Top of the Tower Podcast #061: Rob Bertrand at NAB/PREC 2025
Top of the Tower talks with Inrush Broadcast's Rob Bertrand about the future of broadcast engineering as a service
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.
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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In this week’s issue… Public media faces a CPB-less future - Elections change broadcasters' fates - Another AM goes silent - K-Love buys in PA, Holy Family sells in Mass. - Bell hands off Peterborough stations
NorthEast Radio Watch 4/28/2025: Letterman’s Maine Surprise
In this week’s issue… "Nite Show" goes out in style - Remembering Erie's McKay - Rhodes retires in Scranton, Russo in Buffalo - Islanders drop radio team
NorthEast Radio Watch 4/14 and 4/21/2025: Post-NAB Wrapup
In this week’s issue… After NAB, hope and confusion - WZLX, WBEB relaunch morning shows - WJTO, WLAM stay alive for now - MBC takes over Bell stations - Remembering Mimi Griswold, Herb Squire By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME...
