In this week’s issue… NYC’s “Channel 3” rebounds – Howie Carr’s new home, new sidekicks, new calls – Country lands in Ottawa – Shared LPFM granted in NYC – New England FM downgrade underway – WSJ Radio shuts down
Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada
**IN NEW YORK WEDNESDAY? Me too! Come say hello, have a drink, talk about radio with fellow radio folks (including RadioInsight’s Lance Venta), and pick up a 2015 Tower Site Calendar, hot off the press. 7:30 or thereabouts, Tribeca Tavern, 247 West Broadway. Drop me a line if you can make it!**
If you live in greater New York City, need your daily fix of “I Love Lucy,” “Adam 12” or “Leave it to Beaver,” and you get your TV from an antenna, this may have been a confusing week for you. In the latest chapter of a saga we’ve been documenting on and off here at NorthEast Radio Watch for the last few years, PMCM LLC abruptly shut down WJLP (Channel 3)’s transmitter atop 4 Times Square in Manhattan on Monday, only to put the MeTV affiliate back on the air two days later after the latest in a series of emergency rulings from the FCC.
What’s at stake, still, is the question of how WJLP will identify itself on viewers’ TV sets now that it’s completed its long move from its former life as KVNV in Ely, Nevada. Back there, the station’s virtual digital channel was easy to figure out: it had been an analog station on channel 3, and so its digital incarnation was 3.1.
After its big move eastward, of course, things have been more complicated. PMCM hoped to simply make KVNV’s new incarnation (licensed to Middletown Township, New Jersey) “channel 3.1,” but it quickly ran into issues with other stations that already laid a claim to the “channel 3” identity in the area. In Fairfield County, Connecticut, part of the New York City TV market, WFSB from the neighboring Hartford/New Haven market has long laid claim to the channel 3 position on Cablevision’s system, where it runs a Fairfield-specific CBS feed with local advertising. (WFSB’s over-the-air signal, while virtual channel 3, is on RF 33 since the digital transition.) At the other end of the New York market, where it pushes up against the Philadelphia market, CBS had issues, too: its KYW-TV is now on RF 26, but it’s still virtual 3 as well.
As NERW readers know, the conflict over WJLP’s virtual channel assignment has been dragging on since September, when objections from WFSB and KYW led the FCC to put out a public notice seeking comment on WJLP’s proposal to use virtual channel 3.10 for its over the air signal. That’s the channel WJLP used when it started broadcasting at the end of September, and a lot of lawyers on all sides have been getting rich since then as the filings have flown back and forth.
A week ago, things came to a head when the FCC issued an order directing WJLP to change its virtual channel to 33.1 (as WFSB had requested) or leave the air – and while PMCM filed an appeal asking for a stay of the order, it also took the station off the air completely on Monday night. On Wednesday, its request for a stay was granted and the station came back on using 3.10 again. (Its engineers actually had to duck out of the big CCW/SATCON convention across town to go put the transmitter back on the air at midday!)
For now, that’s only a temporary solution, and WJLP is still fighting to get its second cross-country move fully licensed.
Here’s why that matters: whatever you may or may not think about PMCM’s use of a 1980s-era law designed for one purpose (saving RKO’s embattled license for WOR-TV by allowing it to be “moved” from New York to New Jersey) to instead move two stations thousands of miles across the country, WJLP and its Philadelphia-market counterpart KJWP (Channel 2) are in place now – and subject to the same pressure to get cable and satellite carriage as any other small TV station anywhere else. If you’re asserting must-carry rights, as WJLP must (because so far, no cable company’s willing to pay just to carry the MeTV reruns and infomercials it programs), the law says you get to be carried on your over-the-air channel number.
At cable channel 3, WJLP would nestle snugly between WCBS-TV on channel 2 and WNBC on channel 4, an enviable spot even in an era when fewer viewers are hitting the channel up-down buttons on their remotes. (It would also displace ion Media’s WPXN, channel 31, from its own long-established spot on channel 3 on many area cable systems, which is why WPXN is also fighting against WJLP). At the virtual channel the FCC originally proposed, 14, WJLP would be a little more out of the mainstream – and at channel 33, it would ne nowhere near the city’s other broadcasters on most cable systems. (In Connecticut, WJLP has already promised WFSB it won’t seek to displace it from cable 3, but that hasn’t pacified the Hartford station.)
The latest stay of the FCC’s “go to virtual 33” order runs through December 1, and the longer the legal wrangling drags on, the longer PMCM has to wait to even begin asserting any must-carry rights, and thus to appear on cable anywhere at all. It’s a story we’ll continue following closely here at NERW, however it ends.
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*Ready for a winter blast across much of NERW-land? Let us know if you hear of any stations affected by the weather moving across our territory today – and if you missed it last week, check out our exclusive Winter Weather Preview, a new feature from a new contributor to the site, WHEC-TV chief meteorologist Kevin Williams. Kevin’s part of the radio landscape around here, too, and on Tuesday he’ll offer up his expertise and tell you what your listeners will be experiencing, weather-wise, in the next few months.
Winter also means the arrival of a new Tower Site Calendar, which is back from the printer and now shipping from the Fybush.com Store. If you’ve placed an advance order, watch your mailbox – it’s coming soon!
We’re now previewing the new calendar every Wednesday at fybush.com – check out this week’s feature here!
But don’t stop at the calendar when you’re checking out the store this year – we’ve got a great selection of Arcadia Publishing’s photographic history books from all over the region, including Dr. Donna Halper’s “Boston Radio,” Peter Kanze and Alec Cumming’s “New York City Radio” and a small number of copies of the recently released “Ithaca Radio” personally signed by co-author Peter King Steinhaus during his recent visit to Rochester. (That’s Peter and yours truly at the book-signing event – and yes, that’s an actual 2015 calendar in the flesh!)
We’ve also got the National Radio Club’s always timely AM Radio Log, back issues of the calendar you might have missed, and we’ll soon be offering enlarged prints of popular calendar images, too! And the best part? All your purchases at the Fybush.com Store go right toward helping us keep doing what we do here at NorthEast Radio Watch and Tower Site of the Week (and toward recovering from what’s been a difficult year behind the scenes!)
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*The week’s other huge story, of course, came from eastern MASSACHUSETTS and the career of one Howie Carr. If you read our NERW Update on Thursday, you know what’s coming today: having been officially freed at long last of the Entercom contract he hasn’t wanted for years, Carr is now all done with longtime flagship WRKO (680 Boston) and ready to start his new syndicated show this afternoon on a new Boston home.
And as we hinted on Thursday, Carr’s new Boston home takes on a new name today: the former WUFC (1510 Boston) drops that call (what did it ever mean, anyway?) to loop back to its longtime identity as WMEX. In the 38 years since those calls were last heard at 1510, they’ve moved around to, among other spots, 1150 in Boston (now WWDJ), 1060 in Natick (now WQOM), 106.5 in Farmington NH (now WNHI), 88.7 on Martha’s Vineyard (now WMVY) and most recently WMEX-LP (105.9) in Rochester, New Hampshire, which keeps that callsign for LPFM use after apparently reaching a deal to share it with the Boston AM.
At least for now, the rest of the 1510 lineup remains unchanged: Kevin “Dr. K” Walls, who’s leasing most of the broadcast day from owner Blackstrap, is on morning drive, followed by an hour of Boston Herald Radio, then the syndicated Glenn Beck and Dennis Miller shows. Carr comes on at 3 with his new show, pushing Sean Hannity back to a delayed 7 PM timeslot.
Here’s what else we know so far about the new Carr show: it will originate from Barry Armstrong’s Money Matters Radio studios, which means Carr will still be using a studio that also originates programming heard on WRKO (where Armstrong’s heard midmornings from that same facility); it will keep its current affiliate roster outside of Boston; it will continue to feature current Carr producer Nancy “Sandy” Shack – and at least at first, it will also feature Doug “VB” Goudy, who’s free to rejoin Carr after getting his walking papers from WFXT (Channel 25)’s morning show last week.
And since Goudie’s not going to WRKO, that means we still don’t know very much about what happens on the Carr-less 680.
*iHeartMedia isn’t wasting any time building out a facility shuffle that will significantly downgrade one of RHODE ISLAND‘s biggest FM signals. WWBB (101.5 Providence) is collateral damage in the upgrade of sister station WBWL (101.7 Lynn), which will remain a class A signal from downtown Boston but will lose its big directional null to the south. More than that, “101.7 the Bull” will lose the massive adjacent-channel interference that it suffers within the Boston market from WWBB once “B101” drops from class B to class A and relocates to downtown Providence.
That move is apparently coming very quickly: the new one-bay antenna for the downgraded WWBB went into place atop the One Financial Plaza skyscraper last week, and NERW hears there have already been signal tests from the new facility. How quickly will iHeart complete the remaining pieces of the puzzle, including the downgrade of WCIB (101.9 Falmouth) on Cape Cod from a full B to a directional B1?
*In CONNECTICUT, they’re mourning Lou Morton, who was “Kilroy” in the mornings on WPOP (1410 Hartford) in the 1960s and then went on to program and host mornings at WATR (1320 Waterbury) in the 1970s and to work at WQQW (1590 Waterbury) in the 1980s. Morton, whose real first name was Clarence, died Tuesday at age 88.
In New Haven, mark down WNHA-LP as the calls of the new LPFM on 107.5.
*A quiet week in MAINE finds just one translator application on the docket: W265CO (100.9 Vassalboro) wants to move to 100.5, double power to 19 watts and move to a site east of Augusta from its present site to the north. The translator relays K-Love’s WKVZ (102.1 Dexter).
*There aren’t many markets as crowded as NEW YORK City when it comes to squeezing in low-power FM, but the first construction permits have now been granted for that feat. Once the applicant pool had been winnowed down on 105.5, two were left standing – and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the “Global Service Center for Quitting Chinese Communist Party” reached a successful time-sharing agreement to put their signals on the air. They’ll both use a transmitter located atop an apartment complex where the Grand Central and Cross-Island parkways intersect at the eastern edge of Queens; the Catholic station, licensed to Queens, will operate weekdays from 5 AM-2 PM, Saturdays from midnight until 8 AM and then from 4 PM Saturday to the end of Sunday. The Chinese station, licensed to Flushing, will get 2 PM-midnight on weekdays and 8 AM-4 PM Saturdays.
“Educational Lab Inc.” has been granted a construction permit for 102.3, licensed to Brooklyn but transmitting from Todt Hill on Staten Island, where its 7 watts may not even make it over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
At WNYC-FM (93.9), scratch “Soundcheck” from the broadcast schedule: after a dozen years presenting interviews with musicians and live performances, the show is being moved from its 9 PM timeslot on the air to an online-only version starting this week at soundcheck.org. Host John Schaefer will still be heard on the air with his “New Sounds” show.
*Radio People on the Move upstate: after a 25-year career with what’s now iHeart Media, Dave LeFrois is out as operations manager in Rochester, where he programmed WAIO (Radio 95.1) and WDVI (100.5 the Drive). In a continuing attempt to do more with less, LeFrois’ programming duties in Rochester have been assumed by A.J., who retains his PD title at sister top-40 stations WKGS (Kiss 106.7) here and WWHT (Hot 107.9) in Syracuse, where he’s also the afternoon jock.
Down the Thruway, Albany Broadcasting has named a replacement to try to fill the very big shoes left behind when GM Bob Ausfeld died over the summer. Bryan Hollenbaugh is inbound from Adelante Media Group in the Pacific Northwest, where he was VP/regional market manager in Boise and eastern Washington State.
Another longtime Albany fixture is looking toward a happy retirement after pulling his final airshift on Friday. Bob Cudmore’s 52 years in radio began in high school, included a long run at WGY (810 Schenectady), and wrapped up with a decade as the morning man at WVTL (1570 Amsterdam), where he said goodbye to listeners last week. (That’s another Albany market staple, Joe Condon of WYJB, at right in the photo from Friday’s show).
Cudmore already has a second career underway as an author, with a newspaper column and a recent book, “Hidden History of the Mohawk Valley.”
North Country public radio has completed the move of a translator along I-87: W269BR (101.7 St. Huberts) has moved to 101.9 in nearby Elizabethtown.
*It was a rough week for a lot of talented radio people in NEW JERSEY, where the Wall Street Journal announced that it’s pulling the plug on its radio network operation, which includes the MarketWatch segments aired by many CBS all-newsers, the “Wall Street Journal This Morning” show that’s a widely-carried early offering on talk stations, and several other products. While most of the staff in South Brunswick will be out of work at year’s end, there’s some hope for at least the morning show: Compass Media Networks, which distributed WSJ Radio, is hiring anchor Gordon Deal to continue a new version of the show next year.
There’s a new low-power station being heard widely across central Jersey: WOLD-LP (107.9 Woodbridge) signed on last week as “Oldies 107.9.” The new station belongs to Shawn Newman’s SRN Communications; Newman’s day job is down the road at Greater Media in New Brunswick.
*Listeners in CANADA‘s capital city can now hear country music on a local signal. On Monday, Bell Media’s CKKL (93.9 Ottawa) unplugged adult hits “Bob” after 11 years on the frequency, and on Wednesday at noon a ticking clock counted down to the launch of “New Country 94,” kicking off with 10,000 commercial-free songs.
The old “Bob” airstaff is out, including morning man Cub Carson and John “Milky” Mielke, who’s perhaps better known these days as the proprietor of the Milkman UnLimited website. Here’s hoping they all find new work soon!
In Halifax, the CBC signs on today from a new radio/TV studio home at 7067 Chebucto Road, in a former Bay department store on the city’s west side. The weekend move means the end of two historic facilities: the CBC TV plant at 1840 Bell Road and the CBC Radio studios at nearby 5600 Sackville Street. CBC has been in the Art Deco building on Sackville since the 1930s; that building will become part of an expansion of the YMCA next door and the Bell Road TV building will be put up for sale once the move is complete. (And, sadly, we never did get a chance to visit them for Site of the Week…)
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SPRING IS HERE…
And if you don’t have your Tower Site Calendar, now’s the time!
If you’ve been waiting for the price to come down, it’s now 30 percent off!
This year’s cover is a beauty — the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. Both the towers and the landscape are gorgeous.
And did you see? Tower Site of the Week is back, featuring this VOA site as it faces an uncertain future.Â
Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (buy the calendar to find out which ones!).
We still have a few of our own calendars left – as well as a handful of Radio Historian Calendars – and we are still shipping regularly.
The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025, too. Why not order both?)Â
Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the new calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too!Â