NorthEast Radio Watch 6/9/2025: Urgency Grows for Public Media
In this week’s issue… Public broadcasters plead for help - Connoisseur restructures leadership - Pennsylvania AM goes dark - Succession plan for veteran college radio manager
NorthEast Radio Watch 1/15/2024: Audacy Files Chapter 11 – And Much More
In this week’s issue… Audacy files Chapter 11 – Squier family sells WDEV – Townsquare turns off more signals – WBZ’s Rich pulls back – Remembering Doug Cope – New Year format changes
By SCOTT FYBUSH
Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada
*Happy new year, and many thanks for your patience – while we’d intended to be back with a new issue of NERW last week, family health issues intervened, and so this week’s column ends up covering nearly a month’s worth of news across the region.
We’ll try to get back on a regular schedule as quickly as possible, though next week’s column may also be delayed due to travel.
(And stay tuned also for the start of our 30th anniversary celebration!)
*Amidst all of the expected news of format changes and personnel moves over the holidays – and there’s lots of that in the subscriber-only portion of the column – there was one big piece of news.
That was Audacy’s pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on January 7, the inevitable conclusion of a story that began with Entercom’s acquisition of the CBS Radio stations and all the debt that came along with that deal.
With that $1.9 billion debt load hanging over the company, it was all but inevitable that creditors would force the bankruptcy filing, which will give control of the company to a lender-led group and will remove David Field from his position as chair of the Audacy board.
Don’t expect big changes in Audacy’s operations as a result of the fast-tracked filing, which is expected to be approved next month: the company says it expects day-to-day activities to continue unchanged at its stations. There’s no reason to think Audacy will sell many of its stations, either – the company says revenues are recovering from the pandemic-era downturn, and it’s not as though there’s a long list of buyers with cash in hand for those clusters, either.
(We do, however, expect Audacy to continue selling off the properties it identified for its Audacy Atlas divestiture trust last year, including several tower sites around the region; just this past week, it reached a deal to sell its studio real estate on a valuable development property in Phoenix.)
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.
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!
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