In this week’s issue… Full-time broadcasting resumes at 1WTC – Erie FM CP cancelled amidst bidding dispute – Mathieu goes non-comm – FM anniversaries in Canada
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*By the time the 16th anniversary of the September 11 attacks rolls around in a few months, there will once again be regular TV broadcasting from NEW YORK‘s World Trade Center.
As TVNewsCheck reported last week, NBC/Telemundo’s WNJU (Channel 47/RF 36) has its transmitter in place and will begin overnight test transmissions from the new 1 World Trade Center mast this week, followed very quickly – as soon as a week’s time – by a full-time move to 1WTC as its main transmission site.
The Durst Organization, which manages the site, has already installed one of two UHF master antennas and a VHF master antenna, with work underway to install the second UHF master antenna. When complete, the three antennas will reach from 1626 to 1706 feet above ground level – and they’ve added an additional tenant as well. In addition to the previous announcements that NBC (WNJU and WNBC, though WNBC will end up channel-sharing with WNJU after the repack), CBS (WCBS-TV), ABC (WABC-TV) and WNET (Channel 13) will be using 1WTC, ion Television has also signed up with Durst to put WPXN (Channel 31) on the tower.
WCBS will be the next station to move its main transmitter from Empire to 1WTC in the next few months. We’ll be following the process closely as the rebirth of Trade Center broadcasting continues.
(We send our congratulations, by the way, to Durst vice president of broadcasting John Lyons, who was honored by the NAB with its Television Engineering Achievement Award last month in Las Vegas.)
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.
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?)
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!
*Plans for a new FM station in northwestern PENNSYLVANIA are on hold after the FCC dismissed the ERIE Radio Company’s application for the construction permit it won at auction back in 2015.
As we’ve reported here, the $535,000 winning bid for a class A signal on 100.9 in Westfield, New York would have filled the gap left behind when competitor Connoisseur finally makes its long-delayed move of WRKT (100.9 North East) to 104.9, with an improved Erie signal for what will become “Rocket 104.9.”
How fierce is the radio rivalry in Erie? It was Connoisseur that asked the Commission to dismiss the 100.9 CP, noting that ERIE’s down payment for the winning auction bid was late arriving at the FCC. ERIE principal Rick Rambaldo – who, we’d note, sold WRKT and its sister stations to Connoisseur before launching ERIE as a competing operation – told the FCC he was out of town when the money was due, and his bank said it was an error at their end that kept it from being delivered properly.
ERIE later made the full payment for the construction permit several days early, but the FCC is taking a particularly strict “rules and rules” stance in this case: not only does Rambaldo lose the construction permit, he’s also out the $107,000 down payment plus an additional default penalty that will be assessed once the 100.9 Westfield allocation goes back up for auction.
When it does, it appears that Rambaldo and ERIE will once again be bidders – and that they still plan to try to launch 100.9 with the oldies format that “Captain Dan” Geary now runs on Mercyhurst’s noncommercial WMCE (88.5). Rambaldo tells the Erie Times-News that the university is cooperating with the delayed time frame for now; there’s no word on when the facility might once again go to auction, or how much more ERIE may end up having to spend to get a second FM signal to go along with its existing WEHP (92.7 Lawrence Park).
Over at the other edge of the state, there’s a Spanish-language translator battle underway in Reading and the Lehigh Valley.
“Mega 99.5” (WEST 1400 Easton/WHOL 1600 Allentown/W258BM 99.5 Easton) has added a relay on WLEV (100.7 Allentown)’s HD2, which is being used to feed translator W225CF (92.9 Reading). And the new “Mega 92.9/99.5” has competition in both markets from Radio Sharon Foundation, which launched “Latina 92.1” on W221CU (92.1 Allentown), fed by WLEV’s HD3. Radio Sharon will soon add W296CL (107.1 Reading), which Osiris Fernando Guzman is buying from Scranton’s WVIA for $75,000. In Reading, the two translators will compete with iHeart’s “Rumba” WRAW (1340)/W222BY (92.3).
(And read on over at our sister site RadioInsight for more on Radio Sharon’s odd complaint against the 99.5 translator…)
*Here in western NEW YORK, we send our congratulations to Heidi Raphael, the industry veteran who’s been named VP/corporate communications for Beasley Media Group. Raphael did communications for Greater Media before it was absorbed into Beasley, and she succeeds Soni Diamond, who’s left Beasley after several years with the company.
*Why did Joe Mathieu leave the biggest commercial radio newsroom in MASSACHUSETTS? We now know for sure that it was his own decision – because the former WBZ (1030 Boston) morning anchor has signed on just down Market Street at WGBH (89.7), where he’ll soon take over from Bob Seay as local host of “Morning Edition.”
Mathieu, a 1996 graduate of Emerson College, is just the latest to make the move from commercial to public radio; at WGBH, he joins midday hosts Marjorie Eagan and Jim Braude and their former boss at the old WTKK (96.9), general manager Phil Redo.
*It’s the 50th anniversary of the launch of top-40 WRKO (680), and there are some big events planned for the weekend of June 2-3 in Boston. On June 2, Mel Phillips is hosting an anniversary dinner in Newton, with Jordan Rich serving as emcee and Art Vuolo videotaping the event for posterity. That’s already sold out – but everyone’s invited the next night, when WRKO will host an on-air tribute to its top-40 days. Several WRKO top-40 alumni will return for the event, which will air from 7-11 PM on June 3.
*In NEW HAMPSHIRE, ongoing iHeart cutbacks have claimed the job of PD John Laurenti, who’s out at WHEB (100.3 Portsmouth) and WGIR-FM (101.1 Manchester) after two years with the rock stations. No replacement has been announced, and Laurenti is on the hunt for a new gig.
*The worst-kept secret in Bristol, CONNECTICUT is out: after almost 20 years together, Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg will end their “Mike & Mike” morning show this fall on ESPN2 and ESPN Radio. Golic gets custody of the radio side of things, launching a new show this fall with Trey Wingo and his son Mike Golic Jr. That show will simulcast on ESPN2 until the end of the year, when it will move to ESPNU. Greenberg, meanwhile, will launch a new TV morning show on ESPN on New Year’s Day.
*It’s been 40 years since two pioneering FM stations signed on in CANADA. Toronto’s Q107 (CILQ 107.1) hit the airwaves on May 22, 1977, just two days after the debut of CHAY (93.1 Barrie) as one of the first standalone FMs in Canada.
In Toronto, Q107 will honor the occasion with a “40th Birthday Bash” concert June 2; it also held a reunion last week. Up north, there are no official celebrations planned at CHAY, but there’s a fantastic tribute page that tells the story of the birth of what turned into a fantastically successful early Canadian FM signal.
*Over at Bell’s CFRB (NewsTalk 1010), there’s a new evening lineup in place: Jon Pole’s “Pole Position” now airs from 10-11 PM, following his live two-hour shift on Montreal sister station CJAD (800). CFRB is now simulcasting the CTV national news at 11, then a half-hour of “best of” before its new overnight show, “Beyond Reality Radio.”
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From the NERW ArchivesYup, 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, fifteen and – where available – twenty 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: May 23, 2016 *The ruling last Wednesday from a federal judge in MASSACHUSETTS wasn’t quite as stark as the old Daily News headline, to be fair – but now that WHDH-TV (Channel 7) owner Sunbeam Television has lost its bid to stop Comcast from pulling the station’s NBC affiliation away at year’s end, the future of Boston’s second-oldest TV station is now in a little more doubt.
Stearns pointed out that Comcast’s action is far from monopolistic in a broadcast market that also includes “ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS affiliates, local cable stations, Verizon, RCN, Charter, and the DISH Network…carrying a wide spectrum of programming content.” And his ruling notes that there’s ample precedent for allowing a contract to expire, as NBC’s does with WHDH on January 1, 2017, without forcing the parties to renew. *MAINE Public Radio didn’t take long to find a Portland outlet for its new Maine Public Classical network, which launched May 9 on translators in Bangor and Waterville and a few days later on WFYB (91.5 Fryeburg). Now the classical signal is on the air in the state’s biggest city via W281AC (104.1 Portland), the 50-watt signal that’s been relaying WMPG (90.9), the community station at the University of Southern Maine. We don’t have any details yet on the terms of the transaction, which moves the translator from one arm of the University of Maine system to another; we do note with some interest that WMPG’s disappearance from the 104.1 frequency went completely unremarked on the station’s social media presence. (Monday morning update: The sale price for the translator is an eye-popping $251,000, plus an additional $34,840 in promotional consideration for USM on MPBN’s radio and TV services.) Five Years Ago: May 21, 2012 *In the earliest years of this column, back in 1994 and 1995, one story dominated our headlines: the consolidation of Boston broadcast ownership under a handful of large cluster operators. Our first issues (then known as “New England Radio Watch”) chronicled the disappearance of independent owners and the rise of the earliest duopolies and triopolies and, eventually, even bigger clusters.
On Wednesday, that all changed with the surprise announcement that Mindich had struck a deal to sell WFNX’s license – but not its call letters or modern rock format – to Clear Channel Media + Entertainment for a price widely rumored (but not yet confirmed) to be $11 million. For Mindich, it means the end of a broadcast legacy that began in 1983, when the Boston Phoenix publisher paid $1.1 million for what was then WLYN-FM, a suburban signal that had recently segued from leased-time ethnic programming to “new wave” music as “Y-102.” Over the next 29 years, 101.7 established a niche for itself as the radio voice of Boston’s alternative music scene, breaking bands, sponsoring contests and launching the careers of dozens of talented radio people who made their way through the studios that never moved from the old WLYN-FM digs, in a run-down building way off the beaten path in downtown Lynn. (Just a sampling of the names with WFNX on their resumes includes Bill Abbate, later with WBCN and WZLX; Sharon Brody, now of WFNX; Nik Carter, later at New York’s WXRK; Joanne Doody, later at WXRV; Tom Irwin, aka “Tai the Morning Guy” and later at WRKO and WROR; Juanita “the Scene Queen”; and Neal Robert.)  In an interview with WBUR after the sale was announced, Mindich said he’d received plenty of unsolicited offers for the station over the years, including some at the height of the market that would have paid him much better than the Clear Channel offer. “I realized given that sustaining the station over the last four years in particular has been extremely difficult, and the recession has just really killed us, I made the decision. It had to be done,” said Mindich, who was reportedly in tears when he made the announcement to the WFNX staff on Wednesday morning. The station had approximately a dozen full-time staffers and several part-timers, and Mindich says “eight or nine of them” were let go immediately upon the announcement. WFNX’s airstaff (D-Tension and Henry Santoro in morning drive, station veteran Julie Kramer in middays, Adam 12 in afternoons and Jim Ryan at night) were promptly replaced by automation, though Kramer and Adam 12 were back on the air for farewell shows Thursday and Friday. The sale to Clear Channel doesn’t include an LMA, so the automated WFNX programming (and, Mindich promises, more farewell shows) will continue for the next several months until the signal is handed over to its new owner. *As for the other remaining station in a WFNX network that once stretched from Rhode Island to Maine, Mindich also found a buyer for NEW HAMPSHIRE‘s WFEX (92.1 Peterborough) last week. The Peterborough station came to Mindich in a $1.5 million 1999 purchase, and we don’t yet know how much religious broadcaster Bill Blount is paying to add it to his own regional network that includes WBCI (105.9) in Bath, Maine and AM stations in Connecticut (WFIF 1500 Milford, WSDK 1550 Bloomfield), Rhode Island (WARV 1590 Warwick), central Massachusetts (WVNE 760 Leicester) and Derry, New Hampshire (WDER 1320). *Out there on Nantucket, this is launch week for Jeff Shapiro’s new WAZK (97.7), aka “97.7 ACK-FM.” The new station came together very quickly over the last few weeks, with almost daily updates on its Facebook page chronicling the installation of a new antenna, transmitter and studio equipment. A signal could be on the air at 97.7 as early as today, and programming may start by “Thursday or Friday,” the station says. Ten Years Ago: May 20, 2007 *It seemed like a sure thing – put a Spanish-language format on an FM signal in PENNSYLVANIA‘s biggest market and watch the ratings soar.
So on Thursday, “Rumba” disappeared from the big full-market 104.5 signal, moving down to WDAS (1480 Philadelphia), displacing black gospel from that frequency and its decidedly less-than-full-market coverage. (WDAS had picked up Spanish-language Phillies broadcasts at the start of the season, which should have tipped us off that something was up.) Replacing “Rumba” on 104.5 is Philadelphia’s first commercial modern rocker since the 2005 demise of the old “Y100” (WPLY 100.3 Media) more than two years ago. “Radio 104.5” is running jockless for now, with a logo (and programming) reminiscent of the old WMRQ (104.1) in Hartford prior to its switch to urban in 2003. *Gus Saunders, veteran Boston Herald restaurant critic and longtime host of “Yankee Kitchen” on the old Yankee Network and later on WROL (950), died last Monday (May 14) at his home in Newton. Saunders was on the air with his food show for a remarkable 56 years, signing off for the last time in October 1999. Fifteen Years Ago: May 20, 2002 MAINE gets digital public TV across most of the state tomorrow (Tuesday), with the official launch of three of the planned five DTV outlets for Maine PBS. WCBB-DT (Channel 17) in Augusta, WMEB-DT (Channel 9) in Orono and WMEM-DT (Channel 20) in Presque Isle will all transmit a four-channel digital multiplex that includes the main Maine PBS service, PBS Kids, PBS YOU (the national network’s “how-to” channel) and PBS Plus. MPBC says the remaining two transmitters, WMEA-DT (Channel 45) in Biddeford and WMED-DT (Channel 10) in Calais, will be on the air by this fall, putting Maine far ahead of any of the region’s other statewide public broadcasters in the DTV race. NEW YORK could soon have a new classic rocker. WDRE (98.5 Westhampton) will soon break from its simulcast of modern AC WLIR (92.7 Garden City) to become “the Bone”. It will join a crowded rock market in eastern Long Island, competing against Cox’s WHFM (95.3 Southampton, relaying WBAB Babylon) and Barnstable’s WRCN (103.9 Riverhead), not to mention AAA’s WMOS (104.7 Montauk), which is now targeting a cross-Sound audience in Connecticut but still puts a solid signal across the East End. In NEW JERSEY, the FCC gave the go-ahead to Millennium’s purchase of the Nassau stations in the Monmouth/Ocean market, allowing Nassau to take control of standards WADB (1310 Asbury Park) and WOBM (1160 Lakewood), modern AC WJLK (94.3 Asbury Park), AC WOBM-FM (92.7 Toms River) and CHR WBBO (98.5 Ocean Acres), despite market-concentration concerns. Millennium will have 64% of radio revenues in the Arbitron-defined “market” (where one end can’t hear most of the stations from the other end) when the Nassau stations are combined with its other recent purchases, including WKXW (New Jersey 101.5) in Trenton, which has a sizable audience in the area. Twenty Years Ago: May 22, 1997 NERW went back to Boston this past weekend, only to find yet another station added to the American Radio Systems megaopoly. WNFT (1150 Boston) is ARS’ newest acquisition, to the tune of a reported $4.5 million from Greater Media. 1150 has been a troubled spot on the Boston radio dial for more than a decade, including stints as oldies WMEX (quashed by WODS’s arrival on FM), business WMEX (killed off by the recession of the early 90s), Spanish “Radio Continental”, leased-time ethnic brokered by WRCA (1330), the recent brief run as KidStar’s Boston affiliate (which ended when KidStar went out of business), and plenty of interim periods simulcasting WMJX 106.7 or WBCS/WKLB-FM 96.9. ARS isn’t saying much about its plans for 1150, but rumor has it that the station will pick up some of the sports conflicts (Red Sox/Celtics, for instance) from WEEI (850). There’s also a pretty credible rumor that ARS will move 1150 to the WRKO transmitter site in Burlington, demolish the three AM towers and the FM backup tower on the WNFT site in Lexington, and build a taller FM tower there that can be leased out by subsidiary American Tower Systems. That could be profitable enough by itself to make WNFT’s profitability irrelevant, in fact…time will tell. It will be licensed to New Hampshire, but the story of WLPL (96.3 Walpole) is really our VERMONT news this week: The Vermont Environmental Board is hearing another appeal to the 110-foot tower that WLPL owner Gary Savoie wants to build on Bemis Hill near Athens VT. Two adjoining landowners, Sarah Ann Martin and Veronica Brelsford, have kept Savoie tied up in appeals for several years, and in the meantime WLPL remains on hold. Meantime, WMXR (93.9 Woodstock) is crossing the border in the other direction, moving its studios from Woodstock across the Connecticut River to 52 Main Street in West Lebanon NH. And the next piece of the WVMX (101.7 Stowe) mystery has revealed itself: Sage Broadcasting has applied to sell the station to “Radio Vermont Classics,” which could be related to the Radio Vermont that owns WDEV AM/FM (550 Waterbury/96.1 Warren) and WLVB (93.9 Morrisville). Rumor has 101.7 going classical eventually. Up in MAINE, a new station is about to make its debut. WHRR (102.9 Dennysville) has been testing its transmitter, starting back on May 12. Perhaps in response to the upcoming competition, WQDY-FM (92.7) in nearby Calais has gone to 24-hour broadcasting. Sister AM WQDY (1230) remains on a 7AM – 10PM schedule. And over in Eastport, we’re told high school outlet WSHD (91.7) is back on the air after some recent weather-related antenna damage. Advising the station is WQDY news director Tom McLaughlin, a onetime Boston broadcaster on WBCN (104.1) and the old WTBS (88.1, now WMBR). |
In this week's episode - It was a longer hiatus than we intended, but Top of the Tower is back with a new spring season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio. This week, we move north...
In this week’s issue… WRGB's Bishop to retire - CT "tower" coming down - Remembering Robin Marshall
In this week's episode - It was a longer hiatus than we intended, but Top of the Tower is back with a new spring season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio. This week, we continue bringing...
In this week’s issue… Catsimatidis, Shula add signals - Radiodays rocks Toronto - Ex-Bell, Evanov stations rebrand By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT - MA - RI - CT - NY - NJ - PA -...
But Clear Channel’s experiment with Spanish tropical “Rumba” on WUBA (104.5 Philadelphia) never quite caught fire after the station signed on last fall, replacing the soft AC of “Sunny” WSNI. WUBA languished at the bottom of the ratings, with revenue to match, and the advent of the Portable People Meter in Philadelphia this year confirmed that it wasn’t just an issue with under-representation of the Hispanic audience.
