NorthEast Radio Watch 3/3/2025: Gorbman Retires (Really!)

In this week’s issue… Rochester newsman retires – Mass. AMs on the move – PA FM sold – Corus goes all-Canadian – NAB honors Shulins

By SCOTT FYBUSH

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

*For many of us who’ve worked in radio in upstate NEW YORK, it’s hard to imagine Randy Gorbman ever retiring.

The news and public affairs director at Rochester’s WXXI (where your editor worked for 20 years, the last 11 of them with Randy as his boss) is famously known as the hardest-working man in the business, answering messages and grabbing sound for stories at all hours of the day, night and all weekend long, too.

And yet, somehow, the end of this month will mark the end of Gorbman’s 47-year career in radio news as he prepares to leave the last of his many gigs.

The New York City native cut his teeth in radio at Brooklyn Tech, working at the city school station, WNYE (91.5). Even before graduating from Syracuse University in 1977, he was working at public station WCNY (91.3), and from there it was off to little WIPS (1250) in Ticonderoga to sign the station on in the morning and deliver local news to the southern Champlain Valley.

There were stints in the Catskills and in Stamford, Connecticut, as well as some time with the NBC Radio Network in its Westwood One era. By 1993, he’d arrived in Rochester, leading the newsroom at WHAM (1180), where he worked in two stints sandwiched around some time as operations manager at Utica’s WIBX (950).

And as WHAM downsized, he made the move to WXXI in 2013, arriving just in time to oversee a significant newsroom expansion that took the station beyond its traditional radio and TV broadcast offerings into the digital landscape and made it the largest newsroom in the city.

Through it all, Randy did more than a news director usually does, filling in on every imaginable airshift, anchoring live event coverage and hitting the phones at all hours to provide the sound his anchors (including former WHAM colleague Beth Adams) needed for their newscasts.

(He also never forgot to provide a certain fill-in anchor with his obligatory 5:30 AM Coke Zero and blueberry muffin. These things matter at that hour.)

A passionate fan of radio history and of Bakelite radios from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, even Gorbman admits he’s unlikely to completely pull away from news when he retires, and we suspect we’ll still be hearing him more than a little occasionally on the Rochester airwaves, for which we will indeed be grateful.