NERW 4/29/2013: CBC’s Kitchener-Waterloo License Goof

From the NERW Archives

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: April 30, 2012 –

*Few days in NEW YORK City radio history have produced so many surprises  as this past Thursday.

We knew, of course, that ESPN had long coveted an FM outlet to overcome the signal deficiencies of its New York flagship WEPN (1050), a perpetual laggard in the ratings battle against CBS Radio’s behemoth WFAN (660). But of all the possibilities floated for a new WEPN-FM, the news on Thursday came as a nearly complete surprise: a complex deal involving ESPN, Emmis Communications’ WRKS (98.7) and YMF, which recently took over Inner City Broadcasting’s WBLS (107.5) and WLIB (1190).

Now that the dust has settled, here’s how it all plays out – and what we think it all means:

For listeners, the effects of the deal began to appear on the FM dial almost as soon as the ESPN press conference was underway Thursday morning: WRKS began simulcasting with WBLS in what was billed as a “celebration” of 30 years of urban radio on “Kiss 98.7.”

That simulcast, which ended Friday night as the stations went into their separate weekend programming, was the result of a $10 million deal under which YMF is acquiring the intellectual property of WRKS: the “Kiss” nickname, the station’s playlist and some of its airstaff. Starting today, YMF begins the challenging task of merging the “Kiss” DNA with its own WBLS, bringing together two stations that have been competitors for more than a generation.

Here’s what we know so far about that piece of the puzzle: WBLS will keep its own Steve Harvey morning show instead of taking WRKS’ Tom Joyner. In middays, it’s WRKS’ Shaila (who displaces WBLS’ own Deja Vu.) Jeff Foxx remains in afternoons on WBLS (leaving the syndicated Michael Baisden without a New York home), and at night Lenny Green comes over from WRKS, replacing Keith Sweat on WBLS. We’ll know more this weekend about what moves where, but we’d expect WBLS staples such as Hal Jackson, Imhotep Gary Byrd and the Sunday gospel and Caribbean blocks to remain in place.

At least one longtime WRKS weekend staple, DJ Red Alert, made an emotional signoff Saturday night and apparently won’t be making the move to WBLS. Nor, apparently, will be Felix Hernandez and the Sunday edition of his “Rhythm Review,” though he’ll continue to be heard Saturdays on WBGO (88.3).

And as for the branding? All signs of “Kiss” disappeared from the WBLS website right at midnight – so in effect, it appears YMF may have paid more for the privilege of eliminating WBLS’ biggest competition than for much of the branding that went with WRKS.

*Over at 98.7, it’s ESPN Radio as of 12:01 this morning, simulcasting WEPN (1050) – but what’s on the air is less complex than the tangled financial web behind the scenes. Emmis has been one of the more debt-heavy big broadcasters out there (notwithstanding that it bought WRKS itself for a very reasonable $68 million back in 1994) and its arrangement with ESPN will help to pay off some of the $240 million Emmis now owes creditors.

Here’s how Emmis plans to make all this pay: on the content side, Emmis is getting $10 million from YMF for the WRKS intellectual property, plus additional quarterly payouts of 15% of any revenue increase WBLS shows as it adds WRKS content. On the signal side, the Emmis lease of 98.7 to ESPN is a twelve-year deal starts out at $8.435 million for the first year and increases by 3.5% each year through 2024.

But wait – there’s more! That money won’t flow directly to Emmis as it comes in. Instead, Emmis is structuring a new subsidiary that will hold the 98.7 license and its lease proceeds as collateral for a new $75 million loan from Wells Fargo and TIAA, the national teachers’ insurance company. It’s the proceeds from that loan that Emmis will use to pay down some of its more immediate debt.

In effect (at least if we understand this all clearly), what Emmis is doing here is extracting pretty much every bit of value it can from the 98.7 license without actually selling it outright. Emmis says the entire deal – intellectual property, signal lease, additional payments from YMF and all – will bring in $96 million, and that’s probably more at this point than the 98.7 signal would fetch on an open market in an outright sale.

*If not for the WRKS upheaval, we’d have led this week’s column with another huge story from New York: the death of one of the city’s best-loved rock DJs.

In a 48-year career spent entirely in the city, Pete Fornatale lived the dream, starting in 1964 as an exceptionally talented student DJ on WFUV (90.7), the radio station at his alma mater, Fordham University. At WFUV, Fornatale pioneered free-form rock programming on what had been a staid “educational” FM station, and he quickly parlayed that skill into paying work at WNEW-FM (102.7), one of the city’s first commercial free-form rockers. Fornatale was on WNEW-FM from 1969 until 1989, fighting to keep the free-form torch burning in an increasingly structured world of commercial radio formats. In 1982, he launched “Mixed Bag,” a Sunday bastion of themed free-form programming that came along with Fornatale when he moved down the dial to WXRK (92.3) in 1989 to do middays.

In 1997, Fornatale returned to WNEW-FM for what turned out to be that station’s last gasp as a classic rocker, but that lasted only a year, and by 2001 he was back where he’d started at WFUV, where “Mixed Bag” settled in nicely to what had by then become a professionally-run AAA format, a successor in a way to the free-form radio Fornatale had started there back in the sixties.

Fornatale also became a successful author, writing books that included an early history of music radio (“Radio in the Television Age,” co-written with Josh Mills in 1983) and his story of the Woodstock festival.

*PENNSYLVANIA‘s only NBA team is changing radio homes, and it’s not waiting until the start of the next season to do it. The Philadelphia 76ers were once a cornerstone of the all-sports format on CBS Radio’s WIP (610), but as WIP and CBS kept adding more play-by-play rights, the Sixers found themselves at the bottom of the priority list, often being shuffled to talker WPHT (1210) now that the Phillies have become WIP’s star attraction, followed by the Flyers.

Instead of being the number-four team at WIP (which also has the Eagles), the 76ers are becoming the star attraction at Greater Media’s “Fanatic,” WPEN-FM (97.5 Burlington NJ). It’s being described as a “multi-year deal” that starts at the beginning of the NBA playoffs, and it will also put most Sixers games on WPEN (950).

Fornatale died Thursday, several days after suffering a stroke. He was just 66. WFUV will remember him with a special broadcast next Saturday (May 5) in his old “Mixed Bag” timeslot, from 4-8 PM.

Five Years Ago: April 28, 2008 –

*One of the legendary top 40 voices of the northeast has been silenced, far too young. “Big Ron” O’Brien, whose career included stops at Philadelphia’s WFIL, WYXR/WLCE and WOGL and New York’s WXLO, WNBC and WTJM, died Sunday morning (April 27) of complications from pneumonia.

O’Brien began his broadcast career in 1969 at KUDL in Kansas City, and in the typical progression of the day, he quickly moved through Denver (KTLK), Chicago (WCFL) and Atlanta (WQXI). By 1974, he was in New York, doing nights at “99X,” and by 1976 he was in Philadelphia at WFIL, where he spent three years.

O’Brien then moved to Los Angeles, where he worked at KFI and KIIS, then to St. Louis and Denver (with a brief interlude at WNBC in the early 1980s) before returning to Philadelphia in 1996, where he worked at WYXR (104.5, later WLCE). In 1999, O’Brien was part of the inaugural airstaff at New York’s WTJM (Jammin 105); in 2002, he joined Philadelphia’s WOGL (98.1) for afternoon drive, and it was there that he remained for what turned out to be the last six years of his career.

O’Brien had been ill for several months, WOGL says. He was just 56.

*Elsewhere in PENNSYLVANIA, the sale of WNTJ (850 Johnstown) from Forever to Birach Broadcasting has closed, and as of midnight last night, the news-talk format that had been on 850 (and simulcast on WNTW 990 in Somerset) has moved back to its former home on 1490 in Johnstown. The 1490 signal, which holds the WPRR calls long heard in Altoona, has been running an all-sports format; it returned to Forever’s hands last fall in a purchase from Nick Galli’s 2510 group. The WNTJ calls will return to 1490 as well, probably later this week.

So what happens now with 850? The $300,000 purchase by Birach includes not only the license for 850 (and for another Forever station, WCND 940 in Shelbyville, KY) but also the 115-acre tower site in Paint Township, Somerset County. Forever was reportedly eager to be free of the hassles of maintaining that nine-tower site, easily the most complex directional array in the northeast, and NERW suspects Birach isn’t in this deal with the intent of maintaining the 10 kW DA-1 Johnstown signal on 850, either. Birach has interests elsewhere in the region (including WWCS 540 in Canonsburg, near Pittsburgh, and WTOR 770 Youngstown, NY, serving Toronto) – could the company have plans to move the Johnstown signal elsewhere? That would be a challenging task, since that nine-tower directional array shoehorns the Johnstown 850 into a tight squeeze between other 850 signals in Cleveland (WKNR) and Boston (WEEI), not to mention 860s in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Toronto and plenty of other nearby-on-the-dial stations that would need to be protected.

In the meantime, there’s a loop repeating over (and over and over) on 850 directing listeners up the dial to 1490 – and no indication at all on the WNTJ website that anything has changed.

*NEW YORK‘s WOR (710) is apparently about to bring back one of the station’s signature voices. John R. Gambling is the third generation of Gamblings in what had been an unbroken chain on WOR’s “Rambling with Gambling” morning show from 1925 until the station fired him in 2000. Gambling resurfaced a year later on WABC (770), but lost his midmorning shift there in Citadel’s budget cuts earlier this year.

Now Allan Sniffen’s New York Radio Message Board is reporting that WOR will bring Gambling back to morning drive, possibly as early as next week, alongside current morning host Joe Bartlett. The odd player out, apparently, will be Bartlett’s current co-host Donna Hanover.

WOR hasn’t commented on the reports yet, but there’s a news conference planned for Wednesday; we’ll keep you posted.

*The big news in MASSACHUSETTS last week came from the TV management front, where WHDH-TV/WLVI VP/general manager Randi Goldklank was all over the tabloids after being arrested at Logan Airport following an incident during a flight last Sunday night. Goldklank told state police that a male passenger sitting next to her had been harassing her; Delta Airlines told police she had been acting “unruly” aboard the plane. A police report claimed Goldklank told the officers who met the plane, “I’ll have a news crew down here in minutes and you will lose your (bleeping) jobs.”

Goldklank was arrested for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer. She’s on leave from the stations and apparently in rehab. At least for now, station owner Sunbeam Broadcasting is standing behind Goldklank, who was reportedly on medication for depression after the recent death of her mother. Former WHDH-TV general manager Mike Carson, who’d been consulting for the station, is back as interim VP/GM in Goldklank’s absence.

*One of Boston’s best-known and longest-running sportscasters has died. Don Gillis began his career in radio, first at New Bedford’s WBSM and then at Boston’s WHDH, in the late forties, filling in for Red Sox announcer Curt Gowdy when illness kept him off the air for much of the 1957 season and hosting the “Voice of Sports” talk show, which set the stage for all the sports talk that would follow over the decades in Boston. When WHDH-TV (Channel 5) launched a nightly sportscast in 1962, Gillis was the station’s first sports director, crafting the blueprint for local TV sports reporting. Gillis was the first sports anchor in Boston to have film clips during his reports, and he’ll forever be remembered for his coverage of the Red Sox during their “Impossible Dream” season of 1967.

When WHDH-TV folded a decade later and was replaced by the new WCVB on Channel 5, Gillis followed many of his colleagues out to Needham, becoming WCVB’s sports director for its first decade on the air.

Gillis retired as sports director of WCVB in 1982, but he stayed on as host of “Candlepin Bowling” on Saturday afternoons until the end of the show’s run in 1996.

Gillis died Wednesday (April 23) at his Cape Cod home. He was 85.

Ten Years Ago: April 28, 2003 –

Just in to NERW is word that Jerry Williams has died. The dean of Boston talk radio, Williams came to town in 1957, already a decade into a career that began in Bristol, Virginia in 1946. At Mac Richmond’s WMEX (1510), Williams’ night shift was a sharp departure from the top 40 the station played the rest of the day. When Williams took the air at 10 PM, WMEX turned into Boston’s first talk station, as Williams interviewed the newsmakers of the day and took listeners’ phone calls.
In 1965, Williams departed for Chicago’s WBBM, but he was back in town four years later, bringing his talk show back to the nighttime airwaves at WBZ (1030), where he stayed until October 1976, when he headed to New York for a brief stint at WMCA (570), followed by four years at Philadelphia’s WWDB (96.5).

In 1981, Williams was back on the air again in Boston as part of the original talk lineup at WRKO (680), the station that was once WMEX’s competitor in the waning days of AM top 40. Williams, now ensconced in an afternoon drive shift, quickly became the best-known and most controversial talker in town, using his show as a forum to oppose mandatory seat belt laws and, most memorably, to support a 1990 tax revolt (launching, in the process, the political careers of Barbara Anderson of Citizens for Limited Taxation – not to mention the radio career of the Herald’s Howie Carr, who would later make that WRKO shift his own).

In 1994, Carr replaced Williams in the afternoon, with the veteran host moving to mid-mornings on WRKO (a shift he derided as “The World’s Shortest Talk Show”); by January 1997, Williams had been relegated to a weekend slot, and by 1998 he was gone from WRKO and living in retirement on the South Shore.

Williams couldn’t stay silent for long, though. In January 2000, he resurfaced as part of an ambitious talk lineup on the “new” WMEX (1060 Natick), but health problems got in the way, and he was off the air there within two months. A stroke in April 2001 further weakened him, but not enough to keep him from trying a daily show on WROL (950 Boston) last December and even making a return to WRKO to do some weekend fill-in this past February.

It was October 20, 1927 when the callsign “WEVD” was first heard on the NEW YORK radio dial, on a little 500-watt signal way up there at 1220 kilocycles – and ever since then, those calls have been heard somewhere on the dial in market number one. But after more than 75 years and three distinct spots on the dial (the original WEVD, which landed on 1300, then on 1330, and is today’s WWRV; WEVD-FM, which lasted on 97.9 from the fifties until 1988; and the former WHN/WMGM/WHN/WFAN/WUKQ on 1050, which took the WEVD calls in a trade for the FM signal in 1988), the initials of famed labor leader Eugene Victor Debs are about to bow out for good. It’s no surprise, really, that Disney will change the calls when it formally converts its LMA of WEVD (1050) into a $78 million purchase that’s expected to close within the week; after all, the WEVD calls have long since ceased to have much relevance to New York radio listeners, and they’ve only been heard once an hour since 1050 flipped to ESPN radio in September 2001. So “WEPN” it will be at 1050 on the dial…and only those few of us who feel a deep passion for New York radio history are likely to spend much time reflecting on the loss of the fifth-oldest callsign in continuous New York use. (Only WOR, WNYC, WMCA and WWRL have been around longer.)

Fifteen Years Ago: April 30, 1998 –

Boston has lost one of its legendary broadcasters. Carl DeSuze died Wednesday night at the age of 83.

DeSuze was WBZ’s morning host from the 1940s until the early 1980s, a record that’s unlikely ever to be broken. His urbane on-air manner and affection for all things European made for an unlikely fit with WBZ’s top-40 format in the sixties, but the combination worked, and DeSuze remained on top of the ratings for years. In addition to his duties as “New England’s Alarm Clock,” DeSuze traveled the world, relating his experiences in lectures across New England. A Maine native, DeSuze was proud of his Bowdoin education. After college, he worked at several Maine radio stations before moving to Boston and WBZ.

On a personal note, your editor had the opportunity to work with DeSuze while helping to prepare WBZ’s 75th anniversary celebration in 1996. While DeSuze’s health was already failing, he was eager to share his memories and his memorabilia. I’ll long treasure the memory of spending several afternoons at his home in Concord, as he sifted through several boxes of photos and posters, recounting the stories of celebrities interviewed and distant capitals visited. DeSuze’s death follows that of Gordon Swan by only a few months; together, they represented an era of WBZ history that’s now all but lost.

Listeners to Boston’s number-three public radio station will be hearing some changes come June. WUMB (91.9, simulcast on WFPB Falmouth and WBPR Worcester) is abandoning its nighttime smooth-jazz “Quiet Storm” format in favor of a mixture of blues, world music, gospel, and reggae. Days are changing too, as the acoustic traditional folk is joined by “electric folk” (their words!) and world music. Could WUMB be taking a cue from public radio stations like Philadelphia’s WXPN or Spindale, North Carolina’s WNCW, which have found new audiences for public radio with their folkish spins on the AAA format? We’re looking forward to giving the new 91.9 a listen…

On we go to NEW YORK, where WTOR (770 Youngstown) is reportedly testing, and has now applied for a license to cover. Another 770 in WABC’s home state? You bet, since Youngstown is just north of Niagara Falls, as far away from New York City as you can get in the Empire State, and this 770 will be a daytimer with a directional signal pointed straight out over Lake Ontario, towards Toronto, hence the calls. NERW will be making the drive to Youngstown this weekend; more on this one next week.

And we mourn the passing of two veteran broadcast engineers. Charlie Hallinan died last Wednesday at his home in Binghamton. Hallinan was one of the founders of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, and built many of the Southern Tier’s radio stations. And Mike Venditti of Cherry Hill, N.J. died at home on Monday. Venditti was a legend in the world of superpower AM, having rebuilt border blaster XERF (1570 Ciudad Acuna, Mexico) in the 1970s and returned it to the air. Over the years, Mike built 57 AM stations. He’ll be deeply missed.