Signal Shuffle in Rhode Island

GETCHER 2008 TOWER SITE CALENDAR - BEFORE THEY'RE ALL GONE!

Still haven't ordered your 2008 Tower Site Calendar? You do realize that it's now...er...2008, don't you? We're already down to the last 80 or so calendars, and they're going fast. The 2006 and 2007 editions of the calendar sold out, and this one will do so as well, possibly as soon as this month.

This year's edition is a particularly fine one, if we do say so ourselves. From the cover photo of KAST in Astoria, Oregon to the back cover shot of the Blaw-Knox diamond tower at WBNS in Columbus, this year's calendar features 14 all-new full-color shots of famous broadcast sites far and wide. There's KROQ in Los Angeles, KFBK in Sacramento, WESX in Salem, WGAN in Portland, Black Mountain in Vegas, Mount Spokane in Spokane, and many (ok, several) more.

The calendar is just $18 with shipping and handling included - or better yet, beat our move to mandatory subscriptions later this year and get a free calendar with your $60 subscription to NERW for 2008. (Remember, the proceeds from both the calendar and the subscriptions help keep NERW right here on the web, as we head into our fourteenth year of news and analysis.)

So click right here and you can be sure to have your very own Tower Site Calendar 2008! (And thank you!)

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March 19, 2007 -

• When one of your town's most famous citizens is Stephen King, you probably don't want to get him publicly riled up - especially if you're the University of MAINE, and it's King's radio stations that have been the flagship carriers for your sports coverage for many years. And in fairness, it's not the university itself that made the decision last week to move its sports rights from King's WZON (620 Bangor) over to Clear Channel's WVOM (103.9 Howland) and WGUY (102.1 Dexter) - that call came from Learfield Sports, to which the University sold its sports rights, under the name "Black Bear Sports." It's Black Bear that did the deal with Clear Channel, placing UMaine football and hockey on WVOM, men's and women's basketball and some baseball and softball games on WGUY, and creating a network that will carry the games to other parts of the state as well.
• Promoting the move on WVOM's morning show Thursday, station officials said it would give the broadcasts a wider reach across Maine, as well as restoring former Maine sports play-by-play voice George Hale to a role in the broadcasts. (While semi-retired, Hale still does some work with WVOM, a sister station to his longtime broadcast home, WABI 910.)
• King and his wife Tabitha have been frequent donors to the university, and he fired back on the station's website Thursday: "Tabby and I are very disappointed with the University's decision to move its sports broadcasting rights to Clear Channel, a company which is based far from the college it will be serving. We understand that monetary considerations were a prime consideration, but feel the Athletic Department in particular and the University in general may not understand that making money the prime consideration in any dealing is usually short-sighted. My wife and I feel that may prove to be the case here; we feel that what UM Athletics has gained for their programs may be offset by a loss in the area of community relations."
• As with any good Stephen King yarn, there's another twist to the story: the Bangor stations are among the more than 400 nationwide that Clear Channel is trying to sell. Bids for the cluster were due a few weeks ago, and Clear Channel is expected to announce a buyer for the Bangor group any day now. Executives there say the sale won't affect the UMaine deal, whatever happens.
• In other news from New England, there's yet another TV station sale to report in RHODE ISLAND (though technically, this one's a MASSACHUSETTS station), as Freedom Communications has reached a deal to sell ABC affiliate WLNE (Channel 6) to Global Broadcasting LLC for an as-yet-undisclosed price. Global is headed by Kevin O'Brien, who's spent time at the helm of the Cox and Meredith TV station groups, departing the latter in 2004 after what Broadcasting & Cable describes as a "stormy tenure" in which most of the company's stations changed general managers and news directors, not to mention an investigation of EEO violations. Will the arrival of O'Brien and partner Robinson Ewert be less tumultuous at WLNE, which is sitting firmly in third place in the Providence market under Freedom? If nothing else, Global enters at a time when the rest of the market's unsettled, too - Media General just recently took over WJAR (Channel 10) from NBC, while CBS is in the process of spinning off CW affiliate WLWC (Channel 28) to new owners, leaving only the LIN duopoly of WPRI (Channel 12) and WNAC (Channel 64) under stable ownership at the moment.
• In MASSACHUSETTS, Bob Bittner is trying something new at his standalone AM station, WJIB (740 Cambridge). We've reported in recent months on Bob's struggle with music rights fees, which have skyrocketed now that WJIB has begun to make regular appearances to the left of the decimal point in the ratings. WJIB also lost the income it was receiving from leasing two morning weekday hours to Radio France International, and now Bob says he needs to raise $88,000 this year just to keep the lights on. The result: an announcement last week that WJIB will experiment with listener support. If Bob can raise the needed money by June 30, he'll keep his standards format on the air at WJIB with no commercials and only a few interruptions (mostly for the Sunday church services that help keep the station afloat.) If he doesn't get enough money by June 30, Bob says he'll return whatever donations have come in by then - and he'll have some tough decisions to make. He doesn't want to air commercials, so one possibility is that WJIB may go up for sale. Whaever happens, Bob says his other station, WJTO (730) in Bath, Maine, is safe, since it's not under the royalty-fee pressure that WJIB faces.
• It's either the worst-kept secret in western PENNSYLVANIA radio or some really clever stunting, but we're betting that the impending format change at CBS Radio's WRKZ (93.7 Pittsburgh) is for real. If blog postings from former WDVE stalwart Scott Paulsen and former KDKA talk host John McIntire are to be believed, "K-Rock" will relaunch April 2 as "The Zone," with FM talk and a lineup that will include Paulsen in afternoon drive. WRKZ already airs Opie & Anthony's syndicated morning show, which will stay, and the rumor mill suggests some of CBS' "Free FM" offerings from elsewhere in the country will fill some of the less-prime slots in the "Zone" schedule.

March 17, 2003 -

• Forty-four years after his NEW YORK radio career began, legendary morning man Harry Harrison will make his last broadcast on WCBS-FM (101.1 New York) this Wednesday morning, in what's being seen as another sign of big changes coming on the Big Apple's longtime oldies outlet. Harrison has been a New York fixture since his days as midday man on WMCA (570), where he was a "Good Guy" from 1959 until 1968. That year, Harrison replaced Herb Oscar Anderson in morning drive on WABC (770), where he would remain until 1979. In 1980, Harrison began 24 years in morning drive on WCBS-FM, where he'd eventually be joined by other WABC legends including Dan Ingram and Ron Lundy.
• Longtime WCBS-FM listeners have already heard some changes in the last year or so: the disappearance of most of the pre-Beatles music from the playlist, the dismissal of morning sports guy Phil Pepe, and the recent departure of another WABC veteran, Dan Daniel, from middays -- so it's no wonder that the abruptness of Harrison's departure (he announced for the first time on Friday's show that this Wednesday's would be his last) is sparking plenty of discussion on the message boards and beyond.
• Harrison says the decision to leave WCBS-FM right now is all his -- and he's not "retiring," leaving the door open to a return to the dials at some point. WCBS-FM hasn't named a replacement; Dan Taylor will be doing the shift on an interim basis after Harrison's final show, which he'll broadcast in front of a live audience at Manhattan's Museum of Television and Radio.
• Only Harry Harrison is big enough to keep this next item from being our lead story this week: more than a year after it launched, the YES network has finally won carriage on the Cablevision systems serving Long Island, northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut, the Bronx, Westchester and Rockland. A deal reached between Cablevision and YES last week provides at least a little something to make both sides happy: Cablevision won't have to make YES available on its basic tier (thus increasing cable rates for all its subscribers), instead offering it a la carte for $1.95 or as part of a sports tier with MSG and Fox Sports NY for $4.95 a month; YES gets the same $2.12 per subscriber per month from Cablevision that it's been charging other cable operators. It's a mixed bag for Yankees fans: some of them had been getting MSG and Fox Sports without an extra fee (they'll now have to pay for that $4.95 package, though their basic cable rate will decrease somewhat), and anyone who wants YES will need a set-top box to descramble the channel.
• A station sale in MASSACHUSETTS is all in the family: Marlin Broadcasting is selling WBOQ (104.9 Gloucester) to Westport Broadcasting for $5.8 million, but the sale really just shifts the station from Woody Tanger to his son Doug. WBOQ started out in the late eighties as classical "W-Bach," the successor to Simon Geller's legendary one-man WVCA operation, but in recent years it's become a swinging standards station.

March 19, 1998-

• Once again, NEW HAMPSHIRE tops this week's news -- and again, it's because of job cuts in Granite State radio. Capstar continued to make staff cuts at Manchester's WGIR (610/101.1) this week, starting with the entire morning show on the FM side. Alan Baxter (known on air by last name only, Elle B., "Silent Steve" Gamelin, and "Jeff the Intern" were notified after Monday's show that they're out of work. Afternoon host Fil Robert Kaye is handling morning duties temporarily, but NERW hears that the long-term plan is to simulcast the Greg Kretschmer and Jeanmarie morning show from sister station WHEB (100.3) in Portsmouth. On the AM side at WGIR, sports director Rich Levine is the latest to be fired. Former news director Bill Rossi, meantime, has taken a job with Metro Networks in Boston.
• It's not just Capstar, though; down the Everett Turnpike in Nashua, five staffers at WSMN (1590) are out of work, including longtime WSMN personalities John Halbert and Nick Diamond. New PD Ned Crecilius (of WADN Concord MA) is installing a local talk format at WSMN, with hosts including Woody Woodland, a former sportscaster and salesman at the late WOTW-FM (106.3). WSMN is playing adult contemporary music in middays and evenings for now.
• Up north, we hear WQTH (720) in Hanover is going back to the drawing boards to build its four-tower array, after a local zoning board gave a thumbs-down to the 266-foot towers. Will Bob Vinikoor's new 50-kilowatter make its fall target date? We'll keep you posted... (Ten Years After: Bob's still fighting to get WQTH built...)
• In CONNECTICUT, the unlicensed Nueva Radio Musical (104.5) in New Haven remains off the air for now, while trying to fix some problems that were causing interference to licensed WYBC (94.3) in the city's Hill neighborhood. The station's operators have gathered 2,000 signatures on a petition calling on the FCC to grant them a waiver to return to the air without a license and below the usual 100 watt minimum.
• Up the road in Hamden, the town zoning board is considering an application by WKCI (101.3) to build a new 625-foot tower on Gaylord Mountain Road, just down the hill from WKCI's current site on the tower of WTNH (Channel 8). WTNH isn't renewing WKCI's lease for tower space -- so WKCI needs the new stick to stay on the air from its current site. Neighbors are expressing the usual concerns about a "tower farm" in their backyards...
• The founder of what was once one of MASSACHUSETTS' largest radio/TV groups has died. Thomas O'Neill was working in the Boston office of his family's tire business in the late 1940s when he paid a visit to the Yankee Network, the radio broadcaster that General Tire had recently purchased. He's said to have returned from the visit and told his family that he was more interested in radio than tires -- a decision that led to the formation of General Teleradio in 1948. General Teleradio put WNAC-TV (Channel 7) on the air that June, and grew over the next decade to include stations in New York (WOR) and Los Angeles (KHJ) as well. In 1954, O'Neil bought RKO Radio Pictures from Howard Hughes and General became RKO General.
• O'Neil remained chairman of RKO General until his retirement in 1985, as the company was forced to sell many of its licenses (including WRKO radio and WNAC-TV) following accusations of billing irregularities. O'Neil died Saturday of heart failure at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was 82. In other Bay State news, WCCM (800) in Lawrence has been granted FCC approval of its sale from Curt Gowdy to Costa-Eagle -- but "with conditions," according to the FCC database. We'll let you know more as we learn it.