NERW 5/25/2015: After the Old Rush

In this week’s issue… Boston’s talk scene shuffles again – RI manager ousted – WLNG’s Potz to retire – TV affiliation change in Canada

By SCOTT FYBUSH

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

*Heading into the Memorial Day weekend, the region’s biggest radio news came, once again, from WRKO (680 Boston), which is about to lose the Rush Limbaugh Show for the second time in six years. When the Entercom talker last parted ways with Limbaugh in 2010, it was at the hands of Limbaugh’s syndicator, Premiere Networks, which shifted the show to WXKS (1200), the new talk station being launched by its corporate sister, Clear Channel Radio.

“Rush Radio” became “Talk 1200” but never made much of a dent in the ratings, closing up shop in 2012 and sending Limbaugh back to WRKO, which itself hadn’t made much of a dent with its own attempts to fill the noon-3 timeslot. But Limbaugh’s return to WRKO hasn’t moved the ratings needle much either, and with the three-year deal between Premiere and WRKO running out next month, Entercom saw no compelling reason to pay for another Limbaugh contract.

Instead, WRKO is getting ready for another overhaul of its increasingly unstable schedule. The new lineup will shift current morning host Todd Kuhner to Limbaugh’s noon-3 slot, where he’ll lead in to the Howie Carr show that has itself departed WRKO only to return again for lack of a better Boston option. Barry Armstrong’s Money Matters programming will continue to lease the mid-morning hours before Limbaugh, and mornings on WRKO appear likely to become a co-production with the Boston Globe.

But let’s be clear here: for all the virtual ink being spilled over who’s going to go where on the WRKO schedule, the real story isn’t at Entercom, where there appears to be at least a tacit understanding that 680’s glory days as a major force in Boston radio are behind it. The demographics that WRKO brings in are increasingly unsellable, but at the same time there’s nothing else Entercom can do with WRKO that would be any more lucrative. By walking away from the show that once defined the talk medium, Entercom is showing what’s left of WRKO’s future: for however much longer AM talk still has any viability, WRKO will chug along with inexpensive talent like Kuhner or shows like Armstrong’s or Carr’s that appear to be willing to pay for a Boston clearance.

And right there is the bigger story that few in the industry want to discuss: at least for now, Premiere and its parent iHeart are locked into a deal with Limbaugh that makes it impossible to do what Carr or Armstrong are doing. Seven years ago, Premiere signed Limbaugh to a contract that reportedly pays out $400 million over eight years – and while that might have made sense in 2008, it’s looking like a pretty lopsided deal in 2015. If nothing else, it’s severely limiting Premiere’s ability to negotiate to keep much-needed clearances – if word gets out that WRKO, for instance, is getting Limbaugh at a discount to keep him on the air, how long can Premiere keep the rest of the affiliate base paying significant cash for the show?

It’s not just Boston and WRKO: while his partisans still make the case that Limbaugh is the top-rated talker nationwide with nearly 400 affiliates in almost every market, the value of that reach is fading fast, even in the many big markets where iHeart keeps carriage of Limbaugh in house. Moving Rush to iHeart’s WOR (710) hasn’t pulled the station up to even a 2 share, and the numbers are even more dismal in places like Los Angeles, where Limbaugh’s move from KFI to KEIB (1150) finds that iHeart station down in fractional-share territory. While they can’t say it out loud, of course, we’ve heard from more than one iHeart local talk programmer that if corporate would only allow it, they’d gladly replace Limbaugh in the midday slot.

The big story, then, isn’t one big-market affiliate in 2015 – it’s going to be Limbaugh’s overall contract when it comes up for renewal next year. Assuming Premiere offers a renewal at all, it’s likely to be for considerably less money and likely for less time as well. Will a 65-year-old Limbaugh be willing to settle for a pay cut to keep his current deal in place? And if his not-inconsiderable ego keeps him from settling for less, what then? It’s unlikely any other major syndicator, especially Cumulus-owned Westwood One, would pay Limbaugh what he makes now, either. Even if Limbaugh were to sign on with a new distributor, he’d be starting with a massive disadvantage: in NERW-land alone, he’d be looking for replacements for iHeart-owned affiliates in Worcester, Springfield, Manchester, New Haven, Albany, the Hudson Valley, Syracuse, Rochester, Williamsport, Harrisburg, Allentown and New York City. There’s ample evidence, including WRKO’s own experience during the WXKS interregnum, to show that as loyal as Limbaugh’s listeners are said to be, they don’t automatically follow him to a new home. (Indeed, what talk station that’s launched in the last decade or so has found any lasting success at all?)

Could Rush go to satellite radio? Perhaps – but given his demographics, he’d be unlikely to bring enough new business to SiriusXM to make him worth the kind of salary he pulls down now from Premiere.

It’s just not a pretty picture for Limbaugh, nor for talk radio overall, where no star has emerged in the last couple of decades with anywhere near the dominance that Rush exerted at his prime.

*So having said all that, what is left for Limbaugh and Premiere? The consensus seems to be that he’ll end up over at WMEX (1510), where there’s a little more clarity about that talk station’s future. Owner Blackstrap Broadcasting is now leasing the signal to Daly XXL Communications, a North Carolina-based group that includes station manager Bryan Berner and Henry and Mary Remmer of Wilmington, N.C. (Remmer is a retired Chemex executive with, it appears, no radio background.)

While Daly XXL says it’s planning to purchase the WMEX license from Blackstrap, nothing has yet been filed with the FCC. In the meantime, WMEX announced a new morning show last week: former WTKK (96.9) weekend host Joe Ligotti will take over that slot June 2, displacing Boston Herald Radio to 10 AM-noon. Now can Daly XXL come up with the cash Premiere will want for Limbaugh – and will it be worth it? We’ll be watching.

Mid-week update: We’re hearing that WMEX has told Premiere it’s not interested in paying for Limbaugh. What will be Premiere’s next move? More in next Monday’s column…

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*Up the dial from WRKO, it’s the final week on the air for WBZ (1030)’s Anthony Silva, who’ll say farewell to afternoon drive on Friday after 36 years. (Read our complete April coverage of Silva’s retirement announcement here.)

*A veteran RHODE ISLAND manager is out at Cumulus in Providence. Barbara Haynes was ousted Wednesday after 12 years at the helm of the cluster that includes WPRO, WPRO-FM and WWLI; before that, she’d worked in Providence radio since 1981, mostly at what’s now the iHeart Radio cluster across town. It’s not yet clear who’ll take over at the Salty Brine Broadcast Center, nor what might be next for the well-respected Haynes.

On TV, WJAR (Channel 10) has received the FCC’s go-ahead to make a frequency swap behind the scenes. Since the DTV conversion, it’s been operating on RF channel 51, at the top of the current TV spectrum – but the FCC wants to clear out as much of channel 51 as it can, creating a guard band between TV and the wireless services that now occupy the former channel 52 and above. With WRIW-CD (Channel 23) having recently won permission to move its low-power digital signal from RF channel 50 down to RF channel 36, WJAR is now free to slide its signal one notch down to RF channel 50…at least until the eventual auction-driven repack that will send it, and many other DTV stations, to another new set of RF channels.

*In VERMONT, Chantal is leaving WXXX (95.5 South Burlington) after a 20-year run with the top-40 station. “Triple-X” says it will announce a new airstaff lineup soon to fill the morning slot that Chantal is vacating.

*In central NEW HAMPSHIRE, Jim Fronk is out as part of a “restructuring” at Great Eastern Radio, leaving holes in the morning at WTPL (107.7 Hillsborough), where he was doing mornings, and at WLKZ (104.9 Wolfeboro), where he tracked middays.

*In State College, PENNSYLVANIA, Forever Broadcasting has returned the news-talk format of WRSC to its longtime home at 1390 on the AM dial, reversing the move it made almost six years ago when it flipped the AM side to sports and moved WRSC’s news-talk to WRSC-FM (103.1 State College). The FM signal, which was the longtime home of top-40 WBHV, flipped on Thursday to classic hits as “Happy 103,” launching with a new morning show from Pat Urban, who’s been doing middays on sister station WBUS (93.7).

In Philadelphia, Michaela Majoun is exiting WXPN (88.5) after a quarter-century with the AAA station, most recently as morning host. Majoun will leave WXPN at the end of June to pursue a career in writing, including a screenplay and a TV series she’s been working on after hours. No replacement has been named yet at WXPN.

We’re sorry to report the death on May 15 of Gwyneth Seese, the central Pennsylvania country jock who was known on the air as “Dandalion.” Seese worked at WIOV (105.1 Ephrata), WRKZ (106.7 Hershey) and WCAT-FM (102.3 Carlisle), among other stops that earned her a berth in the Country DJ Hall of Fame and honors as Billboard Air Personality of the Year (1996) and Academy of Country Music DJ of the Year (1989). Seese was 77.

A heritage callsign has returned to Pittsburgh after a long absence: “WPNT” was on Pittsburgh’s 92.9 (now WLTJ) in its Group W era and for some years afterward – and now eagle-eyed viewers are noticing that the Steel City’s MyNetworkTV outlet, formerly WPMY (Channel 22), is now “WPNT(TV).” Is Sinclair preparing to downplay the “MyTV” branding on channel 22 – or perhaps for the eventual spectrum-auction play that will inevitably move the current channel 22 content to a subchannel on sister Fox affiliate WPGH (Channel 53)?

*A NEW JERSEY broadcast legend is recuperating from heart surgery. WOND (1400 Pleasantville) afternoon host Pinky Kravitz, 87, has been off the air since May 15, the first time he’s missed a show in more than half a century. Longport Media GM Dave Coskey tells the Press of Atlantic City that he expects Kravitz to be back on the air before long, noting that in the past “he’s done his show from a hospital without anyone knowing that he was doing it from a hospital, including his doctors.”

WEMG (1310 Camden) is one big step closer to having an FM translator that reaches across the Delaware River into Philadelphia. Last fall, W289AZ (105.7 Trenton), the Hope Christian Church of Marlton-owned translator that WEMG plans to buy, was denied a “Mattoon waiver” to move directly from Trenton to the WEMG tower in Camden. Instead, it applied to the FCC to make a move to a midway point in Palmyra, NJ – and almost as soon as that move was granted, it filed for a license to cover for the Palmyra signal last week, followed by a new application to move to Camden with 250 watts.

*In NEW YORK, Long Island’s legendary WLNG (92.1 Sag Harbor) is losing one of the air talents who helped make it legendary. Rusty Potz, the station’s longtime afternoon jock and a staple of its ubiquitous remote broadcasts, announced at the end of his Friday airshift that he’ll be leaving the WLNG airwaves after this Friday’s show. Potz choked up as he told listeners he’d stay with the station “behind the scenes, in our Florida office, but I’ll still be popping up on the air from time to time.” Potz has been with WLNG for more than 40 years, and on the radio for half a century, including a stint at Hartford’s WCCC before settling in on Redwood Causeway.

Down the road from WLNG, CONNECTICUT-based WSHU is moving a powerful East End translator on Wednesday. W277AB (103.3 Noyack) is being displaced by a new Shelter Island allotment on 103.3, but it won’t go to 107.5 with its existing relay of the mixed news-classical format from parent WSHU-FM (91.1 Fairfield). Instead, the 107.5 signal will become the first outlet of a new WSHU all-classical format, fed off an HD subchannel of WSHU-FM and complementing East End sister station WSUF (89.9 Noyack), which WSHU programs with a fulltime news-talk format.

The whole time Albany had a station called WHRL (103.1, now WGY-FM), we never knew what those calls stood for – until now, as we share the news of the death of the station’s founder. Robert Lee Hill put WHRL on the air in 1966, naming it for himself in a roundabout way – “W Hill, Robert Lee” – and his Regal Broadcasting owned the station for 31 years before selling it to Dame Media in 1997. (It became part of Clear Channel, now iHeart Media, two years later.) Hill founded the Albany Broadcasters Association and worked with the New York State Broadcasters Association after his retirement, as well as traveling to Bosnia in 1998 to help commercial broadcasting get underway there. Hill died Monday at age 76.

Near Syracuse, Craig Fox is applying to move WOLF-FM (105.1 DeRuyter) to a new transmitter site a few miles northeast of its longtime home at one of the oldest FM sites in the state. The current 105.1 site dates back to the Rural Radio Network of the late 1940s, when the hilltop off Carey Road was picked as a link between RRN stations to the east in Cherry Valley and to the west in South Bristol and Ithaca. But by moving to a new location on Chaphe Hill near Tuscarora Lake, WOLF-FM can extend its city-grade coverage eastward to most of Utica without losing much of its existing Syracuse coverage.

Binghamton public broadcaster WSKG is paying $59,500 for a translator CP in the eastern Finger Lakes: W221CW (92.1 Groton) comes to WSKG from Calvary Chapel of the Finger Lakes. It will relay WSQG (90.9 Ithaca), and we’d be not one bit surprised if it migrates southwest into Ithaca itself to become a relay of WSKG’s second radio service, WSQX (91.5 Binghamton), via WSQG’s HD2.

Dialogos of Cobleskill now has calls for its LPFM CP at 105.9: it’ll be WCSQ-LP. Mark down WEPL-LP for the Ibero-American Action League’s planned new 97.1 in Rochester, and WXRM-LP for the new 101.1 LPFM in Cape May Court House, NJ, licensed to the South Jersey Christian Academy.

*There’s a TV affiliation swap coming this fall to two markets in CANADA. After 60 years as privately-owned affiliates of CBC television, Corus will shift CHEX-TV (Channel 12) in Peterborough, CHEX-TV-2 (Channel 22) in Oshawa and CKWS-TV (Channel 11) in Kingston, Ontario to CTV on August 31, shaking up the TV lineup between Toronto and Ottawa. While local Corus management isn’t coming right out to say so, referring only to a “change of direction” at the CBC, the end of CBC-TV’s hockey rights no doubt contributed to the move. The current local newscasts will stay in place on all three stations, though the late news at 11 will move to 11:30 to make room for CTV’s late-night national news at 11.

It’s not yet clear what, if anything, central Ontario residents will do for over-the-air CBC service. Most cable systems in the region already carry the full CBC lineup from either CBLT (Channel 5) in Toronto or CBOT (Channel 4) in Ottawa; until now, they’ve watched CTV on either CJOH-TV-6 (Channel 6), the Deseronto relay of CTV’s Ottawa outlet, or CFTO-DT-54 (Channel 54), the Bobcaygeon/Peterborough relay of CTV’s Toronto flagship. Will those signals go to the CBC now, or will the CBC stick to its current budget-driven policy of providing over-the-air signals only in the urban markets where it originates programming? And will the few US cable systems that pick up CKWS in upstate New York continue to carry the station when it’s mostly a relay of existing US network programming?

In any event, the departure of these Corus-owned stations from the CBC affiliate ranks will leave only three remaining privately-owned CBC-TV outlets, one in Alberta and two in British Columbia.
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