Irene Hits NERW-Land

TOWER SITE CALENDAR 2012...ORDER NOW!

A decade ago, it was just a goofy idea: "Hey, you should put some of those tower pictures into a calendar!"

But when Tower Site Calendar 2002 appeared, it was a hit - and ten years later, the fun still hasn't stopped.

And now it's that moment at least some of you have been waiting for: the grand unveiling of our latest edition, Tower Site Calendar 2012, seen for the very first time right here!

As befits a tenth-anniversary edition, this one's special: in addition to all the great tower photos and historic dates you've come to expect from our calendars, the new 2012 edition is our first-ever themed calendar, paying special homage to the many stations that began broadcasting during radio's first big boom year of 1922.

The 2012 edition brings something else that's new to the Tower Site Calendar: the option of a spiral-bound edition that will hang flatter on your wall.

This week marks your very first chance to order your calendars (including our special limited, numbered signed edition) for delivery in early September...so what are you waiting for?

Order now at the fybush.com Store!

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Yup, we've been doing this a long time now, and so we're digging back into the vaults for a look at what NERW was covering one, five, ten and - where available - fifteen years ago this week, or thereabouts.

Note that the column appeared on an erratic schedule in its earliest years as "New England Radio Watch," and didn't go to a regular weekly schedule until 1997.

One Year Ago: August 23 & 30, 2010 -

• An AM station going silent in CANADA has almost ceased to be a news item these days - but it's only in recent months that the drumbeat of AM-to-FM conversions has been joined by a steady drip of AM signals simply signing off for good.
• Corus Radio led that new trend when it abruptly pulled the plug on Montreal's big-signal CINF (690) and CINW (940) a few months back. Last Wednesday, Corus even more abruptly turned off the 1000-watt AM signal of CJUL (1220) in Cornwall, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence River southwest of Montreal. Corus officials tried to put the best possible face on the shutdown, saying the market had outgrown the little AM signal and that its news and information programming would be shifted to expanded newscasts on its remaining FM sister stations, CJSS (101.9) and CFLG (104.5), but the shutdown nevertheless meant job cuts, including CJUL morning man John Bolton and news reporter Shannon Simpson. By Thursday morning, crews were already on hand tearing down the two AM 1220 towers, which were reportedly in seriously deteriorated condition. CJUL's shutdown marked the second time in just over a decade that Cornwall had lost a station on 1220: in 1999, the veteran station on that frequency, CJSS, moved to FM, clearing the way for then-owner Tri-Co to apply for a new 1220 signal using the old CJSS facilities, which signed on the following year as CJUL. (Cornwall had also once had a second AM station, French-language CFIX 1170, which left the air in 1983.)
• And in another odd bit of irony, CJUL will be one of two Ontario stations on 1220 to go dark in August; at least as we go to press, CHSC (1220 St. Catharines) doesn't appear to be fighting the CRTC's decision not to renew its license when it expires August 31.
• However dead AM radio may be in Cornwall, it's at least fondly remembered down the St. Lawrence Seaway in Kingston, where the last AM signals went dark a couple of years ago. One of those AM-to-FM moves was CFFX, which went from oldies on 960 to soft AC as "Lite Rock 104.3" - but with the CRTC's decision last year to allow oldies formats on FM, Corus is reviving an earlier AM 960 identity. As of 6 PM last Thursday (August 19), CFFX-FM became CKWS-FM, returning to the AM station's original calls, which stood for the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper back then and which now cross-promote sister Corus station CKWS-TV (Channel 11). The resurrected CKWS is expected to announce a new on-air lineup today, and it will hold a free downtown oldies concert Sept. 3 to help promote the new format.
• On the US side of the border, a venerable eastern PENNSYLVANIA AM station has quietly vanshed from the FCC database. WOYL (1340 Oil City) was Venango County's first radio station when it signed on in December 1946; it went silent 63 years later, in December 2009, due to a transmitter failure, and while the FCC granted Special Temporary Authority for WOYL to remain silent through June 2010, it was never renewed and WOYL now appears to be gone for good. (A bit of irony here: WOYL is the second half of a former share-time on the frequency to disappear; WSAJ at Grove City College, which operated only two days a week on the channel, left the AM dial a few years ago.)
• Upstate NEW YORK radio listeners had a bit of a scare last week when WFXF (95.1 Honeoye Falls) morning man Brother Wease was hospitalized with heart problems. Fortunately (especially given Wease's recent brush with cancer), Wease spent only a few days in the hospital and is recuperating well - but his listeners had a surprise Wednesday morning when Clear Channel plugged WHAM (1180 Rochester) midday talker Bob Lonsberry into Wease's morning slot. Lonsberry, as conservative as Wease is liberal, frequently spars with Wease on-air, but this was his first time serving as Wease's fill-in.

Five Years Ago: August 28, 2006 -

• It's hard to think of a recent week's news that's been as dominated by a single broadcast company as last week was by Pennsylvania-based Entercom. In a pair of deals announced Monday morning, David Field's rapidly-growing broadcast group picked up four station clusters from CBS Radio for $262 million - and struck a $30 million deal to buy Boston's WILD-FM (97.7 Brockton) from Radio One.
• We'll assess the impact of both deals in this week's NERW, starting in MASSACHUSETTS, where the Radio One sale made for big headlines. From Entercom's side of the fence, it was a straightforward move to improve the coverage of its active rocker, WAAF (107.3 Westborough) into the core of the Boston market, where WAAF has struggled to be heard clearly for decades. Entercom wasted no time getting the WAAF signal on the new frequency - within a few hours of the announcement on Monday, WILD-FM's urban format was history, and by Tuesday WAAF was ID'ing with both frequencies. As Field noted in a conference call after the deals were announced, the addition of 97.7 to WAAF is extraordinarily cost-effective, requiring no new staff or expenses beyond the tower rent and power bill at WILD-FM's Great Blue Hill transmitter site.
• A station sale in RHODE ISLAND: Chris DiPaola's Southern Rhode Island Public Broadcasting sells WKIV (88.1 Westerly) to EMF Broadcasting, which has been programming the station with its "K-Love" contemporary Christian format for the last year or so. The $100,000 sale comes on the heels of a power increase at WKIV, which goes from 100 w/66' AAT to 1.2 kW/122' AAT at a new transmitter site.
• A NEW YORK morning show is no more. Buckley's WOR (710 New York) abruptly pulled the plug on Ed Walsh after his Friday broadcast. Walsh, who replaced John A. Gambling in 2000 when WOR ended the "Rambling With Gambling" franchise after seven decades, is being replaced beginning this morning with WOR weekend host Joe Bartlett, who'll host mornings alongside Donna Hanover.
• In Rochester, the week's big news was Entercom, of course - the $262 million deal that moves CBS Radio's stations in Austin, Cincinnati, Memphis and Rochester under the Entercom umbrella. Cincinnati and Austin are new markets for Entercom, and in Memphis the combination of the CBS and Entercom stations remains under the ownership caps. But in Rochester, the pairing of Entercom's four signals (country WBEE 92.5, adult hits WFKL 93.3 Fairport, classic hits WBZA 98.9 and talk WROC 950) and CBS Radio's four signals (modern rock WZNE 94.1 Brighton, classic rock WCMF 96.5, top 40 WPXY 97.9 and AC WRMM 101.3) will put Entercom significantly over the cap.
• What is that cap, exactly? The revised ownership rules the FCC adopted a few years back now define it by Arbitron markets rather than by signal overlap, and our analysis puts the Rochester market in the "45 stations or more" category (since noncommercial signals are included in the count), thus allowing Entercom to own up to eight stations, of which no more than five can be in the same band. In theory, then, Entercom should be allowed to keep WROC and five of the seven FMs - most likely the five class B signals, which includes everything except WFKL and WZNE. That, however, assumes that the deal meets Justice Department approval as well, and with the dominance that a cluster including WBEE, WCMF, WPXY, WBZA and WRMM would have in the market, it's still possible that one of the big class B signals could end up being spun off before the dealing's done. (A bit of "only in NERW" trivia - if WPXY remains in the Entercom family when the wheels stop spinning, it would achieve the rare distinction of having been part of all three big clusters in town, having first been part of the Lincoln Group, which became the core of today's Clear Channel Rochester cluster, before being dealt to ARS, which was absorbed into Infinity and then CBS Radio.)
• One more Rochester note - EMF Broadcasting quietly flipped calls on its "K-Love" outlet last week, changing WKUV (104.9 Brockport) to WKDL after just a few months with the WKUV calls. (The WKDL calls had been on Mega Broadcasting's AM station in suburban Washington, DC, which was recently sold to the owner of the Redskins and flipped to sports.)
• A Watertown broadcaster who rose to national prominence died last week. Tony Malara began his career at Syracuse University's WAER (88.3), then worked at Watertown's WWNY-TV (Channel 7), eventually becoming the station's general manager before moving up to network management at CBS. Malara served as CBS TV's head of affiliate relations, then as the network's president, before his retirement in 1995. Most recently, he had moved into television ownership - his Malara Broadcasting bought stations in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Duluth, Minnesota from Granite in 2004, entering into shared-services agreements under which Granite operates the stations as quasi-duopolies. Malara also served as president of the New York State Broadcasters' Association in 1978-79. Malara died Thursday in Syracuse of complications from leukemia, followed by a heart attack; he was 69.
• In eastern PENNSYLVANIA, there was little surprise when Clear Channel finally unveiled the new format on WSNI (104.5 Philadelphia) at noon on Wednesday, after more than a week of stunting. In place of the soft AC "Sunny" format that had been on WSNI, it's now Spanish tropical "Rumba 104.5," the city's first-ever full-market Spanish FM station. While the Philadelphia market's Hispanic population is much smaller than other big Northeast markets, Clear Channel says it's growing quickly, and worthy of its own signal.
• Philadelphia has a new AM signal, too - Alex Langer completed the move-in of WFYL (1530 McConnellsburg) to its new home on 1180 in King of Prussia, and the station made its official Philly-market debut on Tuesday. It's a 420-watt daytimer operating from a short Valcom tower in the middle of a golf course in West Norriton; it's mostly carrying talk from Langer's National Radio Network for the moment.

10 Years Ago: August 27, 2001 -

• There's a new signal on the air in CONNECTICUT, and even though it's just a watt, we'd bet plenty of people can tune in W220CE (91.9 Southington). That's because the new WMNR (88.1 Monroe) translator sits high atop West Peak in Meriden, shoulder-to-shoulder (well, bay-to-bay) with most of the big FM signals in Hartford and vicinity.
• The final days of talk on NEW YORK's WEVD (1050 New York) are apparently upon us, and so is another protest from Chuck Zlatkin's "Save WEVD" group. This time, they're planning a candlelight vigil outside WEVD's studios at 333 Seventh Avenue, to begin at 9:30 PM on Friday (August 31) and end with the candles being snuffed out at midnight, when 1050 will reportedly become ESPN Radio under ABC management.
• On the TV side, we hear October 1 will be the debut of Univision's second network, to be known as "Telefutura." WHSE (Channel 68) in Newark, N.J., WHSI (Channel 67) in Smithtown, WHSP (Channel 65) in Vineland, N.J. and WHUB-TV (Channel 66) in Marlborough, Mass. will be the initial affiliates in NERW-land; we'd expect some call changes down the road.
• We'll start this week's news from CANADA with word that CBC's Radio Two service will soon be available in Quebec City. As part of the CRTC's mandate to broaden the reach of CBC/Radio-Canada services, the CBC won permission this week to put a new CBM-FM (93.5 Montreal) relay on the air in Quebec City. The new signal, with 308 watts, will be at 96.1, the former home of noncomm CKIA ("Radio Basse-Ville"), which is moving (or perhaps has already moved) to 88.3.

15 Years Ago: New England Radio Watch, August 25, 1996

• After more than three years of bitter head-to-head competition for Boston's country-music audience, the war between WBCS (96.9) and WKLB-FM (105.7) came to an end late Friday night. WKLB-FM jock Greg Williams closed out the evening with several appropriate songs, winding down with the lyric "It was over, just like that," and the brief comment, "Ain't that the truth...WKLB-FM Framingham Boston." And after a few seconds of dead air, 105.7 slid into a simulcast with WBCS that's expected to continue for about two weeks. The former WBCS air talent remained on the air Saturday, giving dual IDs as "Boston's Country Stations, WBCS 96.9 and WKLB 105.7." We'll know Monday morning whether WKLB's top air talent, morning hosts Loren and Wally, will be part of this interim simulcast format.
• It's pretty much a given that the simulcast will end September 5, with one of the signals staying country (possibly under the WKLB calls, meaning Greater Media may actually have to pay up on its million-dollar promise to keep WBCS country through the end of 1996), and the other one likely taking the heritage WROR calls that recently returned to the market on Greater Media's AM 1150. (Boston's largest daily newspaper somehow managed to report on the WMEX-to-WROR call change without ever once hinting that WROR has a legacy in the Boston market. The newspaper report claimed that the WMEX calls were purchased by "a Tejano station in Texas," which would be quite a feat considering that Texas is almost entirely K-call country, except for a handful of pre-1923 W stations -- WTAW, WRR, WBAP, WFAA, WOAI, and WACO! No sign yet in the FCC database of anyone claiming the WMEX calls.)
• Police on Cape Cod have made an arrest in the sabotage on WWKJ (101.1 Mashpee) and WJCO (93.5 Harwich Port). A 15 year old boy from Centreville MA was in juvenile court on Friday, charged with cutting the cables from the stations' satellite dish. Station officials say the cable-cutting also damaged one of the receivers, leaving WJCO (soft AC "Coast 93.5") off the air for almost two days. It appears the boy may have been upset about the stations' format change from modern rock, and that he may have had adult help.
• Out in Western Massachusetts, a distinctive FM station may be in for some big changes. Radio Skutnik, Inc. is selling its Greenfield MA properties, WRSI 95.3 and WGAM 1520, to Watertown Radio Associates of Claremont NH. Watertown's ownership is cross-linked to Northstar Broadcasting, which owns WTSV-WHDQ Claremont NH, WNHV-WKXE White River Junction VT, WSSH Marlboro VT, and WXPS and WCPV in the Burlington VT market. I believe they also now have an interest in WZSH Bellows Falls VT, which along with WSSH serves the Brattleboro VT area, just to the north of Greenfield. Will Watertown be willing to spend $650,000 and keep WRSI's distinctive AAA format? Time will tell, but it doesn't look good. Skutnik has an option to repurchase WGAM, a 10kw DA daytimer, for $70,000. WGAM currently programs a satellite standards format.