NorthEast Radio Watch 12/23 & 12/30/2024: WKIT Lives!

In this week’s issue… WKIT finds a buyer – Eskin out at WIP – Staff shifts in Utica – CRTC approves Bell divestitures

By SCOTT FYBUSH

Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada

*It’s a rare horror story that has a happy ending, but for rock fans in Bangor, MAINE, the threat of losing their beloved station at year’s end has been averted.

That’s WKIT (100.3), which Stephen King has owned for decades, and which was to have been one of the three King stations to shut down on New Year’s Eve. Could the top-rated station in Bangor really just go silent like that?

The answer turns out to be no.

“We couldn’t let it die,” said restaurant owner Greg Hawes and sportscaster Jeff Solari, who have formed a new company called Rock Lobster Radio LLC to begin LMA’ing the station from King on January 1 with an eventual purchase to follow.

“Hundreds – if not thousands – of people posted, called or reached out when they heard the news 100.3 was getting the plug pulled,” Hawes and Solari said in a post announcing the news on Monday. “Longtime listeners were devastated. But now the grief can fade. The voices you love are staying right here.”

Solari started in Bangor in 1992 as a WLBZ-TV (Channel 2) reporter/anchor, worked in creative services and promotions at the NBC affiliate, left the market for a while, then came back to do sports at King’s WZON (620) and at WEZQ (92.9 the Ticket). Hawes co-owns a local barbecue joint and a cannabis dispensary.

But while WKIT will live to rock another day, it still appears that its sister stations don’t have a path out of the woods yet. Oldies WZON ran a brief DX test early Sunday morning that was widely heard around the region, including a mention that its tower behind the current King studios on Broadway is set for demolition early in the new year once it goes silent, and AAA WZLO (103.1/98.3) is also still set to go silent as 2025 rings in.

Will the stations find a way to extricate themselves from the jaws of the rabid dog that is the small-market radio industry in the 2020s? Can they escape the path of the possessed car that’s aiming at so many independent stations? Can your editor squeeze in one more gratuitous Stephen King reference?

We’ll be watching closely as the new year approaches.