NERW Year in Review 2024 Part I: The Year’s Top Stories

We almost didn’t do it this year, but with a few days before we’re back with our first regular NERW report of 2025 (coming Monday, January 6), we’re offering up a little gift at the end of the holidays – a brief version of our usual Year in Review, running down the top ten stories of 2024 in two parts, one today and the rest on Friday, January 3.

If you enjoy this roundup of the year’s top stories, we hope you’ll support the coverage we’ve been providing in this space for over 30 years now. Consider subscribing to our weekly NorthEast Radio Watch column, and if you haven’t picked up a Tower Site Calendar yet, we’re shipping them out daily.

On with the first half of our roundup…

10. The Job Cuts Continue

We debated whether or not to even include this as a “news” story, simply because job cuts at the big broadcast groups have become almost a routine quarterly event lately.

Even so, 2024 brought some especially deep cuts in radio that cost a lot of talented radio (and TV) people their jobs.

None of the major groups were spared: a big round of iHeart cuts included the November elimination of the Rich Shertenlieb morning show at Boston’s WZLX, just a few months after the classic rock station made a big-profile hire of the former “Toucher and Rich” co-host. That round of cuts also hit hard at clusters in New York (Len Berman and Michael Riedel’s WOR morning show). Albany (including WGY’s morning show) and Philadelphia (WRFF PD Mike Kaplan).

Even after stabilizing its financials in recent years, Cumulus still cut back jobs in 2024, including most of its local presence in York, Pennsylvania (WSBA and WARM-FM) and New London, Connecticut (where WQGN and “Wolf” WMOS are now being run out of Providence, where “Hot 106” WWKX dropped hip-hop to become a “Wolf” classic rock simulcast).

It was a bad year for a lot of people at Beasley, too, where job cuts hit most of the airstaff at Boston’s WKLB, including veteran jock Carolyn Kruze, and where WBOS (92.9) flipped from rock to an LMA to Bloomberg. Beasley’s New Jersey stations also saw big cuts, including WDHA morning man Jim Monaghan, as did its Philadelphia cluster, where WMGK veteran Andre Gardner was ousted after 22 years.

Earlier in the year, it was Audacy’s turn, with a 2% overall corporate job cut that included big reductions at Hartford’s WRCH and WTIC as well as the exit of Christine Richie at New York’s WNEW and KDKA Pittsburgh afternoon host Rick Dayton.

9. Stephen King Exits Radio

We called it a “horror story,” but there was at least a partial happy ending after Stephen King’s abrupt announcement that he’d be getting out of radio ownership at the end of 2024.

Because it was Stephen King, the story made national headlines, but the back story was all too common: in a small market (Bangor, Maine) with too many broadcast companies chasing too little revenue, King’s Zone Corporation had been losing money for years on classic rocker WKIT (100.3), AAA WZLO (103.1/98.3) and oldies WZON (620), and King didn’t want to keep taking those losses as he heads into his late 70s.

While WZLO and WZON indeed signed off on New Year’s Eve, WKIT was saved, as two local businessmen stepped up to buy that one station along with the studio building on Broadway. Will there be a savior for the other two stations in the cluster? With the AM 620 tower slated for speedy demolition, it’s not clear there will be a path forward for that signal, at least.

While King had all the national name recognition, another Maine owner’s stations found a path to survival in 2024. After Bob Bittner’s death in 2023, longtime engineer Bob Perry partnered with Bittner’s widow to keep WJTO in Bath alive, adding a stream for “Bob’s Memory Station” while the AM signal moved from 730 to 750 to make room for bigger changes at Bittner’s former Boston station. Veteran jock and programmer John Garabedian bought WJIB, modernized the format a bit, also added a stream – and early in 2025, he’ll move that signal from 250 watts on 740 to a much larger 5000-watt signal on 720 at a new site.

8. Veteran Anchors Retire

This is another perennial NERW story, of course, but 2024 saw a particularly large number of exits among veteran voices and faces.

In New York City, Chuck Scarborough marked a remarkable 50 years at WNBC (Channel 4) before retiring on Dec. 12 from his last regular newscast, the 6 PM show on the NBC O&O. Across town at WCBS-TV (Channel 2), Dana Tyler held the station longevity record with a 34-year stint before her retirement.

Buffalo’s Jacquie Walker put in 41 years at WIVB (Channel 4), as well as some time before that here in Rochester at WROC-TV, before she stepped down on May 22, setting the record for longevity at that CBS affiliate.

Nobody anywhere, however, could hold a candle to Rochester’s own Don Alhart, who started at channel 13 (then WOKR) in 1966 and ended up with an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for his 58-year run. A man who likes his significant numbers, Alhart picked his anniversary at the station, now WHAM-TV, for his retirement – he joined on 6/6/66 and did his last 6 PM newscast on June 6, 2024, a few months after he turned 80.

Some notable radio careers closed out in 2024, too: as WJTN (1240) in Jamestown, New York prepared for its centennial at the end of the year, it bade farewell to veteran morning man Dennis Webster in August. Webster started at WJTN back in 1970 while he was still in high school, making it a 54-year career.

Four years after Webster started at WJTN, Giovanni joined WPRO in Providence back in 1974, working on the AM side before settling in for many decades as the beloved morning man on top-40 WPRO-FM (92.3). At the end of April, on the day WPRO-FM celebrated its 50th anniversary playing the hits, Giovanni said his farewell.

And in Montreal, there was nobody bigger in the morning than Paul Arcand, the longtime morning host at CHMP (98.5) who did his last Montreal morning show on June 14. “Puisqu’il faut se lever” (“Since we have to get up”) was mandatory listening in the world of Quebec politics and the anchor of 98.5’s top-rated talk format ever since Arcand moved there in 2004. By then, he was already a Montreal radio institution after many years on CJMS (1280) and then CKAC (730).

7. AM Decline Accelerates

Almost every week, the FCC’s public notices carried news of at least one AM station around the country surrendering its license, and NERW-land was far from immune to the trend.

Regular NERW readers know all the reasons: declining listenership, aging audiences, aging transmitter plants in need of repair, many of them sitting on land that’s more valuable than the station itself.

2024’s death toll included Cumulus’ WFAS (1230 White Plains), which had been operating for several years as an experimental all-digital AM station, as well as WSNO (1450 Barre VT, survived by an FM translator now fed from an FM HD2) and several signals that expired after a year off the air: WYBY (920 Cortland NY), WCHN (970 Norwich NY), WZBR (1410 Dedham MA) and WKGE (850 Johnstown PA), whose nine-tower array came down right at the end of 2024.

Along the Connecticut shoreline, Cumulus’ WICC (600 Bridgeport) isn’t going anywhere, but its news-talk format was extended to FM in 2024, replacing classic hits “Fox” on WFOX (95.9). A few more stations were saved at the last minute: WLEA (1480 Hornell NY) and its FM sister, WCKR (92.1), were set to shut down after the death of their would-be buyer, but Bob Savage stepped in, keeping them alive with the programming of his WYSL (1040) up near Rochester. WADS (690 Ansonia CT) came within a day of losing its license before a team of local radio folks got together to restore service on a longwire antenna in the backyard of programmer/engineer Bob Gilmore.

New York’s WFME (1560) was also on the bubble after owner Family Stations sold off its valuable Queens transmitter site and moved the station to a temporary STA facility on a longwire at its former New Jersey FM site. That signal turned out to be causing interference to a nearby school, but Family salvaged its AM license, moving 1560 to a better STA facility with 10 kW at the WPAT (930) site in Clifton, New Jersey.

And Canada’s slow march of its remaining AM stations to FM continued in 2024 with the new CRTC policy allowing many clusters to have three FMs instead of the former two-FM limit. That opened the way for CFCO (630 Chatham ON) and CFOS (560 Owen Sound ON) to apply for moves to FM that will be carried out in 2025.

(We’ll tackle an even bigger Canadian AM shutdown in the next installment of Year in Review.)

6. EMF Slows Down – Then Speeds Up Again

After years of breakneck growth that gave its flagship K-Love network and secondary Air 1 service nearly nationwide footprints, including a big Buffalo upgrade in 2023, EMF Broadcasting pulled back a bit at the start of 2024 as it changed leadership and moved its headquarters from Sacramento to an expensive new facility near Nashville.

But at the end of the year, EMF jumped right back into growth mode, acquiring the Radio Nueva Vida Spanish-language network that was already operating on many EMF-owned HD subchannels and other signals. Will Nueva Vida get a New York City signal in 2025 now that EMF is buying a potent 94.3 translator signal from across the Hudson in New Jersey? We’re expecting some big moves in the new year.

EMF also kept adding bits and pieces to its network, including a bigger Burlington, Vermont signal with the LMA-to-purchase of WWMP (103.3 Waterbury VT).

And it wasn’t just EMF in growth mode: the regional Family Life Network pushed outward with the acquisition of three former Townsquare commercial FMs at the edge of the Catskills and the launch of several new noncommercial FMs in Pennsylvania and western New York, while the Sound of Life network in the Hudson Valley, Catskills and southern Adirondacks became part of the Minnesota-based Northwestern Radio group.

Join us again on Friday for the second half of the list!