NERW 11/30/2015: Rivera Out at WABC

In this week’s issue…Cumulus empties Geraldo’s vault – It’s Red Sox contract time – Gearhart makes retirement permanent – More on Bell’s job cuts

By SCOTT FYBUSH

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

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*Whatever Cumulus’ plans might be to revive its flagging flagship, NEW YORK‘s WABC (770), they won’t include one of the station’s star personalities. Geraldo Rivera still appears on the WABC website as we finish the column Sunday night, but the 10 AM-noon host hasn’t been on the air since Tuesday and he won’t be coming back.

On Wednesday, Rivera posted on Facebook that Cumulus’ new CEO, Mary Berner, and market manager Chad Lopez “do not intend to honor the handshake deal I made with the ousted company chief John Dickey, an agreement to extend my current contract for a year.”

Cumulus hired Rivera in 2012 to host back-to-back local shows for WABC and KABC in Los Angeles, then swapped out his KABC shift for national syndication a few months later. The national syndication ended in early 2014, leaving Rivera as a (presumably) highly-paid local-only host, a tenuous situation at a company that’s been trying hard to cut costs at its local stations.

It’s not yet clear who’ll end up with the mid-morning shift at WABC, especially in the context of a schedule that’s likely to be in flux again whenever either Cumulus or Don Imus decide they’re done with each other. (Recall that Imus said earlier this year that when he’s ready to go, he plans to just walk away from his morning show without any advance notice or fanfare.) Will Cumulus look to syndication to fill the 10-noon slot? It wouldn’t surprise us one bit. Less likely, we think, are the rumors that Keith Olbermann, recently departed again from ESPN, might fill the slot.

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North of the city, Dennis Jackson’s W276BV (103.1 Stamford CT) has refiles its application to relocate to  New Rochelle, this time as a directional 85-watt signal relaying WVOX (1460 New Rochelle). An earlier attempt to relocate W276BV was quashed by Bridgelight’s co-channel W276AQ (103.1 Fort Lee), which had submitted some sketchy interference complaints from Westchester County listeners. But with Bridgelight’s subsequent application to move the Fort Lee translator to 102.3, Jackson sees an opening to try again with the Westchester move.

*We promised you we’d post the video of our big night at the Empire State Building last month as soon as it became available, and thanks to our friends at This Week in Radio Tech, it’s now here for your viewing enjoyment! Thanks again to everyone at Empire, publicist Peggy Miles, AES and David Bialik and the SBE for making it all possible…

*There’s a new permanent morning host at NEW JERSEY 101.5 (WKXW Trenton). With the sad announcement that Jim Gearhart’s recovery from a head injury and concussion is still ongoing and he won’t be able to return to the morning show, the Townsquare Media talker has named fill-in host Bill Spadea as Gearhart’s replacement.

Spadea (left) has been Gearhart’s substitute since 2014; he’s also continuing as host of the nightly “Chasing News” (formerly “Chasing New Jersey”) on WWOR-TV (Channel 9) and Philadelphia’s WTXF (Channel 29).

Gearhart’s forced retirement ends a long and impressive career that goes back to WKXW’s launch as a talker, and even before that to stints at WCBS (880) just before its 1967 flip to all-news, as well as KQV in Pittsburgh and WPOP in Hartford. His legacy at New Jersey 101.5 lives on in the name of the station’s building, dubbed the “Jim Gearhart Broadcast Center”

An AM move is underway along the Garden State Parkway: with just hours to go before losing its longtime site in Union, Multicultural Broadcasting’s WJDM (1530 Elizabeth) has moved north up the Parkway to a new STA facility that’s triplexed at the Clifton site of sister station WPAT (930 Paterson) and WNSW (1430 Newark). WJDM’s application to go directional at the Clifton site at higher power remains pending.

South Bergen Community News has filed for a license to cover for WSBP-LP (94.3 Wood Ridge). The new community signal will cover a stretch of the Route 17 corridor from Hackensack down to East Rutherford.

*A very happy birthday to one of the deans of PENNSYLVANIA broadcasting. Myron Jones turned 90 on Friday, and he’s still going strong long after selling off the Erie stations he founded, WJET radio and TV. It was back in 1951 when Jones put WJET on the air at 1570, followed by WHOT in Youngstown, Ohio and then by WJET-TV (Channel 24) in 1966.

Jones was inducted into the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1997. He tells WJET-TV his secret to living to 90 is “behaving yourself.”

*Ever since the Boston Red Sox signed a 10-year deal with Entercom back in 2006, it’s been a constant subject of conversation in MASSACHUSETTS media circles. And now that the $20 million/year deal is nearing its end, it looks like Entercom is trying to keep the next cycle of Sox radio rights from being quite as much of a headline topic.

On Friday, the Herald reported that the Sox are close to a new deal with Entercom that will keep the team in place on WEEI-FM (93.7) while reducing the cost to a more reasonable level. Entercom GM Phil Zachary told the Herald‘s Gayle Fee he hopes to have the new contract nailed down before Christmas, denying rumors that Entercom will simply barter the airtime to the team going forward.

In fairness to both the station and the team, their options are rather more limited now than they were a decade ago. While CBS Radio’s WBZ-FM (98.5 the Sports Hub) is a fierce rival to WEEI, CBS management has been reluctant to overpay for sports contracts. That’s true even in a situation like this one where losing the Sox would be a deadly blow to the WEEI end of the rivalry; in any event, if CBS did make a real run at the Sox rights, Entercom could have chosen to invoke its right to a two-year extension of the 2006 contract, a choice it apparently turned down earlier this year. The other big player a decade ago isn’t in the picture now: if the team and Greater Media had teamed up to launch a sports talker on WBOS (92.9) back then, we’d almost certainly not be talking about a WEEI/WBZ-FM rivalry now.

And of course we must admit (sigh…) that the team itself isn’t exactly working from a point of strength right at the moment. While Entercom got two World Series wins out of this last contract, it’s also endured last-place finishes three of the past four seasons. If there’s a blue-chip team in town now, it’s the Patriots, and CBS has them locked down at WBZ-FM for some time to come.

*A long-silent Bay State AM signal is now well and truly dead. We reported earlier this year that the FCC had sent an inquiry to Al Grady’s Discussion Radio, Inc. about the status of WDIS (1170 Norfolk). Grady and his lawyer responded a month later, saying the station’s building had been condemned in June 2014, forcing WDIS off the air, but that they’d sent the FCC “numerous faxes” requesting permission to remain silent.

Faxes don’t comply with the Commission’s filing standards, of course, and even if WDIS had been granted silent status, it still would have had to resume some sort of operation before June 2015 to keep the statutory clock from ticking down to the one-year mark after which licenses are cancelled as a matter of law. Since WDIS didn’t do that, the FCC has now officially pulled its license and deleted its callsign, telling Grady that a “business decision on the part of Licensee to allow the building to deteriorate to the point of condemnation,” and then to not find an alternate site, doesn’t merit any special review of the case.

*Back in the days when this column was called “New England Radio Watch” and your editor resided in suburban Boston, I was a frequent co-host of a little radio show called “Let’s Talk About Radio,” heard each weekend on Bob Bittner’s WJIB (740 Cambridge) and its sister stations in Worcester, Manchester and later in Maine.

“LTAR” faded away after a few years, but Bittner resurrected the show a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been running on Sundays from 7:30-8 AM on WJIB and WJTO (730/98.3 Bath).

*Radio People on the move in NEW HAMPSHIRE and MAINE: Matty Jeff has departed Saga’s WPOR (101.9 Portland) to become the new PD/afternoon jock at WGNA (107.7 Albany), taking the role previously filled by Steve Giuttari before he went to WFMS in Indianapolis. Jeff’s move from Saga to Townsquare is complemented by a reverse move – Mark Jennings leaves Townsquare’s WOKQ (97.5 Dover) after 32 years at the station to take over at WPOR as ops manager/PD/afternoons. WOKQ is now looking for a replacement to fill Jennings’ big shoes.

*We continue to learn more about the job cuts Bell Media’s inflicting across CANADA, including a high-profile radio dismissal in London, Ontario last Monday. Just after Steve Garrison finished his morning show on CJBK (1290), he was called in to be notified his job was no more. Garrison had been in radio for 44 years, starting in Stratford at age 17. He’d been at CJBK since 1975, and on morning drive for 27 of those 40 years. In August, Garrison was shifted from morning drive to a 9-10 AM slot, and as of last Tuesday he’s at loose ends. “I never thought my career would ever end this way,” he told the London Free Press.

Meanwhile in the Rogers stable of stations, Wayne Cavanagh is retiring at year’s end after 46 years in radio, much of it at CJET in Smiths Falls. That’s where he’ll do his last show Dec. 24 as morning co-host at what’s now “92.3 JACK FM.”

*HD Radio is still something of a new concept north of the border, but now another broadcaster is jumping in: Byrnes Communications’ CIHR (104.7 Woodstock) has added an HD2 that’s carrying all Christmas music for now.

A long-delayed new AM signal just west of Toronto will be even more delayed: Elliot Kerr’s new CKNT (960 Mississauga) has been granted another one-year extension, allowing him until November 30, 2016 to put the news-talker on the air. Why the third extension, which the CRTC doesn’t often grant? Kerr blamed Industry Canada, which turned down his initial plans for a transmitter site. If it makes air within the next year, CKNT would run 700 watts by day, 104 watts at night, which isn’t much “oomph” to get through the dense construction of much of Mississauga.

*A station sale in Quebec: Torres Media is paying C$401,000 to buy silent CKOD (103.1 Salaberry-de-Valleyfield) from Radio Express Inc.

Over at Radio Insight, Lance Venta has picked up on a domain registration and new website for what will be known as “Max 103.1” when Torres gets the suburban Montreal signal back on the air. Torres also owns CIDG (101.9) in Ottawa and CIUX (105.5) in Uxbridge, outside Toronto.

*You’ve probably never been to Ear Falls, Ontario. We’ve never been to Ear Falls, Ontario. It’s a long way from anywhere to the thousand or so people in Ear Falls, which is 50 bumpy miles north of the Trans-Canada Highway out there in very rural northwest Ontario. But when there’s radio news from Ear Falls, we’re here to report it, and so you’ll surely want to know that Acadia Broadcasting has applied to flip CKDR-4 from 1450 on the AM dial to 97.5 FM, using 50 watts/34.6 m. The Ear Falls signal will continue to relay CKDR from Dryden, which itself flipped from AM to 92.7 FM a few years back. The move will leave CKDR with one remaining AM relay in Hudson, and will leave Ear Falls with only one AM signal, CBOI (690), the low-power relay of CBC from Thunder Bay.

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