NorthEast Radio Watch 10/12/2020: A Bit of Boston History Comes Down

In this week’s issue… End of (another) era on Soldiers Field Road - More music on WABC - RI broadcaster reaches LPFM consent decree - Breakfast Club ousted - Canadian analog TV stragglers shut down By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT - MA - RI - CT - NY - NJ - PA - Canada *Will you forgive us, on another fairly slow autumn news week, if we start this week's column with a little bit of history that's now missing from the eastern MASSACHUSETTS skyline? It's been a little over two years now since iHeart moved WBZ (1030) out of the building at 1170 Soldiers Field Road in Allston that was built back in 1948 by Westinghouse as its combined radio-TV center. One piece of WBZ stayed behind when WBZ's radio studios moved north to Medford, though - while the station's main 50,000-watt transmitter plant was and still is out in Hull, out on the edge of Massachusetts Bay, it maintained a 10,000-watt backup transmitter in Allston, using a 257-foot self-supporting tower in the parking lot of the WBZ studios. Now that tower is down, dismantled early last week by Kurt Jackson and his crew in the first salvo of construction work that will eventually lead to the construction of a new building for WBZ-TV and the demolition of the 1948-era building and all of its later additions. If you know your history, you'll know this marks the third time a tower has come down at this site: before WBZ moved there in 1948, the Soldiers Field Road land had been home to the transmitter site for WCOP radio, which moved out to Lexington to make room for Westinghouse. (The concrete footings for the old WCOP tower were discovered, somewhat unexpectedly, in the mid-1990s when excavation was taking place to the west of the original building for the construction of a newsroom/control room addition.) The second tower to come down here was the famous one: Hurricane Carol in August 1954 took down most of the 680-foot self-supporting tower Westinghouse had built just six years earlier for WBZ-TV, dropping part of the tower over the TV/FM transmitter room and radio studios on the east side of the building. The FM station went silent at that point, surrendering its license and reapplying for a new facility a few years later, while the TV station made a temporary move to Medford before building a new guyed tower at the Needham site it still uses. The story we always heard while working at WBZ was that the AM auxiliary tower went up soon after that, using a tower that Westinghouse had dismantled after signing off another of its early FM outlets, the first version of KDKA-FM in Pittsburgh. Truth? Legend? It's decidedly unclear: the first time the Allston auxiliary facility appears in FCC records is in 1958, two years after KDKA-FM moved from its original site in Oakland (now WQED-TV's tower site) to KDKA-TV's North Side tower. But the ASR records for the Allston tower show a construction date of 1950, and it does appear in a 1955 aerial photo of the site. Nor do we have a complete engineering history of the AM auxiliary facility. It was originally licensed with 5000 watts, and we're told by WBZ veterans it actually used a longwire running from a transmitter on the top floor of the building out to the tower, which by then sat in the middle of a growing parking lot on the west side of the building. By the time we arrived early in the 1990s, it was a 10,000-watt signal, shunt-fed into the tower from a Harris transmitter in the wall of the radio master control space on the first floor. (It didn't get fired up often, because it created interference to WBZ-TV's studio operations on the other side of the building.) The 1996 renovations turned the old master control space into the WBZ mailroom, where a new DX10 was installed somewhat incongruously next to the mailboxes. It saw several extended periods of use during tower work down at the main AM site in Hull - and that raises yet another question: will iHeart bother to try to find a new auxiliary site for AM 1030, perhaps diplexed with co-owned WRKO in Burlington? Or has continuity of AM operations become less important these days? In any event, after more than 72 years there's now nothing of WBZ radio to be found at 1170 Soldiers Field Road. We'll be watching for the next steps now that the tower is down and the site of the new WBZ-TV studios begins to be cleared, a move that will also require demolition of the adjacent 1200 Soldiers Field Road building that once housed the studios of WBOS-FM and WSSH-FM. [bucket id="8276" title="Calendar Ad"] [pmpro_login show_menu="false" show_logout_link="false"] [membership level="1,3,5,7,8,9,10,11"] *In RHODE ISLAND , there's a coda to last week's story about Chris DiPaola's move of his "I-95" classic rock format from WWRI-LP (95.1 Coventry) to WPVD (1450 West Warwick) and its translator on 105.5. The FCC's rules say you can't own or operate an LPFM license in tandem with a full-power station, a line DiPaola had blurred in the past down in South County, where his DiPonti Communications owns WBLQ (1230 Westerly) and family members own WSUB-LP (96.7 Ashaway), which itself once was home to WBLQ's local full-service format and which shares some studio and sales staffing with WBLQ. In Coventry, DiPaola's involvement with WWRI-LP apparently attracted competitors' attention; for more than two years now, the FCC had been investigating the LPFM's operations, and last week it reached a consent decree with the LPFM's licensee, the Marconi Broadcasting Foundation. The decree addresses the cross-ownership issues, finding that DiPaola had been on the LPFM's board at the same time he was sole proprietor of full-power WBLQ, and that there had been inconsistencies in the LPFM's subsequent filing for a change in board control, which in turn also triggered issues with the FCC's rules on holding periods for LPFM licenses before they can be transferred. It found other problems, too, including underwriting announcements that crossed the line into commercial content. Marconi was able to show financial considerations that resulted in a reduction in its penalty, which the FCC reduced to $15,000. It will make an initial $2500 payment, then will pay $500 a month until it's paid off the penalty in 2022. * NEW YORK 's WABC (770) is betting on more oldies as a big part of its weekend lineup. With Cousin Brucie (Morrow) now established on Saturday nights, owner Red Apple Media announced it's extending his shift to a fourth hour, from 6-10 PM - and it's launching a second oldies show to follow, with Tony Orlando trying his hand at radio for a three-hour shift from 10 PM until 1 AM Sunday. Frank Morano, the talk host who came over to WABC from WNYM (970 Hackensack) along with Red Apple owner John Catsimatidis, told listeners last week that Catsimatidis is also talking to WNYM morning host Joe Piscopo about doing a Sunday night Sinatra show on WABC. And Morano himself recently expanded his role on the WABC schedule, launching his own live "The Other Side of Midnight" overnight talk show from 1-5 AM, replacing Red Eye Radio. *On Long Island, the Indian programming of Radio Zindagi found a new home quickly after the sale of its previous outlet, WBWD (540 Islip). It's now appeared on WNYH (740 Huntington), which had been airing a variety of filler programs after its previous lease tenant, Radio Cantico Nuevo, defaulted at the end of 2019. *Radio People on the Move in PENNSYLVANIA : Kristen Herrmann moves up to the PD chair at Beasley's WBEN-FM (95.7 BEN FM) in Philadelphia, where she's been on the air in mornings and afternoons. Herrmann takes over from Chuck D'Amico after his move down the hall to program sports WPEN (97.5 the Fanatic). There will be some sports under Herrmann's oversight, too: Beasley just signed a deal to move Villanova University sports to WBEN-FM, which replaces previous flagship WTEL (610), now leased by Beasley to iHeart for its Black Information Network programming. Where are they now? Chuck Knight, whose career included more than a decade programming WBEB (B101) in Philadelphia and a more recent stint as a senior programming VP for iHeart in San Antonio, has found a new gig after being one of the victims of iHeart's January job cuts. He's the new PD at WINK-FM (96.9) in Fort Myers, Florida. *Want a sure bet in CANADA ? How about this: when you try to import a U.S.-based syndicated morning show into Toronto, listeners there aren't going to warm up to it. This time it's Premiere's New York-based "Breakfast Club" and Stingray's CFXJ (Flow 93.5) finding it out the hard way: after just a few months, Flow is pulling the show off the air, replacing it on Thursday with the local hosts who were displaced to afternoons back in May, Blake Carter and Peter Kash. The move may have been cursed from the beginning. Stingray originally planned to launch the syndicated show back in March, but delayed the move for two months so that Carter and Kash could continue providing local information at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even waiting until May was still "the exact wrong time," Stingray GM Steve Parsons told Toronto's NOW. With the presidential election heating up south of the border and "Breakfast Club" becoming increasingly politically-focused, its content wasn't speaking to Toronto audiences, as host Charlamagne tha God even acknowledged to a Toronto caller last week. "Y’all need a local morning show in Toronto," he said - and that's what Flow listeners will get again starting Thursday. * Viewers of Canada's CTV network and its local affiliates weren't getting a local anything for a while last Monday night, when a power failure at CTV's national headquarters in the Agincourt neighborhood of east Toronto knocked out not only Toronto's CFTO (Channel 9) but also the hubbed master control for all of CTV's local stations from Winnipeg east to the Maritimes - plus most of the company's cable networks, including the TSN sports channels and the CTV News Network, not to mention streaming for most of Bell's radio stations and much of CTV's digital presence. For several hours, viewers instead got the Toronto-based CP24 news channel, which operates from the old CHUM-City facility on Queen Street West in downtown Toronto and wasn't affected by the outage. (Neither were MuchMusic or several other cable channels based on Queen Street.) Even after signals were restored mid-evening, power still wasn't back in CTV's national newsroom, which sent anchor Lisa LaFlamme outside to deliver the late-night national newscasts from a spot overlooking the 401 highway. It's still not clear exactly what failed, or why there wasn't more redundancy at play. *It's the end of the line for a few of the analog TV stragglers still on the air in Ontario: as planned, CTV pulled the plug on CJOH-TV-6 (Channel 6) in Deseronto, near Belleville, as well as CKNY-TV-11 (Channel 11) to the north in Huntsville on Friday. (It's long in the past now, but back in the 1980s, cable systems here in Rochester pulled in CJOH-TV-6 for a few years, giving Rochester viewers access to CTV programming and news from its parent station, CJOH-TV in Ottawa.) *South of Windsor, the Amherstburg Broadcasting Corporation is applying for a 50-watt/51 m signal on 107.9 in that small town. The new station, which has asked for the calls CKBG, would broadcast a mix of news, talk and adult contemporary music if applicant Marty Adler gets the grant. And in Digby, Nova Scotia, CKDY (1420) wants to complete its move from AM to FM. It's been running with 50 watts on 99.7 since March, when it suffered vandalism at its AM site. Saying the damage would be too expensive to repair, CKDY is asking the CRTC for permission to move permanently to 99.7 with 6.5 kW. [/membership]

NorthEast Radio Watch 10/12/2020: A Bit of Boston History Comes Down

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NorthEast Radio Watch 10/12/2020: A Bit of Boston History Comes Down

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Site of the Week 10/9/2020: Houston’s Legendary KILT 610

Site of the Week 10/16/2020: iHeart Houston, And More

Scott Fybush

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