NorthEast Radio Watch 10/28/2024: News Changes at GBH
In this week’s issue… GBH shuffles mornings, prepares new show launches - NYSBA inducts Hall of Famers - More news-talk in the Hudson Valley - Remembering Dan Sys
NERW 7/27/15: CBS Radio Shakeout Continues
In this week’s issue… Behind CBS Radio’s cuts and changes – Boston’s V Brothers Reunite – Remembering CT’s Ed Henry, NY’s Brigham, Rogers – Voices Radio gets a reprieve
By SCOTT FYBUSH
Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada
*It’s easy to alarm readers (or at least gin up attention and subscription revenue) by constantly predicting dire tragedy. For 21 years now, that’s not how we’ve rolled at NERW. Even when the stopped-clock rule takes hold and big things are happening, we’d still rather drop back a bit and offer a reasoned analysis, and that’s just what we intend to do this week as we track the changes that are taking hold at CBS Radio.
We still don’t believe, for a number of reasons, that there’s much validity to the rumors that CBS intends to sell its entire radio division. There aren’t many buyers out there who could afford the entire roster of premium properties, and most of those buyers would have serious ownership-cap issues if they did try to absorb CBS.
We do believe, however, that the wheels continue to turn on a possible sale of several smaller CBS markets, and a series of management changes late last week continues to point to Hartford as one of the markets that’s likely on the chopping block. Longtime market manager Suzanne McDonald exited the Hartford cluster as part of the shuffles, and it’s telling that CBS isn’t replacing her. Instead, Boston market manager Mark Hannon will oversee WTIC (1080), WTIC-FM (96.5), WZMX (93.7) and WRCH (100.5) remotely. Who’d be in the market for the Hartford cluster? Connoisseur, certainly, as it aims to expand beyond its existing Hartford holdings of WDRC-FM (102.9) and the four-AM cluster based at WDRC (1360). Or might other medium-market groups like Alpha or Townsquare want to add Hartford? However you size it up, it’s likely much easier to sell a Hartford-sized cluster right now than to find the right buyer for much bigger clusters in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.
Elsewhere at CBS, David Yadgaroff moves up from sales manager to SVP/market manager in Philadelphia, replacing Marc Rayfield as he heads north to run the New York cluster. It appears Yadgaroff will be one of several CBS Radio market managers charged with overseeing sales as well as the overall operation of his cluster.
In Pittsburgh (another smaller market where a cluster sale is possible), we know more about an earlier round of CBS Radio staffing cuts: at WDSY (Y108), veteran morning man Jimmy Roach is out, leaving Brian “Monty” Montgomery flying solo. Down the hall at WBZZ (Star 100.7), middayer/APD/MD Scott Alexander and night host Lindsay are out, with afternoon jock Flick taking on APD/MD duties.
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*News from the NEW YORK market: at SBS’ WPAT-FM (93.1 Paterson), Luis Jimenez’ brief run in mornings didn’t end well. The former WSKQ-FM (97.9) morning powerhouse came back to SBS in February, eight years after jumping to rival Univision, but now he’s gone again from both his local and syndicated shows, firing off a tweet calling SBS management “Hitler wannabees” and promising to return with an online show this fall.
Over at CBS, WBMP (AMP 92.3) midday jock Niko has added the assistant PD title.
And what the heck is happening to Emmis’ WQHT (Hot 97) on social media? Lance Venta has the story over on RadioInsight…
*As Syracuse’s WOLF (1490) gets ready to host a reunion of its old top-40 days August 8, the venerable AM station has a new format. After spending nearly a year silent, the former Radio Disney affiliate signed back on this past spring as a simulcast of FM sister “The Dinosaur,” but now Craig Fox has flipped 1490 to Fox Sports Radio. WOLF is the third all-sports AM in the market, competing with ESPN on Galaxy’s WTLA (1200/97.7) and CBS Sports Radio on Cumulus’ WSKO (1260).
Down the street at iHeart’s WSYR (570/106.9), Mark Wainwright is the new permanent replacement for the late Joe Galuski in morning drive. Wainwright had been one of several rotating fill-ins during Galuski’s illness and after his death in May.
Veteran Syracuse reporter/news director Andy Brigham has died. During a three-decade career, Brigham was a tough investigative reporter before moving into management as the news director of WTVH (Channel 5) and later WIXT (now WSYR-TV, channel 9). Brigham had been living in North Carolina, but was attending his granddaughter’s wedding in California when he died suddenly at age 76.
In the Finger Lakes, Brien Rogers turned to radio ownership after retiring from a long career at Goulds Pumps, moving across the street to buy WSFW (1110/99.3) in Seneca Falls from George Souhan in 1987. Rogers’ BJR Broadcasting sold the stations back to Souhan in 1997. He died Sunday at age 81.
*An obituary from CONNECTICUT as well: Ed Henry, who died July 18 at age 88, spent 65 of those years hosting “The Polish Music Show” every Sunday on WMRD (1150 Middletown) and more recently on its simulcast WLIS (1420 Old Saybrook) as well. Henry had already been chosen for induction this fall into the inaugural class of the Connecticut Broadcasters Hall of Fame, an honor that will now be bestowed posthumously.
*In MASSACHUSETTS, the “V Brothers” are reuniting at Boston’s iHeart cluster as Frankie Vinci, aka “Frankie V,” comes home to take over mornings at WJMN (94.5). The Framingham native had been doing mornings at iHeart’s KHTS (93.3) in San Diego, and he’ll keep doing that show remotely for now while he fills the JAM’N slot left vacant by the departure of Ramiro Torres. Morning co-host Ashlee Feldman stays in place, and Frankie’s brother Mikey V will be right down the hall doing production and nights at WXKS-FM (Kiss 108).
At Entercom, WRKO (680) installs Dave Ramsey’s money management talk show in the 7-10 PM weeknight slot, replacing Mark Levin, now heard up the dial at iHeart’s WKOX (1430). Combined with Barry Armstrong’s midmorning money show, that’s now six hours a day of WRKO talk that’s devoted to money instead of politics – a sign of bigger changes to come at the struggling talker?
*In VERMONT, Amber (Huyghe) Stone is departing WZRT (97.1 Rutland), where she’s been assistant PD and midday jock since returning in 2013. She’s reportedly off to a bigger gig, as yet unannounced.
*There’s a new country simulcast coming to central PENNSYLVANIA in September, thanks to Kristin Cantrell’s 7 Mountains Media. After buying several station clusters in the region, 7 Mountains is combining WJUN-FM (92.5 Mexico), WLZS (106.1 Beaver Springs) and WHUN (106.3 Mount Union) as “Big Foot Country,” keeping the existing country format on WJUN and replacing oldies on WLZS and WHUN. The new stations will use several existing 7 Mountains staffers: Jeff Stevens (now PD of WIEZ 670 in Lewistown) will be PD and morning co-host alongside Mary Lee; WHUN’s Rick Hamilton will handle afternoons and there’s a search underway for a midday host.
On Pittsburgh’s AM dial, Bruce Sakalik has quietly exited KQV (1410) after a 15-year run (including a decade as morning news anchor); he’s joining Comcast as a local host. Just down the dial at 1360, Rev. Loren Mann’s WGBN (1360 McKeesport) continues to struggle with its aging four-tower night site. The former WIXZ (and later WPTT and WMNY) hasn’t used the night site much since Rev. Mann took over, and now it’s asked for special temporary authority to operate daytime-only from its nondirectional 5 kW facility closer to Pittsburgh.
And in the Erie market, we’re following the bidding, such as it is, in the FCC’s lackluster FM Auction 98 this week. As of Tuesday morning, the price tag for the new class A on 100.9 in Westfield NY (the replacement for Connoisseur’s WRKT when it finally moves from 100.9 to 104.9) had climbed from $25,000 to $86,000, with Rick Rambaldo’s The ERIE Radio Company in the lead as it seeks a sister station to its WEHP (Happi 92.7).
*In NEW JERSEY, little class D WPDI (103.9 Hazlet) is back on the air, now carrying Radio Cantico Nuevo programming.
*And we close with the latest chapter of the sad Voices Radio saga from CANADA, where Saturday was supposed to have been the end of the line for CKAV (106.5 Toronto) and its sister stations in Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver.
But Saturday night came and went and the Toronto signal remained on the air. That’s because Aboriginal Voices Radio, the licensee of the “Voices” stations, is filing an appeal of the CRTC’s decision to pull its licenses. AVR doesn’t deny that there were serious problems at its stations, but it’s arguing that the worst of the problems were at its Ottawa signal, CKAV-FM-9 (95.7), and it says the problems there shouldn’t automatically lead to all of its licenses being pulled simultaneously.
While that appeal makes its way through the judicial process, the Federal Court of Appeal has granted a stay of the CRTC’s license revocation, allowing Voices to stay on the air for now. We’ll be following this case closely.
(Read the court’s ruling here)
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From the NERW ArchivesYup, we’ve been doing this a long time now, and so we’re digging back into the vaults for a look at what NERW was covering one, five, ten, fifteen and – where available – twenty years ago this week, or thereabouts. Note that the column appeared on an erratic schedule in its earliest years as “New England Radio Watch,” and didn’t go to a regular weekly schedule until 1997. One Year Ago: July 28, 2014 *A running thread in this column over the last few years has been the rise and gradual fall of traditional news-talk radio on the FM dial. This week’s big chapter comes from western PENNSYLVANIA, where Clear Channel’s WPGB (104.7) was an FM talk pioneer when it launched back in 2004. With Pittsburgh DJ-turned-talk host Jim Quinn in mornings, Rush Limbaugh in middays and, for five seasons, Pirates baseball in the evenings, “NewsTalk 104.7” aimed to replicate many of the elements that had long made CBS Radio’s KDKA (1020) a Steel City success story.
So when rumors began to swirl this summer that WPGB was due for a format change, the only real surprise was that it had taken Clear Channel so long. As our sister site RadioInsight first reported over the weekend, the next chapter for 104.7 appears to be country, though the flip may not occur until Labor Day weekend. *Up on Florida Mountain, at the hairpin curve on Route 2 overlooking Adams, Massachusetts, things are slowly getting back to normal for the FM stations that lost their tower in a March storm. WNNI (98.9 Adams), the new northern Berkshires relay of public station WNNZ (640 Westfield), was just completing construction at the site when the tower came down. In June, it applied for a modification of its construction permit to move to a new antenna on a pole erected next to its former site, and last week WNNI requested a license to cover the 630 watt/382′ facility. The other station at the site, Vox’s WUPE-FM (100.1 North Adams), continues to operate under STA from a temporary 661-watt facility at the same location while it works on a permanent tower replacement. *Marti Casper has been a fixture at the 93.3 spot on the Rochester dial through multiple calls, formats, and owners: the station was Entercom’s oldies WBBF when she started out on the morning show, and she survived a format change to adult hits (“Fickle 93.3,” WFKL) and then the station’s sale to Stephens Media. For the last five years, she’d been solo in mornings on Fickle after the departure of her former co-host, George “Ace” Acevedo; last Tuesday, she was abruptly ousted, apparently amidst budget cuts at Stephens. No replacement has been named yet, and it’s not clear what’s going on at Fickle (nor, generally, at Stephens overall, which has been one of the more inscrutable broadcast groups in the region.) Five Years Ago: July 26, 2010 After not quite two years as a talk station, CANADA’s Astral Media has flipped CHAM (820 Hamilton) right back where it came from. On Thursday at noon, CHAM ditched “Talk 820,” which had failed to make much of a dent in Corus’ dominant CHML (900) since launching in September 2008. In its place is “Today’s Country 820 CHAM,” returning the 50,000-watt signal to the format it had used for decades before making the flip to talk. The revived country CHAM features morning host Mike Nabuurs, who’d been doing the station’s late-morning talk shift. And along with sister station CKOC (1150)’s oldies format, we believe it makes Hamilton the only large Canadian market that still has two stations playing music on the AM dial – three, if you count Evanov’s nearby CKPC (1380 Brantford), which recently flipped to a news/country hybrid. John Manzi worked in several New England states during his long radio career, but it was in RHODE ISLAND that Manzi became known as “Big Ange,” bringing his high-energy delivery to stations that included WJAR, WICE, WHIM and most memorably WPRO. Manzi, who also went by “Andy Jackson,” worked in Binghamton (WINR), Elmira (WELM) and Maine (WASY, WZON) as well during a career that stretched from the sixties into the late eighties. He died July 17 in Providence, at 67. Some good news for NEW HAMPSHIRE’s scrappy little classical station: Harry Kozlowski’s WCNH-LP (94.7 Bow) received planning board approval last week for the new transmitter installation it’s planning at its new full-power CP, WCNU (91.5 Bow). Some neighbors had objected to the new signal, but others showed up in force at a planning board meeting to support WCNU’s proposal, which would add a small transmitter shed and even smaller antenna to an existing 40-foot pole. (NERW notes that “I don’t want to look at a shed every day,” an actual objection from an actual neighbor at the board meeting, may well be one of the least persuasive NIMBY complaints we’ve ever seen…) In New York City itself, public station WNYC-FM (93.9) will soon be operating from fully licensed facilities for the first time since 9/11. Until now, WNYC has remained officially licensed at its long-gone World Trade Center site, while its actual operation has remained under Special Temporary Authority with 4 kW from the Empire State Building master antenna. The problem with WNYC’s return to its old Empire home was the short-spacing that plagues so many stations in the region – when 93.9 moved from Empire to the World Trade Center in the early 70s, it lost the grandfathered short-spacing it enjoyed to adjacent-channel WZMX (93.7 Hartford), and WZMX’s current owner CBS Radio objected to the interference an Empire-based WNYC-FM would cause to the Hartford station. WNYC and CBS finally reached a settlement, and now WNYC-FM will once again be licensed to Empire at 5.4 kW/1361′, just shy of the 6 kW a full class B signal would use at that height. With WNYC’s impending return to licensed status, only one of the Trade Center FM signals is still in license limbo: SBS’ WPAT-FM (93.1) continues to operate under STA at Empire as it works out its own short-spacing issues. Ten Years Ago: July 25, 2005 As Boston’s WBZ-TV (Channel 4) fights to regain the ratings dominance it once held in eastern MASSACHUSETTS, it will do so under a new news director. Last week, the station sent ND Matt Ellis packing, two years after Ellis replaced longtime news director Peter Brown. For the moment, newsroom veteran Jen Street is running things until a permanent replacement for Ellis is named. NEW YORK may soon have one fewer analog TV signal, as the owners of WLNY-TV (Channel 55) in Patchogue apply to turn off their analog signal and go digital-only (on channel 57 for now, though they’ll have to move from that interim channel in a few years.) Here’s the back story – the spectrum that’s now UHF channels 52-59 is being reallocated out of broadcast use, and the FCC has already auctioned several of those channels to new users, even though they won’t be able to occupy them right away. A subsidiary of Qualcomm landed what’s now channels 55 and 56, and they’re now making offers to stations on those channels to speed up the transition and abandon analog TV earlier than scheduled. It’s a pretty good bet, we think, that very few of WLNY’s viewers are watching the over-the-air analog signal, and for everyone else watching on cable or satellite, the station will remain available as usual. Heading upstate, Albany’s WAMC completed its takeover of WRUN (1150 Utica) last week, returning the signal to the air after a few days of silence. It’s now the westernmost link in the WAMC public radio network, which stretches north to Plattsburgh, south to Middletown and east to central Connecticut and Massachusetts. Fifteen Years Ago: July 28, 2000 After just a few months as a public radio outlet, the lone AM station in Bennington, VERMONT is about to return to commercial operation. WBTN (1370) came along with Vermont Public Radio’s purchase of WBTN-FM (94.3) from Belva Keyworth last winter, and for the moment, VPR had been using the AM mostly to simulcast the FM, breaking away for a few minutes of local news, commentary, and death notices on weekday mornings. VPR announced this week that it will sell 1370, and the new owner should be familiar to anyone who’s ever put a piece of professional broadcasting gear in a carrying case. Those blue canvas camera covers and bags come from Porta-Brace of North Bennington — whose owner, Robert Howe, will soon buy WBTN(AM) from VPR to continue operating it as a local voice for Bennington County. “WBTN-AM is in good hands with Bob Howe and I’m sure he will be successful in operating this legacy station that the Bennington community supports so strongly,” said VPR president Mark Vogelzang, Staying north for another moment, we see that the FCC has flagged the Clear Channel purchases in the Bangor market for ownership-cap review. By the way, we miscounted in our estimate of what Communications Capital Managers paid for the six stations involved — it was actually just over $13 million, for a tidy profit of just under $7 million from the sale. The big news this week in MASSACHUSETTS is the impending departure of Charles Laquidara. The Big Mattress’ finale on WZLX (100.7 Boston) comes on Friday (8/4), and Charles will have a busy week leading up to the last show — from being honored with a star on the Tower Records sidewalk on Monday to an open house Wednesday night at the Hard Rock Cafe. (Which reminds us…NERW would very much like to hear from anyone in WZLX signal range able to tape the last Laquidara shows; read on to see why we won’t have the NERW-mobile parked in the shadow of the Pru ourselves.) It must be “end of an era” week, as over on the TV side, WCVB (Channel 5) announced its post-Chet’n’Nat lineups. Just as the last issue was going to press, GM Paul La Camera spake thusly: Natalie Jacobson will do the 5 and 6 PM shows, the former with Anthony Everett and the latter solo. In between, Everett and Heather Kahn continue on the 5:30, and both return at 11. What of Jacobson’s former (on- and off-air) partner, Chet Curtis? He’ll anchor Sunday nights with Pam Cross, as well as doing in-depth reports for channel 5 and its Web presence. Just to add to the fun, a new news director is also on the way to 5 TV Place: Coleen Marren comes to WCVB from Hearst-Argyle sister station WISN-TV (Channel 12) in Milwaukee. She starts August 22. Meanwhile over at WBZ-TV (Channel 4), the new post-Liz Walker lineup shakes out like this: With Walker now doing the noon show and going home to her son, Joe Shortsleeve and Lisa Hughes take the 5 and 11, Ted Wayman and Sara Underwood handle the 5:30, and Hughes does the 6 with Jack Williams. Twenty Years Ago: July 26, 1995 [no issue] |
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