NERW 6/29/15: Boston’s Big Talk Realignment is Complete

In this week’s issue… WRKO launches post-Rush lineup – WMEX sale price a stunner – CRTC pulls the plug on AVR – #ThanksJack – iHeart launches CT “Beat”

By SCOTT FYBUSH

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

*It’s a new era in Boston talk radio, for whoever’s left to listen. Today marks the launch of a new mostly-local lineup and new branding at Entercom’s venerable WRKO (680) and the start of the new Rush Limbaugh-anchored talk format at iHeart’s WKOX (1430 Everett). The week also brings new ownership to WMEX (1510) at a price that looks stunningly low (but we’ll show why it might actually be unsustainably high). And it may bring a new talker to another New England market, too.

WRKO first: what was once “the Talk Station” is now “the Voice of Boston,” and the final piece of its new, Rush Limbaugh-free schedule drops into place this morning with a new Boston.com-produced morning show. As had been widely expected, former TV anchor Kim Carrigan is hosting “The Boston.com Morning Show,” with assistance from Jon Meterparel on sports (late of WEEI, down the hall) and producer David Cullinane to deliver “four hours of rapid-cadence news, talk and trending live from the newsroom at Boston.com.”

Market manager Phil Zachary is positioning the new show as a move away from “traditional talk radio…facing strong headwinds,” emphasizing that it’s part of WRKO’s first all-local weekday lineup in 20 years. The rest of that lineup is pretty much as we’d been anticipating: Barry Armstrong will continue to lease the 10 AM-noon slot for his Financial Exchange show, followed in the former Rush slot at noon by former morning man Jeff Kuhner, the lone piece of the schedule produced solely by WRKO. At 3, Howie Carr’s show stays in place, and then it’s syndication after 7 PM.

If that’s one vision of the future of talk radio – going local by partnering up as much as possible with other entities (Boston.com in the morning, then Barry Armstrong, and then Carr’s self-syndication in the afternoon), today also marks the launch of iHeart’s new bargain-basement approach to talk. WKOX (1430 Everett) signs on as “Talk 1430” today with Fox Sports Radio in morning drive, followed by an all-syndicated Beck/Limbaugh/Hannity lineup. For iHeart, WKOX will be at least a vaguely useful test going into next year’s syndication renewal talks with Limbaugh: if you put his show on one of the worst AM signals in the market, surround it with syndicated programming and no local content and (presumably) don’t give it any promotion, how many dedicated Rush listeners will still find it and stay tuned?

For iHeart, at least, there’s not much financially at stake: it already owns 1430 and had already been running it at minimal cost with a satellite-fed format, Spanish tropical “Mia.” Up the dial at 1510, though, there’s a lot of math to consider as we evaluate the $175,000 sale price for WMEX that had a lot of people talking all week.

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Cards on the table here: for all the talk about LMA operator Daly XXL being poised to buy the WMEX license from Blackstrap Broadcasting, we had our doubts here at NERW that the transaction would ever really be filed. After all, among the checkered episodes in 1510’s recent past was another LMA to Wallis Communications that was supposed to result in a sale and instead just fizzled out.

“$175,000? That’s less than my house cost me!” was a real reaction we saw from several people last week, amazed at how little Daly is paying to Blackstrap for the 50,000-watt WMEX license. Yes, it’s a big hit from the $20 million Blackstrap paid just a few years ago for 1510 (then WWZN) and WSNR (620 Jersey City) in the New York City market; take away the $13 million Blackstrap got for WSNR earlier this year and Blackstrap’s investors end up with a loss of more than $6 million for 1510.

“Wow, AM values have completely cratered” was another common reaction. While it’s true that the benchmark values for most AM stations are on the decline – consider the mere $500,000 Salem is paying Radio Disney for WMKI 1260 in Boston, a station with a signal arguably worse than WMEX – the 1510 signal in Boston is a special case, and then some, thanks to a perfect storm of operational conditions.

As NERW readers have long known, WMEX’s Waltham transmitter site has been problematic ever since the station moved there in the late 1970s. Tucked into the back parking lot of an office park on Waverley Oaks Road, the four-tower array has what’s reportedly a mid-five-figure monthly rent payment to the owners of the land beneath. Add to that the power costs for the station’s aging Nautel AMPFET transmitter and the experts we’ve talked to estimate that just keeping the signal on the air costs something like $50,000 a month even before the costs of personnel and studio facilities are factored in. With expenses like that, it doesn’t take much to start a station spiralling – and 1510 has arguably been in a painful spiral of revolving formats and owners for more than three decades now.

Can Daly XXL reverse that long slump with the latest talk format on 1510? We won’t sugarcoat it: it feels like the longest of long shots, but we wish them all the best in the effort.

*When Jack Williams went on the air in MASSACHUSETTS back in 1975, an hour of early-evening news was still a big deal and WBZ-TV (Channel 4) was one of only three big sources for TV news in Boston. Forty years later, Williams retired on Thursday from a news landscape that had been completely transformed, with Jack the last big name standing from the glory days of TV news pairings in the 1970s and 1980s, albeit in only an occasional role. (That semi-retirement included the “Wednesday’s Child” adoption segments that have been a Williams signature since 1981.) His old on-air team, including co-anchor Liz Walker and sports director Bob Lobel, came back to WBZ to see him off before a big outdoor farewell party.

*At Greater Media’s WROR (105.7 Framingham), Julie Devereaux is back in her old midday slot after spending the last few years doing afternoons. The midday slot had been without a regular host for a while; Devereaux’s move to the 10 AM-2 PM daypart makes room for another Boston vet, Jay Beau Jones, to move from weekends to afternoons.

*Is central CONNECTICUT the next venue for a Boston-style talk shakeup? Over at our newly-revamped sister site RadioInsight, Lance Venta picks up on a whole bunch of new domain registrations for iHeart Radio’s WPOP (1410 Hartford), currently lingering in the ratings basement with a Fox Sports Radio satellite feed. Is Rush Limbaugh not long for CBS Radio’s WTIC (1080), the market’s hugely dominant talk station? And if Limbaugh is pulled from WTIC (or is sent packing), who’s on the bench to replace him? Beyond Jim Vicevich in late mornings, there’s not much local news-talk talent left on WTIC now that the afternoon slot has gone from disgraced former governor John Rowland to sports talk.

At WPOP, meanwhile, a duplication of the schedule of sister iHeart talker WELI (960 New Haven) would put Glenn Beck in the Hartford market, where he has no clearance, and would upgrade Sean Hannity from a late-night delayed clearance on WTIC to a live clearance on 1410.

*At iHeart in New Haven, translator W265DB (100.9) relaunched last Monday as hip-hop “100.9 the Beat.” Adam Rivers of sister station WKCI (101.3) is also programming the new “Beat,” using iHeart’s Premium Choice lineup that includes New York’s Angie Martinez in afternoon drive.

*The newest AM frequency in NEW YORK state is just days away from launch now. Rockland County’s WRCR (1300 Spring Valley) will be doing on-air testing this afternoon of its new 10 kW facility at 1700 on the dial, and if all goes well it will make its final move from 1300 to 1700 on Saturday.

Way up north, just down the road from where that prison escape continued to make national headlines over the weekend, RadioActive’s WZXP (97.9 Au Sable Forks) has gone silent again. The Plattsburgh-market station had last been operating with a rock format LMA’d to Russ and Diane Kinsley (who’d earlier been running the same format on WEXP 102.5 and continue to stream it at musicheads.us), but Randy Michaels’ RadioActive group tells the FCC it’s now looking for a new format that’s economically viable for the station.

*Remember WXXE (90.5 Fenner)? The folks at Syracuse Community Broadcasting who put the little class A signal on the air east of Syracuse more than a decade ago got into a sparring match with the region’s big public broadcaster, WRVO (89.9 Oswego), for what seemed to be no good reason, applying for translators on WRVO’s frequency that would have nibbled at the edges of its coverage area.

In the years since, SCR lost another license, WXXC (88.7 Truxton), after misleading the FCC about whether construction was complete before the CP expired. It applied for a Syracuse-area LPFM signal in the 2013 LPFM window, and now that it’s been granted a low-power CP (WSPJ-LP 103.3), SCR has to sell the WXXE license.

That sale was filed last week, and for $7500 the WXXE license is going to… yup, WRVO’s parent, the State University of New York. WRVO apparently plans to use the Fenner signal to fill in some holes between Syracuse and Utica where its other signals don’t reach.

(We’d note, for what it’s worth, that in the last several years of traveling through the area we’ve heard not one bit of signal from WXXE.)

Here in Rochester, the latest TV anchor farewell comes from Hubbard’s NBC affiliate, WHEC (Channel 10), which said goodbye to Lia Lando on Friday after five years. Lando had been anchoring “Roc City Tonight” at 7 PM and co-anchoring the 11 PM newscast. Weekend anchor Jennifer Mobilia moves up to take those roles as Lando heads off to spend more time with her family and her PR business.

*A few months ago, we told you about ESPN’s plans to relocate its Mike & Mike morning show from its Bristol, Connecticut headquarters to New York City’s Times Square. The move was supposed to happen early in 2016, but ESPN now says it won’t be happening after all, at least not on that accelerated schedule.

*In western PENNSYLVANIA, Bob Stevens’ Broadcast Communications Inc. (and its nonprofit sidekick, Broadcast Educational Communications) is swapping signals with K-Love parent EMF, and here’s how it plays out: BCI and BEC paid $375,000 last year to buy WKJL (88.1 Clarksburg WV) and WRIJ (106.9 Masontown PA) from He’s Alive, Inc. Those stations will go to EMF in exchange for translator W237CX (95.3 Bridgeport WV) and full-power WDKL (95.9 Grafton WV); WDKL, in turn, has an application pending to relocate to Loch Lynn Heights MD, where it will join BCI’s existing two-FM/one-AM Oakland, Maryland cluster.

But wait – there’s more! BEC is making one more purchase from He’s Alive!, paying $75,000 for WRWJ (88.1 Murrysville PA), east of Pittsburgh.

*For the second time this decade, CANADA’s broadcast regulators have pulled the plug on a licensee occupying a valuable Toronto FM frequency. Aboriginal Voices Radio has been a frequent thorn in the CRTC’s side for failing to live up to its promises to serve urban aboriginal communities in large markets across the country.

Calling it “a decision that shocks only the people who haven’t been paying attention,” our friend Steve Faguy provides a highly detailed look at why the CRTC imposed the death penalty on “Voices Radio,” which will have to shut down CKAV-1 (106.5 Toronto), CKAV-9 (95.7 Ottawa) and its stations in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver on July 25.

What finally did Voices in was a disastrous CRTC hearing back in May, at which Voices presented the commission with its new consultants, Bray & Partners and Steve Kowch, promising that this time it was going to get its many issues under control. Those problems included a persistent lack of any local programming, much less news (and how could it do any, with a staff of two part-timers at the end?), as well as filing the proper annual reports and maintaining program logs and logger recordings.

And so CKAV-1 and its sister stations join CKLN (88.1), the Ryerson University station that was shut down in 2011. Just as with 88.1 in Toronto, the 106.5 frequency in Toronto as well as the Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver frequencies will soon get a CRTC call for new applications. Unlike 88.1, this call will apparently be limited to broadcasters who intend to provide service to Aboriginal listeners, presumably in a way more focused than the vaguely-AC music mix that “Voices” was playing when last we heard it. We’ll keep you posted as the process moves forward.

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