's ongoing attempt to figure out which parts of its 850-station
nationwide operation are worth the money its private-equity owners
spent for the company. The first round back in January claimed
about 1,850 jobs around the country, most of them in sales and
promotions. At the time, certain alarmist bloggers warned that
the company had bigger plans that involved centralizing most,
if not all, of its programming. Those dire warnings still haven't
come to pass, but last Thursday's job cuts, which involved at
least 590 of the remaining Clear Channel staffers, did cut deep
into the company's programming payroll - and in the process began
to shed light on the company's new programming direction.
- Last week's cuts (which were decided at a level far above
local managers, from what we're hearing) were not spread evenly
across the company, as will be evident in our market-by-market
rundown later in this week's issue. Instead, it appears that
Clear Channel attempted to analyze which of its stations - and
even which dayparts within stations - were producing significant
returns to the company's bottom line, and which were (at least
on paper) bringing in too little to justify the payroll expense.
- The result, as best we can make out from the patchwork of
cuts across the region, is a new system of "haves"
and "have-nots." Some of the "haves" are
big-market giants like New York's Z100 and Q104, where star air
talent will find themselves doing extra work voicing generic
tracks under the company's "premium choice" program
- and it's those generic tracks that will replace the local talent
that was cut at second-tier stations like WSNE in Providence
or WKGS in Rochester. Some of the "haves" are the largest
stations in the company's medium markets, where cuts to local
talent were minimal last week. But some of the other "haves,"
interestingly, are stations in smaller markets like Manchester
and Poughkeepsie, where talent costs are apparently low enough
to allow the company to keep at least some local presence alive
and still make a profit.
- Last week's cuts also reached into Clear Channel newsrooms,
as the company continued its effort to centralize as much news
programming as possible, and even into some markets' engineering
departments, where some talented and long-serving engineers found
themselves out of work. We'll have more thoughts on these cuts
in the weeks to come, as we see whether it's possible for an
anchor in Albany to credibly report the news from Worcester,
or what happens when something breaks in a studio in Boston and
the guy who built that studio is no longer in the building to
fix it quickly.
- We'll have as much information as we could round up about
the Clear Channel cuts, market-by-market, throughout this week's
column - but first, there's that other big noisy story coming
from eastern MASSACHUSETTS to address. That would be WTKK (96.9
Boston) afternoon talk host Jay Severin - or is that "former
WTKK talk host" Jay Severin?
- The facts, as best we can ascertain them: Severin, predictably,
used the flu headlines last week to bang away at a favorite topic,
Mexican immigration. Equally predictably, Severin minced no words
as he attempted to link the flu outbreak to illegal immigrants
- followed, just as the usual script dictates, by protests and
outrage from the usual quarters. Severin is no stranger to controversy,
of course, and neither is WTKK itself, so the extent of the station's
reaction was slightly surprising: it quickly pulled Severin off
the air, calling his suspension "indefinite" and adding,
rather pointedly, that the station "has not been using the
remarks for which he has been suspended in on-air promos,"
apparently to counter Severin's claims that WTKK was doing just
that.
- So far, so normal - we've seen this basic scenario play out
many times in the world of talk radio, with the length and permanency
of the suspension depending largely on the offending talk host's
ratings and revenue stream and the extent to which the station
thinks it can reap publicity and improved ratings from the controversy.
Where does Severin fit on that continuum? The rumor mill was
churning hot and heavy over the weekend, with considerable speculation
that WTKK owner Greater Media is less interested in milking the
matter for publicity than in using the furor as an excuse to
jettison Severin's hefty salary (reportedly as much as a million
dollars a year) and stagnant ratings. Will Severin's local show
give way to, say, a much less-expensive syndicated Sean Hannity?
Stay tuned...
- Clear Channel didn't have a lot of staff to cut in Boston,
but it still lost some key people. At WXKS-FM (Kiss 108), Dierdre
Dagata had been shuffled from middays to weekends to nights,
but now she's gone from the station, with her 8 PM-12 AM shift
now being handled via out-of-market voicetracking. (Ironically,
the tracking comes from Kiss in Dallas and Jackson Blue, who'd
been doing nights at WXKS-FM until last fall.) Behind the scenes,
chief engineer Steve Riggs is out after nearly two decades with
WXKS and WJMN. His experience with the station included several
studio moves and rebuilds, including the recent relocations of
WJMN from Waltham and WXKS from its longtime Medford home into
a new cluster studio in Medford.
- Progressive talk is returning to Boston's airwaves, thanks
to a new leased-time deal with Blackstrap's WWZN (1510), where
programmer Jeff Santos is already leasing mornings for his own
talk show. Now Santos is taking much of the rest of the daytime
hours as well, running Stephanie Miller at 10 AM, Ed Schultz
at noon, Thom Hartmann at 3 PM and another local hour from 6-7
PM.
May 2, 2005 -
- There's been plenty of speculation - present space included
- that the big move of WBEC-FM (105.5) in western MASSACHUSETTS
would lead to the sale of some of the last remaining assets of
Bruce Danziger and Jeff Shapiro's Vox Media. That will indeed
be the case, as Vox files to sell WBEC-FM to Jim Morrell's Pamal
Broadcasting, which will take over operation of the station when
it completes its move from Pittsfield to Easthampton, where it
will serve Northampton, Amherst and Springfield.
- Pamal already owns adult rock WRNX (100.9 Amherst) in the
market, as well as WPNI (1430 Amherst), which is leased to public
radio WFCR. It'll pay $7 million to add WBEC-FM to the group
- and if we're reading the sales contract right, Pamal gets the
WBEC-FM calls and the intellectual property that includes the
"Live 105" nickname and top 40 format, which we'd expected
to stay with Vox in the Berkshires on a different frequency.
(Which it may yet do; there's little question that the remaining
Vox stations in Pittsfield, Great Barrington and North Adams
will be sold as well, as Shapiro and Danziger dissolve what's
left of the company.)
- That leaves one more station remaining in Vox: WNYQ-FM (105.7),
which is moving from Queensbury, in the Glens Falls market, to
Malta, in the Albany market, as part of the WBEC-FM move. Pamal
has been LMA'ing WNYQ from Vox since last year, and the WBEC-FM
filing reveals that Pamal has an option to buy WNYQ as well,
though there will be market-concentration issues in Albany, where
the company already has five FM stations and two AMs.
- In MAINE, it's the end of the line for Mark Persky and WBLM
(102.9 Portland) after 28 years together. The veteran morning
man has been off the air at WBLM since February, when he disappeared
from the "Captain and Mark" morning show, which still
features PD "Captain" Herb Ivey along with former midday
jock Celeste. Last week, the station announced it had parted
ways with Persky; there's already plenty of noisy speculation
that he's headed for Nassau's "Frank" WFNK (107.5 Lewiston),
which has been eating away at WBLM's ratings. (NERW irony alert:
When Persky joined WBLM way back, it was still operating on that
very 107.5 signal...)
- It's the end of an era in NEW YORK radio history: At 1:00
Saturday afternoon (April 30), WOR (710 New York) began broadcasting
from its new home at 111 Broadway, closing the book on almost
eight decades of radio from 1440 Broadway. Bob Gibson did the
last newscast from 1440 at noon Saturday, followed at 1 PM by
the first newscast from 111 with Dara Welles - and the word is
that engineers Tom Ray and Kerry Richards had very little sleep
over the weekend as they got everything in place at the new digs.
-
May 6, 2000 -
- This week's column might better be called "Clear Channel
Watch" for all the news Lowry Mays and company have generated
in the region over the past few days -- not least of which is
word of an impending purchase making waves in the Hudson Valley
radio scene. It hasn't been officially announced by either company
yet, but we're hearing that $24 million is the price Clear Channel
will pay to add Straus Media Group's ten stations in the region.
Included in the deal are:
- * Standards WCKL (560) Catskill and news-talk WHUC (1230)
Hudson
* News-talk WKIP (1450) Poughkeepsie
* News-talk WELV (1370) Ellenville
* "Thunder Country" WTHK (93.5) Hudson and WTHN (99.3)
Ellenville
* Hot AC "Cat" WCTW (98.5) Catskill and WCTJ (96.1)
Poughkeepsie
* Soft AC "Q92" WRNQ (92.1) Poughkeepsie
* Adult rock WRKW (92.9) Saugerties
- The Straus stations fill in a gap between CC's existing clusters
in Albany (including WPYX 106.5, which has a translator in the
northern Hudson Valley), Utica, Binghamton, New York City, and
Connecticut. If this deal comes to fruition, it will be the first
time one of the big national groups has set foot in the Hudson
Valley, and certainly the possibility of moving many of the stations'
operations to the existing CC clusters nearby can't be ruled
out. We'll keep watching this one for developments...
- One that Clear Channel has confirmed: The company will pay
$5 million to Cram Communications for that company's Syracuse-market
WVOA (105.1 DeRuyter). WVOA currently programs religion, simulcast
on WVOQ (103.9 Mexico) in Oswego County to the north, as well
as on translators W243AB (96.5 Westvale) and W237AY (95.3 DeWitt)
in the Syracuse area. Those stations, along with WVOA's sister
AM station, WSIV (1540 East Syracuse) don't go to Clear Channel,
which leads us to think that the WVOA format will continue on
WVOQ and the translators.
- Some of the week's other big news also happened in NEW YORK,
including a confusing decision by the FCC on the addition of
a new allocation on the FM dial way up north in Saranac Lake.
The town's existing FM station, WSLK (106.3), had opposed Dana
Puopolo's petition to add 107.1A to the table of allocations
for Saranac Lake (which, oddly, has an allocation at 101.7A that
has itself never been used since WSLK changed frequency some
years back). Arguing that many frequencies were being added to
the table on a speculative basis, without ever being applied
for, WSLK tried to get the FCC to refuse to add the frequency...but
to no avail. Another part of the decision substitutes 102.9A
for 102.5A in Westport, thus meaning a frequency change for WCLX
down the road.
- From CONNECTICUT comes word that WFSB (Channel 3) in Hartford
has inaugurated digital TV service. WFSB-DT operates from WFSB's
transmitter site on Talcott Mountain in Avon, using channel 33.
- While we're in the vicinity of Talcott Mountain, we're able
to clear up some of the confusion that followed last week's report
of the Entravision/WHCT deal. First off, it now looks as though
Entravision is about to follow through on its purchase of Channel
18, in a complicated deal that will cost the company $26 million.
Only $1 million will go to WHCT's current owner, the bankrupt
Astroline firm that's been fighting to hang on to the license
since 1984. The rest will go to two other companies that had
been hoping to buy WHCT but were caught up in bankruptcy problems
and in a lawsuit over minority-buyer preferences. That, amazingly,
is the easy part. The rest of the proposed Entravision purchases
in the region (including WNDS in Derry NH) don't look like they'll
become reality. It seems the stations were recommended to Entravision
as possible acquisitions by Barbara Laurence (who was the principal
some years back in Cuchifritos Communications, the almost-buyer
of Channel 43 in Bridgeport), but amidst a lawsuit between Laurence
and Entravision, the chances of any of those stations actually
being sold seems slim. Clear as mud?
- In MAINE, J.J. Jeffrey's Atlantic Coast Broadcasting is adding
to its station group with the purchase of Carter Broadcasting's
three Maine stations. Jeffrey gets to add Portland's WLOB (1310)
and Rumford's WLOB-FM (96.3) and WLLB (790) to his existing group,
which includes sports "WJAB" WJAE (1440 Westbrook)
and WJJB (900 Brunswick), CHR WRED (95.9 Saco), and adult AC
WCLZ (95.5 Topsham). NERW knows Jeffrey must appreciate the irony
of longtime competitors "WJAB" and WLOB finally uniting
under one roof; those with shorter memories will at least recall
that the Carter stations were to have been part of the failed
sale to Catholic Family Radio last year. Expect a format change
from religion when the deal closes...
- The FCC's approval of the CBS/Viacom merger this week creates
the first TV duopoly in Boston, as CBS's WBZ-TV (Channel 4) and
Viacom's WSBK (Channel 38) join forces. Boston isn't one of the
markets where the FCC is ordering divestitures; the cross-ownership
cap now allows 2 TVs and up to 6 radios in the largest markets,
and CBS's 1 AM and 4 FMs stay under the cap. Viacom is adding
one more Massachusetts station, too: WLWC (Channel 28) in New
Bedford is being transferred from LMA partner "C-28 FCC
License Subsidiary Inc." to Viacom. (WLWC doesn't count
against duopoly, of course, because it's a Providence-market
station).
New England Radio Watch, May 4, 1995
- 1550 WNTN in Newton (10kw-D) has added a new block of programming
to its leased-time format. The "Asian American Broadcasting
Network" is heard from 4:30 till 7:30 pm, and rebroadcast
the following day from noon till 3. It's the first broadcasting
venture of businesswoman Sarinna Chiang, and the first Chinese-language
program on commercial radio in Boston. Chiang is already talking
about branching out to other large markets. I want to know what
happens this winter, when WNTN's signoff creeps back to around
4:30 pm!
- WBZ's veteran morning news anchor, Gary LaPierre, will be
in New York Friday morning (May 5), to sub for Paul Harvey on
Harvey's morning and midday news and comment broadcasts. This
will be a chance for the nation's largest radio audiences to
hear what we've all known for years -- Gary's one of the best
there is. We're all thrilled for Gary, and he's pretty excited
himself.
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