After the NAB Show

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Tower Site Calendar 2011 features more than a dozen great images of radio and TV broadcast facilities all over the country (and even beyond - this year's edition takes us to Mexico!)

Thrill to a night shot of KFI's new tower! Check out the WAEB Allentown array just after it lost a tower - or enjoy the history at venerable sites like those of KID in Idaho Falls, WCAP in Lowell, KTKT in Tucson and Rochester's Pinnacle Hill.

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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: April 19, 2010 -

• It's never good form to complain about a trip to Las Vegas to commune with the rest of the broadcast world, but now it can be told: the last few years at the NAB Show have been downright depressing. The 2009 show was especially difficult - attendance was sharply down, new products were few and far between, and even if they'd been on the floor in abundance, nobody could have afforded to buy them. So it's with great pleasure that we can report that the 2010 show was a distinctly more pleasurable experience. While attendance was still nowhere near the six-figure peaks a few years back, there were plenty of familiar Northeast radio faces to be seen on the new terrain of the Las Vegas Convention Center's central hall, where radio exhibitors were relocated this year after more than a decade over in the north hall.
• Those exhibitors had some neat new stuff to show off, perhaps most notably in the arena of audio processing, where it's been a long time since the "big guys" have had shiny new boxes to offer. It's hard to make intelligent comparisons on a noisy show floor where it's impossible to A/B competing processors at separate booths, but our (far from sophisticated) ears gave the nod to the new Omnia 11 over Orban's new Optimod 8600 and Wheatstone's latest Vorsis box; what we can say with certainty is that the processing geeks out there will have plenty to debate for some time to come. (And if your favorite major-market FM sounds a little different in the next few weeks, it's a good bet that there's a quiet test of one or more of those processors going on for the benefit of corporate engineering...)
• Even more heartening than the sight of all that new gear was the good news we heard from many of the exhibitors on the floor: radio companies are once again buying equipment for more than just emergency repairs. On just the second day of the show, we talked to one well-known vendor who reported having already booked orders well into six figures - and you can no doubt imagine how big the smiles were that accompanied that statement!
• It's a good thing the vendors and the engineers were smiling, because upstairs in the session rooms, the executives weren't having as good a time, at least not while listening to regulators. Your editor wasn't around back in the sixties when FCC chairman Newton Minow was all but run out of an NAB show after his famous condemnation of TV programming as a "vast wasteland" - but we got a taste of that kind of tension while watching Minow's present-day successor, Julius Genachowski, attempt to triangulate his broadband goals with broadcast industry realpolitik during his Tuesday-morning keynote address. If Genachowski truly believes, as he told broadcasters, that he can free up significant new spectrum for broadband data without forcibly taking it away from TV owners, he was clearly the only one among the thousands in the room who believes such a move is possible. (The challenge, of course, is that the big urban markets where that spectrum is most urgently desired are also the markets where TV stations are already using that spectrum most heavily; in Los Angeles, for instance, where we spent some time before the show, essentially the entire UHF TV dial is already full to bursting.)
• Perhaps the more telling statements came later in the day. Genachowski didn't stick around for the "Regulatory Face-Off," bolting back to Washington for a Senate hearing without even taking audience questions, but his colleagues Michael Copps, Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Atwell Baker sat down with the NAB's new president, former Oregon senator Gordon Smith, to debate the issues at greater length.
• Meanwhile, there was plenty going on back home, starting in MASSACHUSETTS, where there's a new episode in one of the perpetual soap operas in Boston radio in recent years: the testy relationship between Entercom's WRKO (680 Boston) and its star talk personality, Howie Carr. On Friday, Entercom suspended Carr for a week, citing unspecified on-air comments that have badmouthed the station and the company. "His behavior and his anger at the company is unacceptable because he denigrates the company, the medium, the station, the signal, and he’s a highly, highly, highly paid employee," WRKO VP Julie Kahn told the Globe on Saturday. While this is hardly the first time Carr has sparred with Entercom - there's still plenty of bad blood from his unsuccessful 2007 attempt to break his WRKO contract in order to move to morning drive at Greater Media's WTKK (96.9) - it comes at a particularly bad time for WRKO, just weeks after the station lost much of its syndicated talk lineup, in particular Rush Limbaugh, to Clear Channel's new WXKS (Rush Radio 1200).
• Those programming changes left Carr as the highest-profile talk host by far on WRKO, and apparently gave him the confidence to test the boundaries of his contentious relationship with management. Can Entercom afford to keep Carr off the air for more than a week if he doesn't ease up on the criticism - or will the reality of a weakened schedule anchored by Tom Finneran in mornings and Charley Manning in middays force WRKO to give Carr free rein to speak his mind in afternoons, as long as he keeps drawing an audience? As always, stay tuned...
• "The Garden Hotline" was a longtime weekend staple on talk radio, and now the man who created it has died. Ralph Snodsmith was an Illinois native, but his radio career began in Rockland County, where he was the Cornell Cooperative Extension agent for many years. Snodsmith did local radio on WRKL (910 New City) before going national by way of WOR and the WOR Radio Network. In recent years, he'd been heard on Rockland's WRCR (1300 Spring Valley). Snodsmith served as director of the Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing; he also appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" and wrote several gardening books. Snodsmith died Saturday morning in Virginia after suffering complications from an accident; he was 70.

Five Years Ago: April 17, 2006 -

• It's not quite a done deal, but the long fight over the fate of a MASSACHUSETTS high school station appears to be close to a happy ending. On Thursday, officials at Maynard High School and Boston's WUMB (91.9) announced that they've reached a settlement with Living Proof, Inc., the California religious broadcaster that was granted a tentative preference for a new class A signal in Lunenburg on 91.7, the same frequency Maynard's WAVM has been using for its 10-watt class D signal since the early seventies. The Living Proof grant not only tossed out three other applications for 91.7 - WAVM's application for a power increase to class A status and applications for new facilities in Stow from WUMB and in Lexington from Calvary Satellite Network - but threatened WAVM's ability to continue to exist even with its current facilities.
• As regular readers of this column know, WAVM fought back, enlisting the state's congressional delegation and garnering plenty of media attention about the possible loss of a program that's trained lots of aspiring broadcasters over the years while providing exemplary public service to a small city with no other local radio or TV. A few months ago, Living Proof had offered a settlement that would have granted CPs for its own Lunenburg application and for CSN's Lexington application, as well as giving WAVM protected class A status with a very complex directional pattern. That deal never won full approval from all parties, but it apparently paved the way for the current settlement.
• Under the deal, WAVM will get its protected class A status, increasing to 500 watts with a directional antenna that will protect Living Proof's new Lunenburg signal. That station, in turn, will use somewhat lower power than originally planned. WUMB, which had entered into a cooperative agreement with WAVM much earlier in the process, will share time with WAVM on the 500-watt Maynard signal, using the 91.7 facility there to simulcast WUMB's folk programming when students aren't on the air.
• A well-publicized VERMONT unlicensed broadcaster was dealt a big defeat in federal court last week. After three years of legal battles between the FCC and Radio Free Brattleboro, culminating in a raid of the station by federal marshals last year, U.S. District Judge J. Garvan Murtha ruled last week in the government's favor, granting the FCC summary judgment in the case and issuing a ruling barring anyone involved in RFB's operations from returning to the air without a license. Such a license does exist in Brattleboro, and many former RFB volunteers are involved with licensed LPFM outlet WVEW-LP (107.7), which has yet to sign on. Its construction permit expires in September, and its debut was reportedly delayed by the seizure of the RFB equipment, some of which was to have been used to build the LPFM.
• In PENNSYLVANIA, the big changes this week come from the Scranton area. On the air, Bold Gold Media pulled the plug on the oldies simulcast at WICK (1400 Scranton)/WYCK (1340 Plains) and the separate oldies format at WPSN (1590 Honesdale), replacing them with a sports simulcast as "The Game," with programming coming from Fox Sports Radio and Premiere's Jim Rome. "The Game" is also the flagship for Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons baseball.
• Meanwhile, the market's incumbent sports station, WEJL (630 Scranton), may soon be getting some company on its tower. Entercom's WBZU (910 Scranton), the former WGBI (and now a simulcast of news-talk WILK 980 Wilkes-Barre), is about to lose the lease on its transmitter site south of downtown Scranton. Last week, WBZU applied to the FCC to move to the WEJL tower on the roof of the Times-Tribune building in downtown Scranton. Currently 1 kW days/500 watts night, WBZU would go to 900 watts days, 440 watts nights from the more efficient WEJL tower. (And a remarkable bit of irony: WEJL began its life as WQAN, and until the forties shared time with WGBI at 880 on the dial, using that same tower site that WBZU is about to lose. WQAN didn't move to 630 until the late forties, when it ended the sharetime with WGBI and built the tower atop the Times building that will soon be home to WBZU as well.)

10 Years Ago: April 16, 2001 -

• One of MAINE's oldest radio stations is getting a new owner. After announcing an LMA earlier this month, Clear Channel bought Bangor's WABI (910) and WWBX (97.1) from Gopher Hill Communications this week for $3.75 million. The deal gives America's largest radio owner nine stations in the market; in addition to the standards AM and the hot AC FM outlets, Clear Channel already has AC WKSQ (94.5 Ellsworth), country WLKE (99.1 Bar Harbor), rock simulcast WFZX (101.7 Searsport) and WNSX (97.7 Winter Harbor), oldies WGUY (102.1 Dexter), talk WVOM (103.9 Howland) and country WBFB (104.7 Belfast).
• With nothing happening in NEW HAMPSHIRE, it's down to MASSACHUSETTS next, where former WJMN (94.5 Boston) GM Matt Mills moves into the VP/GM office of Greater Media's Boston group, taking responsibility for talker WTKK (96.9), oldies WROR (105.7 Framingham), country WKLB (99.5 Lowell), AC WMJX (106.7) and AAA-ish WBOS (92.9 Brookline). Mills takes the job held most recently by Frank Kelly, who gets promoted to VP/Sales for the entire Greater Media group.
• The "leftover" RHODE ISLAND Radio Disney outlet is getting a new owner. Hall Communications, which owns Providence-market country outlet WCTK (98.1 New Bedford MA) and New Bedford's WNBH (1340), is picking up WHRC (1450 West Warwick) from Disney, which no longer needs the station after adding WICE (550 Pawtucket) to the Mouse lineup. No word yet on Hall's plans for the station, which fits neatly between the New Bedford group and its southeastern Connecticut stations.

15 Years Ago: New England Radio Watch, April 16, 1996

• Providence's WPRI-TV is changing hands, as mandated by the FCC. CBS bought the then-ABC affiliate on channel 12 from Narragansett Broadcasting last year, but was then acquired a few months later by Westinghouse, owner of WBZ-TV and WBZ radio in nearby Boston. The WBZ-TV and WPRI signals overlap over a broad area of southeastern Massachusetts, so CBS was given a 12 month waiver. WPRI became a CBS affiliate last fall, and is expected to remain so under new owner Clear Channel Communications. It's worth noting that Clear Channel's TV operations are mostly Fox stations, and the former CBS affiliate in the market, WLNE New Bedford MA, is owned by Freedom Communications, which recently signed long-term CBS affiliation agreements for several other stations. So, it's possible that WLNE could revert from ABC to CBS, WPRI could go from CBS to Fox, and existing Fox affiliate WNAC could end up with ABC...but that's just irresponsible speculation on this Radio Watcher's part. Clear Channel is paying $68 million for WPRI.
• WTVU, channel 59 in New Haven, is reportedly about to change calls to WBNE (Warner Bros. New England, presumably). WTVU/WBNE has the distinction of being the longest- running construction permit in the US, having been granted in 1953 as WELI-TV, but not coming on air until just last year. Channel 59 is operated under an LMA by LIN's WTNH (Channel 8) New Haven.