By SCOTT FYBUSH
Welcome back to the workweek, and to the fall season in radio! If you missed it over the long, lazy Labor Day weekend, there’s a full NorthEast Radio Watch column this week, available for your reading pleasure right here. Better yet – this column is free in its entirety for everyone. Our readers are our best marketers, and one of the best ways you can support what we do here is to share NERW with your colleagues and friends. Let ’em know what they’re missing!
As a NERW reader, of course, you’re not missing anything. Here’s what’s breaking this post-Labor Day morning:
“Mix” goes right up against Entercom’s hot AC behemoth, “Star 102.5” WTSS, as well as a former “Mix,” Cumulus’ WHTT (104.1), in search of the office-and-minivan crowd.
The airstaff stays largely intact, with the exception of afternoons: Trevor Carey is out, replaced by former production director Dan Rinelli. “Bobby O” O’Brian is the new production director, and veteran jock Dave Gillen adds some weekend shifts to his day job in sales at WGRZ (Channel 2), reports the Buffalo Broadcasters.
*Our content partner, RadioInsight, is tracking an impending format flip at WKZF (92.7 Starview) in the Harrisburg market, where the Hall station has changed calls to WLPA-FM, apparently ahead of a switch from rock to a sports simulcast with WLPA (1490).
There’s also a new callsign at WWBZ (700 Orange-Athol) in north central Massachusetts. After some false starts with branding earlier this year (it couldn’t be “Legends” or “WBZ,” as it turned out), the standards station is now WFAT.
And we’ll have full obituaries in our next column for two NERW-land broadcasters we lost over the weekend: Hank Yaggi, the former general manager of WTNH/WCTX in New Haven, was 69 when he lost his battle with Alzheimer’s disease on Sunday; in Philadelphia, they’re remembering Dan Donovan, one of the on-air legends from the heyday of WFIL (560) who went on to a long career in Minnesota.
THE 2025 TOWER SITE CALENDAR IS SHIPPING NOW!
Behold, the 2025 calendar!
We chose the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. This picture has everything we like in our covers — blue skies, greenery, water, and of course, towers! The history behind this site is a draw, too.
Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (can you guess? you don’t have to if you buy the calendar!).
We will ship daily through Christmas Eve. Place your order now for immediate shipping!
This will be the 24th edition of the world-famous Tower Site Calendar, and your support will determine whether it will be the final edition.
It’s been a complicated few years here, and as we finish up production of the new edition, we’re considering the future of this staple of radio walls everywhere as we evaluate our workload going forward.
The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the new Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the new Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025 ready to ship, too. Why not order both?)
Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the next calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too!
Prime ad space that’s easy on the eyes
Here’s how an ad in our calendar has better exposure than one in a magazine:
1. Magazines issues are designed to be looked at for a period of weeks or months. Calendars are designed to be looked at for a whole year.
2. Magazines are read or glanced at, then placed in a drawer or in a pile. Calendars are hung on a wall.
3. Magazines usually don’t get read more than once. Calendars are looked at between four and eight times each day. (Promotional Products Association International; Advertising Specialty Institute)
Plus, people don’t usually walk into someone’s office, pick up a magazine and start to read it. But they do walk into someone’s office and see a calendar hanging there.
Let’s do the math: four impressions or views a day (conservatively), five days in a work week (at minimum), 260 work days per year. That’s just over 1,000 impressions per year. We sell around 600 calendars each year. That’s 600,000 total impressions for the year!
A 4-by-1-inch banner ad on each month’s page costs only $2,500. That’s less than one penny for each impression your ad makes on a broadcast-industry professional.
The Tower Site Calendar has become THE prestige print product of the broadcast industry. Since 2002 it has become a must-have for engineers and engineering managers in stations big and small, all over North America.
Give us your layout and we’ll give you the exposure.
We’re ready to work with you! Call us at 585-442-5411 between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. ET, or email lisa@fybush.com.