NERW 5/26/2014: Entercom to Morning Team – Buzz Off

In this week’s issue… NYC’s Now is now Amp – Rochester morning team axed – CBC: No shutdown of Radio 2…yet – Cape noncomm dial lights up – Dodge LPFM rescinded – Knowlton Nash, RIP

By SCOTT FYBUSH

(Another brief note before we launch into the column: Lisa is back in Rochester, but remains hospitalized, 25 days and counting. We’re attempting to get caught up this week on orders from the Fybush.com Store, but NERW posts may still remain brief and delayed for some time to come. Thanks, once again, for your patience as we try to get through our latest ordeal.)

*The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a remarkable thing. It protects my rights – and yours, on this Memorial Day – to stand on our front lawns, or in the town square, or here on the Internet, and proclaim our opinions as loudly as we’d like about just about anything. But what it doesn’t do – and has never done – is to guarantee us the right to use a soapbox we don’t own to express an opinion without backlash and consequences. Over the years, we’ve chronicled the misfortunes of plenty of broadcasters who’ve forgotten that distinction, and last week it hit home again right here in this column’s hometown of Rochester, NEW YORK, where Kimberly Ray and Barry Beck are now the former morning hosts at Entercom’s WBZA (98.9 the Buzz).

Entercom moved swiftly to dismiss them on Thursday after a social media firestorm kicked up around comments they’d made on Tuesday over the city’s decision to provide medical coverage for transgendered employees and employees’ partners. For a morning team that’s made its mark in town by turning a jaundiced eye on many community developments, that particular segment of the “Kimberly & Beck Show” wasn’t all that out of the ordinary, but it touched a particular nerve within the local GLBTQ community when Ray brought up a specific incident involving a transgender student at a local high school.

The backlash caught the pair at a bad time internally, too; they’d just returned to the air less than a week earlier after spending most of early May off the air in an unrelated suspension that reportedly had to do with on-air criticism of a station sponsor, and that no doubt made them more expendable to Entercom management.

(As for last week’s comments? They’re pretty much exactly what you’d expect, but if you must, you can hear excerpts in this WROC-TV story about the firings, which also includes an interview with your editor, or find the entire clip in this RadioInsight story.)

While there’s some speculation in the local media community that the firings were themselves a publicity stunt during a ratings period, and that the 13-year veterans of the Buzz will be back on the air once the attention dies down, NERW’s sense is that this one’s for real, leaving Entercom looking for a replacement morning show that can hold the high ratings Kimberly and Beck drew in the station’s target demographics. Given how unusual the Buzz is – it’s a rare female-leaning rocker operating just down the hall from a more traditional male-heavy classic rock station, WCMF (96.5) – that may be a challenging assignment.

*Another local media personality found himself caught in some of the crossfire from the Kimberly & Beck incident: WHAM (1180) talker Bob Lonsberry was his usual outspoken self in a commentary he’d posted about the city’s new policy on the WHAM website earlier in the week. After Kimberly & Beck’s comments made the issue more of a hot potato, Clear Channel executives pulled the Lonsberry commentary from the site and disavowed it; Lonsberry, who’s been at the center of a few similar firestorms in his career at WHAM, remained on the air at week’s end.

*The big format change leading into the Memorial Day weekend was no surprise to readers of NERW or our sister site, RadioInsight, who’ve known for months now that “Now” wasn’t going to be around much longer at CBS Radio’s WNOW-FM (92.3 New York).

After bringing in a new PD – Rick Thomas, late of KRTH in Los Angeles – and then letting most of its airstaff go last Monday, CBS finally pulled the trigger at 2 PM on Thursday, flipping the top-40 station to a new brand, “AMP Radio,” and reworking its playlist to emphasize “new music,” with a particular lean toward electronic dance music and more of a Hispanic flavor than your typical mainstream top-40.

(You can hear the flip at another of our sister sites, FormatChange.com.)

Thomas has plenty of work ahead of him now at “AMP”: he’ll have to hire a new airstaff for the new station, which launches with commercial-free weekends through Labor Day, and he’ll have to steer a careful course between going so heavy on new tunes that “AMP” edges out of the mainstream, and drifting closer to mainstream top-40 and back into the direct competition with Clear Channel’s Z100 (WHTZ 100.3) that “NOW” was losing.

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*Over at Cumulus’ WABC (770), Pat Kiernan’s “Drive Home” news hour from 5-6 PM now has a co-host: the NY1 anchor is joined by Rita Cosby, the former cable TV host who’d more recently been doing afternoons on WOR (710) during the transition from the old Buckley lineup to Clear Channel’s ownership there.

*Where Are They Now?: Rick Mattioni was the first professional news director at Syracuse University’s WAER (88.3), where he started in 1983 amidst the controversial transition that took the station from student operation to its current status as an NPR news/jazz outlet. In 1987, Mattioni left Syracuse for WVTF (89.1) in Roanoke, Virginia, where he rose over the years from news and public affairs director to become director of programming and operations for the public broadcaster that serves a big swath of southwest Virginia. Mattioni, 62, announced last week that he’ll retire in September after 27 years with WVTF.

*Just as the NEW JERSEY shore heads into the busy season, there’s a format change at two of Townsquare Media’s AM signals. WOBM (1160 Lakewood) and WADB (1310 Asbury Park) had been playing mostly-automated oldies, but last Monday found them flipping to talk as “News Talk Radio WOBM 1160 & 1310.”

Bob & Marianne Levy remain in place as morning hosts, followed by an hour of brokered programming at 9 AM. The rest of the schedule is all syndicated: Glenn Beck from 10-noon, Rush Limbaugh noon-3, Sean Hannity at 3 and Todd Schnitt at 6, though Schnitt will be preempted for much of the summer by Lakewood Blue Claws baseball, another holdover from the previous format.

*Over at Greater Media’s WCTC (1450 New Brunswick), budget cuts cost longtime newsman Bruce Johnson his job last week. “I love radio. It’s been my life,” Johnson told the Star-Ledger after being dismissed. With the 34-year veteran gone from WCTC, there’s now just one full-time staffer in a newsroom that once boasted nine.

*Up at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Carl Kraus didn’t quite hit the 34-year mark, but that’s just fine: the general manager of WFDU (89.1 Teaneck) retired last week after just over 33 years with the station, and we congratulate him on a long and successful run there. The station has also reworked its weekend schedule, adding a new Sunday public-affairs block from 7-8 AM and a new Saturday morning show featuring punk and garage rock, hosted by former music director John Monroe.

*Our PENNSYLVANIA news starts with a “Where Are They Now?”: longtime ABC Radio executive Mitch Dolan is back in the business as the new CEO of Times-Shamrock’s radio and outdoor divisions. Dolan’s known, of course, for his long run (1990-2009) as president and general manager of ABC’s WPLJ/WABC in New York, not to mention spending the last half of that run as president of the ABC Radio Station Group, first under Disney and then under Citadel. At Scranton-based Times-Shamrock, Dolan will oversee not only the local Scranton cluster (“Rock 107” WEZX and the ESPN cluster based at WEJL) but also sister stations in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Reno and Las Vegas. Since leaving the ABC stations in 2009, Dolan has been at the helm of his own new company, Audio Path LLC.

*There is no part of MASSACHUSETTS (and perhaps even the entire country) where there are as many radio stations per capita as Cape Cod. With no adjacent markets to the east or south, there’s been lots of room for new signals to drop into the Cape’s dial, which explains why the three commercial operators in the market have four FM signals each, a total of 12 commercial FMs (plus one more out on Nantucket) chasing just 200,000 or so year-round residents.

But if the commercial part of the dial has gotten crowded, the noncommercial side of the Cape’s FM spectrum has become as jam-packed as the Sagamore Bridge on a summer Sunday. Twenty-odd years ago, the Cape and Islands had a grand total of three high school/college stations and one community station (WOMR in Provincetown). As of this Memorial Day weekend, there are now 10 Cape and Islands signals below 92 MHz, plus three more full-power noncommercial FMs and several LPFMs in the commercial band.

The newest arrivals include three brand-new signals: two that we’ve been telling you about in recent weeks and a third that’s been flying under the radar. WBUH (89.1 Brewster), the signal that Home Improvement Ministries transferred to Boston public broadcaster WBUR (90.9) just a couple of months shy of its construction permit expiring, was licensed a few weeks ago but didn’t make its official debut as a WBUR simulcast until Friday morning. It joins WBUA (92.7 Tisbury) on Martha’s Vineyard and, at least for now, the longtime WBUR simulcast on Cape Cod Tech’s WCCT-FM (90.3 Harwich), though we wonder if the WCCT simulcast will survive now that it’s completely encompassed by the much larger WBUH signal.

WBUA, of course, is the signal that was the longtime home of commercial AAA WMVY on the Vineyard, and last week also marked the debut of WMVY’s new over-the-air home on the noncommercial dial. We told you last week that Dennis Jackson’s Vineyard Public Radio was within a few days of closing on its sale of WMEX (88.7 Edgartown) to the Friends of MVY group that’s been operating “MVY” as a stream and looking for a new FM outlet. The sale closed on Wednesday, and within hours a tower crew was mounting an antenna on the tower behind the MVY studios. WMEX (which had been operating on a limited schedule from another location on the island) was on the air at 3:15 PM, and at 4 it began carrying MVY programming.

There are still a few more steps to complete WMVY’s FM comeback: there’s a pending application to boost the power on 88.7 from the present 580 watts to 12 kW DA, which will provide much more coverage of the Cape in addition to the island coverage 88.7 now enjoys. And there’s the matter of a callsign: as early as tomorrow, 88.7 will swap calls with a new low-power FM in Rochester, NEW HAMPSHIRE – which means the Rochester station will become WMEX-LP (105.9), carrying on the oldies legacy of the old WMEX (106.5 Farmington NH, now EMF’s WNHI) under the management of the old WMEX’s general manager, Gary James. And the WMVI calls that have been on the Rochester LPFM for just a few days will move to 88.7 on the Vineyard – but that, too, will be just temporary while a swap is arranged with WMVY (104.3 Hartford VT), the station where the WMVY calls have been parked. (Need a scorecard?)

There’s yet one more new FM on the Cape, or soon will be: Horizon Christian Fellowship’s CP for WYZX (88.3 East Falmouth) expired Sunday, and while we’d heard reports that the new “Renew FM” religious signal had been testing, it wasn’t on the air Sunday afternoon when a NERW reader drove by the station’s Barnstable transmitter site.

*On an otherwise quiet week around greater Boston, Steve Silberberg lit up the translator he’s been seeking for over a decade for his “River,” WXRV (92.5 Andover). W243DC (96.5) runs 10 big watts from the candelabra tower above the Needham Sheraton, and it’s being heard as far out as Framingham, though its main purpose is to break through the front-end overload that obscures the main WXRV signal around the big FM signals in the Needham/Newton area.

Out in western Massachusetts, the FCC has turned down at least one of the LPFM applications related to the notorious Brian Dodge. “Hilltown Community Arts” had applied foe 103.3 in Worthington, but that application was dismissed last week after the FCC notified the group that it lacked any evidence establishing its proper registration as a nonprofit. Will the Commission now put the other Dodge-related applications and CPs in the area (we counted at least six when we reported extensively on the issue a month ago) under the same strict scrutiny?

We know at least one other Dodge-connected signal is feeling the heat: the FCC sent a strongly-worded letter to WCKL (560 Catskill NY) last week looking for information about whether the station has been on the air from its licensed facilities within the past 12 months. If it hasn’t been, the Commission says its license is subject to cancellation – and given that the station was evicted from its Clear Channel-owned transmitter site and its equipment was removed more than a year ago, we can say with great certainty that there’s been no WCKL emanating from the licensed site in over a year.

*Barry Scott’s still without a Boston radio outlet for his “Lost 45s” specialty show, but the former WROR (105.7) host is getting some nice publicity for the syndicated show (like this piece, for instance, from our old colleague Mike Kinosian, now at Radio-Info) – and if his Facebook page is any indication, he’s still generating plenty of e-mails from WROR listeners hoping to bring the show, and its 1970s novelty tunes, back to the airwaves.

*MAINE has always boasted some unusual radio studio locations – remember the days when WDME (103.1 Dover-Foxcroft) made its home in an old railcar? Now there’s another one coming to Skowhegan, where the Wesserunsett Arts Council’s new 98.1 has found a studio site in a former cellblock of the old Somerset County Jail. The station will set up shop in what had been three jail cells and a day room at the former jail, which dates to 1865 and now houses a variety of small local businesses, including the Somerset Grist Mill, which is donating the space for the station.

*Is one of CANADA‘s national radio networks about to leave the airwaves?

Despite the rumors that started last week with the watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, it doesn’t appear that the CBC has any immediate plans to take CBC Radio Two or its French-language counterpart, Espace Musique, off the terrestrial airwaves.

While the Corporation faces an increasingly uncertain financial future with sharply reduced government funding and the loss of revenues from NHL hockey, it says the reports that it will propose a Radio 2 shutdown at its June board meeting are “speculation, inaccurate and misinformation.”

It’s not clear just what switching off the Radio 2 transmitters would accomplish: while it would save some power bills, it wouldn’t do much to reduce rent (most of the Radio 2 signals come from CBC-owned towers, and the others generally already share space with other CBC services that would continue to operate), and it wouldn’t automatically mean those big FM signals (including CBL-FM 94.1 Toronto, CBOQ-FM 103.3 Ottawa, CBM-FM 93.5 Montreal and CBH-FM 102.7 Halifax) would become available to upgrade other CBC facilities, instead releasing those allocations to a CRTC free-for-all that could see them go to commercial broadcasters that would provide still more intense competition for the surviving CBC Radio One.

It would also wipe out the advertising revenue generated by the recent addition of commercials to Radio 2 and Espace Musique, and even if that revenue has thus far been far below projections, the CBC needs every bit of it right now. In Quebec, Espace Musique will be allowed to continue to sell ads to the Montreal Symphony after the CRTC rejected a complaint from Montreal’s commercial “Radio Classique” (CJPX 99.5) that the sales violated the CBC’s promise to sell only national advertising; the CBC argued that the symphony is in fact of national interest to Canadian listeners, even if it’s highly unlikely that a listener in Vancouver or even Quebec City will be buying tickets.

*We close this week with the sad news of the death of Knowlton Nash, one of the most trusted names in Canadian TV news. Starting out as a Washington-based freelance correspondent for the CBC in the late 1950s and 1960s, Nash became the head of the network’s news and information division in 1969, then assumed iconic status as anchor of “The National” from 1978 until 1988, when he stepped down to clear the way for the broadcast’s current host, Peter Mansbridge, who was being wooed to move to CBS as a morning news anchor. After a short stint as weekend anchor, Nash retired in 1992, focusing on his second career as an author, penning several books about the CBC and journalism. In recent years, he’d been in Florida, suffering from Parkinson’s disease; he died Saturday night in Toronto, at age 86.

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