NorthEast Radio Watch 8/18/2025: Big Cuts at Beasley

In this week’s issue… Beasley cuts hit multiple markets – Public broadcasters continue cuts – Christian broadcasters buy in central PA – Remembering Buffalo’s Wander, NY’s Lopate, PA’s Crumbliss – Could massive TV consolidation shake up NERW-land markets?

By SCOTT FYBUSH

*We’re back at NERW Central, finally, after nearly a month of non-stop travel. (Stay tuned for some updates coming soon about some exciting new projects we’re involved in!)

There’s a lot to catch up on, and as with so much of the news so far in 2025, it’s not great news, for the most part.

We start with Beasley, which was making some big job cuts across its NERW-land clusters and beyond while we were away.

In its central New Jersey cluster based in New Brunswick, the cuts claimed the jobs of two program directors. Terrie Carr, whose career at WDHA (105.5) started way back in 1989, was arguably the heart and soul of that venerable rock format, where she also did middays – but heart and soul can’t compete against profit margins these days, and so it was more than a little disheartening to hear on Carr’s social media that she was cut loose with just a one-minute phone call and no chance to say goodbye to the community of listeners she’d built up over two long stints at WDHA.

“The Good News is I have been planning to launch my own “thing” with details coming soon,” she posted on her Facebook page. “Thanks to everyone who has reached out so far too… I’m not going anywhere! Whatever you do “Know Your Value” – it’s all we have.”

At sister station WMGQ (Magic 98.3), Debbie Mazella had been with the station since 2007 and had been PD since 2016, and now she’s out as well from that post and from her midday shift.

So far, no replacements have been named for the midday shifts or for those PD roles.

*In Boston, “Cadillac Jack” McCartney is a radio legend, having served as Beasley’s Boston PD since 2013 and as the company’s corporate VP for strategy and analytics, the latest stop on a career that’s included long runs at crosstown Kiss 108/Jam’n 94.5 as well as as PD of New York’s Power 105.1 and other corporate roles at iHeart.

That, however, wasn’t enough to keep him in place at Beasley’s Waltham studios, where he was also cut loose last week.

*The Beasley cuts also hit in Philadelphia, where Mike Missanelli’s second go-round at WPEN-FM (97.5 the Fanatic) ended a year after it started. Missanelli had been on afternoons at the sports station from 2008 until May 2022, then returned last August as midday host, the latest stop in a career that’s also included runs at crosstown WIP and WMMR as well as at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It’s not just Beasley’s northeast markets being affected, of course – veteran programmer Cat Thomas was cut loose at the company’s Las Vegas cluster, which recently went through an abrupt move to a temporary studio after the Beasley family sold the studio building it owned there.

And in Fort Myers, Florida, Beasley’s entire cluster is in the process of being sold; in its earnings call, the company says it has found buyers for all five of its stations there, raising $18 million in two separate transactions that haven’t yet been filed with the FCC, possibly awaiting changes in the ownership caps.

If those caps are raised or eliminated, will Beasley’s big clusters in Boston and Philadelphia be in play? We’d bet heavily on it.

*In MAINE, another of Bob Bittner’s former stations has gone silent. WLAM (1470 Lewiston) and its 97.3 translator went silent August 14, telling the FCC they’ve ceased on-air fundraising while “in discussions to sell the stations.”

WLAM’s silence follows the demise earlier in the month of what had been the flagship of “Bob’s Memories Stations,” WJTO (750) in Bath. The licenses for WJTO and its 105.3 translator are for sale via broker and friend-of-Bob Dennis Jackson, but a buyer will have to move them to a new site, since the WJTO tower on the water in Bath was taken down almost immediately after the station signed off.

(Thanks to Dennis and engineer Bob Perry for the photo of the tower coming down; the property in Bath is being sold and will eventually be developed with housing, and Dennis notes that the daytime AM signal on 750 can be moved within a fairly wide radius with up to 5000 watts by day.)

*Maine is also one of several states where there could be a big change coming in TV ownership, as already-huge station owner Nexstar appears to be contemplating a takeover of Tegna, a move that would add 64 more stations to the portfolio of more than 200 stations Nexstar already owns or operates around the country.

In Portland and Bangor, that possible deal would bring Tegna-owned NBC affiliates WCSH (Channel 6) and WLBZ (Channel 2) into the Nexstar fold, where the company hasn’t owned anything so far.

*The much bigger potential shakeups, however, would hit in PENNSYLVANIA and western NEW YORK, where a Nexstar-Tegna merger would depend on changes in FCC ownership rules that would allow a mega-Nexstar to own more stations than it’s currently allowed to hold in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg and Buffalo markets.

In Scranton, such a merger would bring all of the top three stations in the market under common ownership, combining Tegna’s top-rated ABC affiliate WNEP (Channel 16) with Nexstar’s NBC/CBS duopoly, WBRE (Channel 28)/WYOU (Channel 22) and leaving only Fox affiliate WOLF-TV (Channel 56) as a separately-owned newsroom and Big 4 affiliate.

In Harrisburg, the merger would combine Nexstar ABC affiliate WHTM (Channel 27) and York-based Tegna Fox affiliate WPMT (Channel 43), though it would leave two more sizable competitors in the market, Hearst’s dominant NBC affiliate WGAL (Channel 8) and Sinclair’s CBS outlet, WHP-TV (Channel 21).

In Hartford, CONNECTICUT, Tegna’s combo of Fox affiliate WTIC-TV (Channel 61) and CW affiliate WCCT-TV (Channel 20) would pair up with Nexstar’s existing duopoly of ABC on WTNH (Channel 8) and MyNetwork on WCTX (Channel 59), in a market where NBC’s WVIT and Gray’s CBS affiliate, WFSB, are also dominant competitors.

And in Buffalo, the merger would combine the two top-rated stations in town, Tegna’s WGRZ (Channel 2, NBC) and Nexstar’s WIVB (Channel 4, CBS), along with its WNLO (Channel 23, CW). The only other remaining newsroom in town would be Scripps’ WKBW (Channel 7), which has long been a distant third in the market.

The Tegna stations would add to a Nexstar presence that also extends across every market in New York state, as well as Altoona, Erie, Springfield, Providence and the big CW outlets in New York City and Philadelphia.

Would the FCC and the Department of Justice really allow a merger that would create such large ownership combinations and, potentially, massive newsroom staffing cuts as the companies combine their operations? Up until a few months ago, that would have been a resounding “no” – but these days, the rush to deregulation in Washington seems to allow almost anything to go forward.

(Speaking of which, the FCC is also opening a huge rulemaking proceeding that seems likely to put almost anything on the table when it comes to reworking the rules about EAS and wireless emergency alerts. We’ll have more to say later about this, including the ongoing transition behind the scenes from EAS-as-a-hardware-box to EAS-as-a-software-service.)

*In Albany, Matty Jeff is already director of content for Townsquare’s cluster and brand manager/afternoon host at country WGNA (107.7) – and now he’s added a corporate role, becoming Townsquare’s director of country content and programming.

Jeff, who’s been with WGNA for almost a decade, succeeds Doug Montgomery in that corporate role.

*Art Wander was the kind of character you don’t see much these days in radio.

The “Tiny Tot of the Kilowatt,” who died August 13, had a career that started before most of today’s broadcasters were even born, joining Buffalo’s WKBW (1520) way back in 1956 before it became the legendary top-40 giant it’s remembered as today. Wander had been in the Navy and had run the radio station at Buffalo’s VA hospital before starting his radio career, and what a career it was.

After doing news at WKBW, Wander went into radio programming and management. He worked everywhere from Memphis to Chicago to Atlanta to Syracuse, where he was running WNDR (1260) in the mid-sixties before leaving for New York, where “Artie Boo Boo Baby” met Brian Epstein and the Beatles and programmed the city’s first FM top-40 station, WOR-FM (98.7) in the mid-sixties.

While at WOR-FM, Wander got to hear a pre-release version of “A Day in the Life” before the track even had a publicly-announced name, leading him to write Epstein to find out just what that was that he’d heard.

(Photo credit: Steve Cichon’s Buffalo Stories, where you can read more about Wander and Beatlemania on the radio.)

Wander’s wanderings brought him home to Buffalo in the 1980s and into a new chapter of his career, this time as a sports talk host before all-sports radio had even become a format. On WGKT (1400) and then for long stretches on WGR (550) and Empire Sports Network, Wander was outspoken and sometimes abrasive, earning a “get out of town” from Bills management but also a loyal following of listeners and viewers.

Wander stayed in Buffalo after retirement, making appearances on WBBZ-TV and avidly following the Bills and Mets right up to his death.

A 2008 inductee in the Buffalo Broadcasters Hall of Fame, Wander was 97.

*And in New York City, Leonard Lopate was an erudite talk radio presence for more than 40 years, starting in the 1970s at WBAI (99.5) before moving to WNYC, where his show was a midday fixture for 32 years until Lopate’s abrupt dismissal in 2017.

Lopate, who died August 5 in Brooklyn, denied the allegations from station management that he’d made sexually inappropriate comments to co-workers, instead accusing WNYC of cutting him loose because of his age and high salary. He returned to WBAI for several years to finish out his talk career, but the WBAI show never achieved the prominence he’d earned at WNYC, where a booking on his show was a must for any author, actor, musician, politician or anyone else looking for a deeper interview than anything commercial radio could offer.

Lopate was 84.

*After buying WSNJ (1240 Bridgeton), Loud Media is trying to move one of its translators from southern NEW JERSEY to Delaware. W260BW in Swedesboro, across the bay from Wilmington, Delaware, has applied to the FCC to swing its directional antenna around from an eastward lobe to a mostly westward lobe and to move from 99.9 to 95.1, which appears to set up another hop that would take it all the way into Wilmington.

We’re still waiting to see what Loud will use as a permanent format on WSNJ and its translators, which have dropped the previous “Pop FM” format and are running an interim variety music playlist as “Random Music Radio” for now.

*At the other end of the Garden State, WXMC (1310 Parsippany-Troy Hills) is blaming “recent heavy storms” for its request to go silent for up to 180 days. The “Radio Zindagi” south Asian outlet says water topped the bases of its towers and it’s still assessing the damage to the site while it figures out how to proceed.

*As public broadcasters continue to figure out how to adapt to a post-CPB world, we continue to track job cuts around the industry, including some cuts last week at NJ PBS, the public broadcasting outlet operated by New York’s WNET over the TV transmitters still owned by the state of New Jersey.

After undergoing one round of cuts to its NJ Spotlight News daily news operation in March, WNET CEO Neal Shapiro announced last week that “(w)e are facing a financial situation that requires us to make the painful decision to reduce the size of the NJ Spotlight News team” because of the loss of both federal and state funding.

Current reports the cuts appear to have affected about 11 of the remaining 38 or so employees at NJ Spotlight news, a pretty significant cut to what was already a bare-bones operation, especially compared to the previous state-run NJN News operation that was shut down 14 years ago.

*We now know more about the fate of two central PENNSYLVANIA FM signals that are in transition.

In Milton, Vic Michael’s Michael Radio Company turns out to be flipping his purchase of WVLY-FM (100.9 Milton) from Sunbury Broadcasting. After paying $410,000 for the now-silent FM signal, Michael is keeping the tower site but selling the license to K-Love Inc. for $200,000, filling a gap along the Susquehanna Valley south of Williamsport.

Moving south down the valley, Family Life Ministries will pay Seven Mountains Media $400,000 for WQBG (100.5), which is moving from Elizabethville into the Harrisburg market with a new city of license of Carroll Township. The move will give Family Life a much more potent Harrisburg signal, while removing WQBG from its present “Bigfoot Country” simulcast after the deal closes and the new signal is built out.

*In Bethlehem, we remember Ron Crumbliss, a radio and Marine Corps veteran whose CC Broadcasting owns WGPA (1100), as well as WLSH (1410 Lansford)/WMGH (105.5 Tamaqua).

Crumbliss, who died August 3 at 76, made his career as a pipeline welder and as a record store owner, but he was always actively involved in radio starting in his days in the Marines in Vietnam. In later years, he went on to work at area stations that included WHOL, WXLV and WMUH in the Lehigh Valley and WYNS in Lehighton before buying WGPA in 2015.

At WGPA, Crumbliss and his son Christopher created a unique nostalgia format that includes rockabilly, Western swing, doo-wop and classic country, all run out of what used to be the living room of a small ranch house in Bethlehem.

Crumbliss was 76.

*In central MASSACHUSETTS, Holy Family Communications withdrew its $150,000 sale of its three AM stations, WACE (730 Chicopee), WNEB (1230 Worcester) and WESO (970 Southbridge), to Journey for Life Media.

Instead, only WESO and its 101.1 translator are being sold, this time to Daniel Becker’s TLM Communications, for an as-yet-undisclosed price.