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 9/2 and 9/9/2024: It’s TJ Time
In this week’s issue… NY’s 98.7 enters stunt mode – Double shifting at WBLI – WICC, WFOX simulcast with talk – New country in Toronto – Big booster project in western Mass
By SCOTT FYBUSH
Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada
[Programming note: after an unusually heavy few weeks of late summer news, we’re going to try to take a week off and return with a new NERW on Sept. 16 – but if there’s something big breaking, we’ll be back next week anyway. And watch this space for some special features in the meantime…]
*It was, for a while, the very best kept secret in broadcasting: when Good Karma Brands’ lease of WEPN-FM (98.7) in NEW YORK came to an end Friday night, what would Emmis begin programming as it took back operation of the station?
There’s an answer now, but if anything, it leaves even more questions hanging. There was no ceremony to the end of ESPN programming on 98.7 after a dozen years. What had been the local 9 PM to midnight show, hosted by station veterans Larry Hardesty and Gordon Damer, broadcast its final episode Thursday night as Good Karma let the pair go. (Why? Apparently a bit of cost-cutting as the ESPN New York programming moves to WHSQ 880, but along with that the reality that with the addition of the Mets, there’s not going to be much space for a local night show on the station now.)
Listeners to 98.7 heard a few seconds of static before midnight as audio sources were switched around at the Empire State Building and the station’s HD Radio signal was turned back on after many years – and then it was into “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon and the revelation that listeners were now hearing “TJ 98.7, a pop-up radio station.”
What’s that about? As the hot AC tunes began to spin (with a legal ID noting that the automation for the pop-up is coming from radio.cloud, which puts automation, yes, in the cloud, feeding it through an internet connection to an output device at the transmitter site), some clues began to emerge. What was longtime WINS news anchor Judy DeAngelis doing on the new station talking about her hometown of Westwood, New Jersey? And what’s the “special treat” arriving on 98.7 Tuesday morning after a commercial-free weekend?
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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