NERW 2/23/15: Flooded Out in Worcester

In this week’s issue… MA cluster recovers from flood – iHeart’s Boston endgame – What’s next for NYC’s 1560 – Cephas Bowles, RIP – The real story on a Canadian “power increase”

By SCOTT FYBUSH

Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada

*With the nonstop pounding of snow that’s been driving MASSACHUSETTS and the rest of New England insane for the last few weeks, it would have been easy to bet that we’d be leading this week’s issue with a story about a studio roof collapsing under several feet of snow, or perhaps ice bringing down a tower somewhere in the region.

Instead, it’s liquid water leading the column this week, and lots of it, and on Thursday morning all that water was rather unfortunately pouring through the downtown Worcester home of Cumulus’ WXLO (104.5 Worcester), WORC-FM (98.9 Webster) and WWFX (100.1 Southbridge).

It appears cold weather was to blame for freezing a six-inch sprinkler pipe that ran through an unheated part of the building. When the pipe burst, station employees said they thought at first that the roof had given way. The bang was actually the pipe bursting, and the noise that followed was an entire stairwell filling with water as it poured down through the seven-story structure. Staffers fled the building as water rose ankle-deep in station offices and studios, and all three stations soon went silent after the power to the building was cut.

The stations were back on the air with automation and generator power by Thursday afternoon, but corporate engineers were soon in the air to assess the damage and figure out a recovery plan. The WXLO main air studio (above) appears to have taken the worst hit, completely soaked by water coming down through the ceiling from upper floors; while it’s likely a total loss, the other studios and offices (and the all-important technical core) mainly had water on the floor and some damage to the walls.

We’ve been writing an awful lot about emergency preparedness lately in this space, and the Cumulus mishap in Worcester is a good reminder of another question any broadcaster needs to be able to answer: if we lose access to our studios, how quickly can we be back on the air – and from where?

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*The week’s other big New England story was covered in a NERW Update early last week (you are on our new email list or following us on Twitter or Facebook, aren’t you?):

After nine years transmitting from downtown Boston, what’s now WBWL (101.7 Lynn) wants to pack up and move back to its previous transmitter site in Medford, on the hill above the old Malden Hospital. Why reverse course like that? Simple – because unlike the 2006 move that took what was then WFNX from a Medford-sited class A signal to another class A signal downtown, this time the move comes with a substantial power boost to  a class B1 signal.

It’s the final chapter of a shuffle we’ve been chronicling from the beginning for our loyal NERW readers, and it helps to explain what iHeart Media had in mind when it started the ball rolling on a big downgrade of co-owned WWBB (101.5 Providence) and a lesser downgrade of WCIB (101.9 Falmouth) on Cape Cod. The latest chapter involves a little more downgrading: WCIB, now a 13 kW/476′ DA signal that’s just barely a class B, will reduce to 12 kW/476′ DA as a class B1, while WWBB will remain technically untouched at its new downtown Providence class A facility, though its allocation coordinates will be modified.

What will it mean for “The Bull,” once it’s all done? Here’s our analysis:

There’s still no beating WBWL’s big country competitor – Greater Media’s WKLB (102.5) enjoys what’s arguably the best commercial FM signal in the entire Boston market, blanketing the country-friendly suburbs from high up on the WBZ-TV tower in Needham with a full class B signal on a nice clear channel. But those country-friendly suburbs will hear a lot more on 101.7 with its new  13.5 kW/452′ signal, instead of the 1.7 kW/449′ the old WFNX signal used at the Medford site or the current 1.7 kW/626′ from downtown.

There’s a tradeoff, of course: if you’re anywhere near the Back Bay or 101.7’s present downtown site, the new 101.7 signal from Medford will suffer overload from all those FMs on the Prudential Tower and the ones that will stay behind when WBWL leaves One Financial Center. That overload wipes out everything on a lot of radios, even powerful signals like WKLB that come from the more distant Needham/Newton sites – and in turn, there’s overload from WKLB and its fellow Needham/Newton signals that will make 101.7 a little iffy along part of Route 128. But 101.7 will become a much more solid signal in the northern suburbs and up toward the Merrimack Valley, and the Malden site will be able to look up and over downtown and the Blue Hills to be at least respectable in Boston’s southern suburbs, too.

(You can see both 101.7 sites, old/new and new/old, at this Tower Site of the Week feature – and I guess we’ll have to make it back to Boston once the snow melts to see the new-new 101.7 site once it’s up!)

*In NEW YORK City, the week’s big news (at least in some circles) came at the top of the AM dial, where Radio Disney’s 16 years on WQEW (1560) came to an end with no fanfare whatsoever Tuesday morning.

Later in the week, Disney formally closed on its $12.95 million sale of the 50,000-watt signal to Family Stations, which reenters the heart of the New York market two years after selling its longtime home, WFME (94.7 Newark), to Cumulus.

Sometime this week – possibly as early as today, depending on how quickly Family’s engineers can get the work done at the 1560 transmitter site in Maspeth, Queens – the 1560 signal will return to the air with the WFME calls and satellite-fed Family Radio programming from its home base in Oakland, California. Family plans to reintroduce some of the local weather and traffic updates that station manager Charlie Menut used to do on 94.7; it still owns the old WFME studio/transmitter site in New Jersey, and it’s working on an audio feed from there to the new AM signal.

Family will also keep its current FM toehold in northern Westchester, WFME-FM (106.3 Mount Kisco), the little class A signal it got in trade from Cumulus as part of the 94.7 sale.

With the sale of 1560, Disney still has three more AMs to sell off in the region, and there’s no news as yet of any buyers for WMKI (1260 Boston), WWJZ (640 Mount Holly NJ/Philadelphia) or WDDZ (1250 Pittsburgh), which means those signals will remain on the air with satellite-fed Disney programming for now.

At WOR (710), Wayne Randazzo is the new pre- and post-game host for Mets broadcasts this season. Randazzo moves east from CBS Radio’s WSCR (670) and WBBM (780/105.9) in Chicago to fill the role last occupied by Seth Everett.

Out on Long Island, Dave Widmer is out as GM/market manager for Connoisseur’s cluster,  where he’d been since 1998 and the days of Barnstable Broadcasting ownership. Widmer helped to oversee the merger of former Clear Channel signals WALK/WALK-FM into the cluster last year, and there’s been no formal announcement yet of a replacement in his longtime post.

“Sunny Joe” Allen has joined Pamal’s Hudson Valley cluster as assistant production director. He’s a familiar name to our New England readers, most recently at Saga’s WKNE (103.7) in Keene, NEW HAMPSHIRE, where he’s been doing afternoons for four years.

It’s been too cold and snowy for much action here in upstate New York, with just a few tidbits from FCC-land: in Buffalo, Family Life Ministries has filed for a license to cover on the move of translator W207BB (89.3 Grand Island) to 106.1, displaced (as we’ll see later in the column) by a new Canadian signal on 89.1. In Oswego, Galaxy has filed for a license to cover on  a change of city of license at WTKV (105.5): the “TK” classic rock outlet is now “WTKV Minetto,” which clears the way for Minetto-licensed WKRH (106.5) to move across the Cayuga County line to Fair Haven, allowing it to stay in Galaxy hands without triggering the Syracuse market cap.

And here in Rochester, we were puzzled to see an application for a digital companion channel for W26BZ in nearby Victor; as best anyone here can tell, that station (which relayed MyNetwork affiliate WBGT-CA) has been off the air for many years now. Will the FCC allow it to go digital on RF 22 – and to move to the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Rochester?

*Sad news from NEW JERSEY, where WBGO (88.3 Newark) announced on Sunday that its longtime CEO Cephas Bowles had died. The Newark native began his broadcast career at Syracuse University in the early 1970s, working at WAER (88.3). He later worked at CBS Radio News and at KUAT in Tucson, Arizona before joining WBGO in 1993.

At WBGO, Bowles oversaw significant growth, maintaining the station’s independence as one of the few big all-jazz signals in the U.S. and leading a capital campaign that moved its transmitter from downtown Newark to Four Times Square in Manhattan. He was also a major player on the public radio scene nationally, serving for many years on the NPR board of directors.

Bowles retired from WBGO in 2014 while battling serious illness. He died on Saturday; memorial plans hadn’t yet been announced at our deadline.

Some happier news comes from up the road at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s WFDU (89.1 Teaneck), which didn’t waste any time after getting news that the FCC had approved its application to boost power from its transmitter on the historic Armstrong Tower in Alpine. WFDU is raising money to pay for the power boost – and to add new HD Radio services, too: it plans to offer “an expansion of our tried-and-true eclectic music shows that include blues, classic country, oldies, bluegrass etc.” during the week on HD2, while going deep into classic jazz on the weekend. Its HD3 service will be all-classical. (All three services will stream 24/7, even during the weekday hours when the over-the-air 89.1 signal is shared with New York University’s WNYU.)

*They’ll have to wait for warmer weather to get it built out, of course, but in VERMONT, Christian Ministries’ WFTF (90.5 Rutland) wants to make a big move up to the mountains. WFTF is currently a 720 watt/-561′ class A signal broadcasting from a tower behind the church (shown at right) on Rutland’s north side where it went on the air back in 1987. Now Christian Ministries, which bought the station in 2011, wants to move it up to Pico Peak. From there, WFTF would become a 60 watt/2230′ DA class A signal, sharing a tower with commercial WJEN (105.3 Killington) – and with Christian Ministries’ own 100-watt WGLV (91.7 Woodstock). How would that work out? Pretty well, actually, since WGLV’s directional signal is aimed mainly south and east toward the Connecticut River Valley, while WFTF’s new pattern would be aimed entirely westward down into Rutland.

Meanwhile on 90.5 to the east, Green Mountain Educational Fellowship is also applying for a change at its WVFA in Lebanon, N.H.: it hopes to go from its present 12 watts/613′ to 300 watts/613′ from its existing site on Eastman Hill Road southeast of Lebanon.

*One occupational hazard of being a college station is that college building renovations can wreak havoc on your transmitter site. That’s happening in northeast PENNSYLVANIA, where Marywood University’s WVMW (91.7 Scranton) is being forced to move because the college is tearing down the building where it’s now located. WVMW’s proposing a slight eastward move to a different campus location, from which it would run 1.8 kW/-273′ instead of its present 2 kW/-285′ atop the Learning Resources Center on the south side of the campus.

Lindsay Cochrane is the new night host and assistant MD at CBS Radio’s WBZZ (Star 100.7) in Pittsburgh, scooting north up I-79 from her most recent gig in middays at WVAQ (101.9) in Morgantown, W.V.

*It was a week of new station launches in CANADA – and more specifically in southern Ontario, where two new FMs made their official debuts.

On Friday morning, RB Communications flipped the switch for the formal launch of CKYY (89.1 Welland). “Country 89” had been testing in the Niagara region for several months, and its official start restores country music to an area that hasn’t had a local country signal of its own since the days when sister station CIXL (Giant 91.7) was doing country on the AM dial as CHOW (1470). The new “Country 89” is expected to repatriate some country listening that’s gone west to Hamilton’s CHKX (94.7) or east to Buffalo’s WYRK (106.5).

Northwest of Toronto in Orangeville, Tuesday was the official launch of My Broadcasting’s latest “My FM” local signal, CKMO (101.5). It’s been testing since November, mostly with Christmas music, and plenty of local officials were on hand at its Mill Street studios for a noontime ribbon-cutting. (And now that Orangeville has a true local station, will this move things forward for Evanov’s application to move Orangeville-licensed CIDC 103.5 closer to Toronto?)

*And we close with one of those stories that is, we hope, why you read NERW each and every week: the real explanation for a story that’s been somewhat mangled in a lot of the trade press this past week.

It involves CKBC (104.9) in Bathurst, New Brunswick, one of the many stations that changed hands from Astral Media to Bell not long ago. As so often happens in a deal like that, the corporate lawyers get busy making sure all the paperwork is just right on their new acquisitions – and in the case of CKBC, they found a discrepancy.

You may have read elsewhere that CKBC is now raising power because it was operating below its maximum class, or some such. That’s not actually true, and here’s the real story: in Canada, as NERW readers know, there are two agencies that regulate broadcasters, the CRTC (largely for content and competition issues) and Industry Canada (for technical issues). When CKBC was licensed for its move to FM back in 2003, the station originally told both the CRTC and Industry Canada it wanted to operate at 20,000 watts. In September 2003, Industry Canada told the CRTC that it wanted CKBC-FM to run 33,500 watts instead (there’s where that “class maximum” bit comes in), and that was when CKBC was supposed to have filed a revised technical brief with the CRTC specifying 33,500 watts.

Somehow, that didn’t happen – and so for more than a decade, CKBC has been carried along on the Industry Canada books at 33,500 watts and on the CRTC’s records with 20,000 watts. The Bell lawyers found the discrepancy, and the CRTC has now approved the “power increase,” but it’s all on paper: in the real world, CKBC has been running 33,500 watts since day one, and now it just has the paperwork to prove it.

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