NERW 11/14/2016: NBC Boston Hits The Air

From the NERW Archives

Yup, 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: November 16, 2015

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*How do you replace a market legend? If you’re Cumulus in Buffalo, NEW YORK, you stay within your cluster and tap another solid talent who’s already in the building. WGRF (96.9) morning man Larry Norton is just a few weeks away from his final show December 4, and last week Cumulus announced that his spot on 97 Rock will be filled by Rich Gaenzler.

“The Bull” has plenty of name recognition in town, most recently as the afternoon host on sister station WEDG (103.3 the Edge) and the midday sports guy on WHLD (1270). He’ll keep the rest of the 97 Rock morning team (Christine Klein, Rob Lederman and producer Steve Tripi) with him as he moves over to the WGRF corner studio.

*In Albany, “Magic” came back to the FM dial last week with the debut of W263CG (100.5 Colonie), the new FM translator for Albany Broadcaster’s soft AC WROW (590 Albany). The new high-power translator operates from the same tower as sister station WKLI (100.9 Albany), which was the home of the “Magic” format from 2001 until it moved to WROW in 2010.

*Traci Beard’s radio career started in VERMONT and eventually extended into New Hampshire as she moved from the old WMXR (93.9 Woodstock) to WXXK (Kixx Country 100.5) and eventually to Binnie Media’s Wolf stations in the Granite State, paired with Paul Quitadamo on the “Traci and Paul Morning Show.” Binnie pulled the plug on the show a week ago, taking it off the air at the “Wolf” stations (WXLF 95.3/WZLF 107.1) as well as WFNQ (Frank 106.3) in Nashua, and now Beard and Quitadamo have launched a “Traci and Paul” podcast to keep their partnership going.

Five Years Ago: November 14, 2011

*So, where were you at 2 PM on Wednesday? The first-ever national test of the Emergency Alert System had broadcasters (and especially broadcast engineers) on alert themselves, waiting to see whether the system would actually work as federal officials attempted to deliver a test message from Washington to every broadcast station, cable operator and satellite provider in the nation.

To hear the mass-media reports after the fact, the test was a failure, and it’s not hard to see why listeners and viewers would have reached that conclusion: if they were in fact paying close attention just after 2, they’d have heard the usual EAS alert tones (the fabled “duck farts”), followed either by dead air in some areas or by muddy, doubled audio in others – and then a few more “duck farts” and right back to normal programming.

But behind the scenes, it’s increasingly clear that for the most part, broadcasters upheld their part of their “voluntary” partnership to help deliver emergency information: the test data and audio delivered from FEMA to the Primary Entry Point (PEP) stations around the region was successfully passed down the daisy chain to most of the local stations expecting to hear it. It’s just that the audio coming into the system was painfully bad – and the fault for that didn’t lie with the broadcasters but rather with FEMA itself, which reportedly fed it to the PEP stations via a garden-variety telephone conference bridge, only to have audio echo back into the bridge from one of the PEP locations.

*In NEW YORK‘s capital city, DJR Broadcasting pulled the plug on oldies “Legends 96.7” (WPTR-FM Clifton Park ) on schedule on Friday – and it dropped the venerable callsign, too: the class A FM signal is now WDCD-FM, simulcasting the religious format of sister station WDCD (1540 Albany).

Congratulations to WBEN (930 Buffalo/WLKK 107.7 Wethersfield) newsman Steve Cichon, who’s just been promoted to news director at the Entercom news-talker. In addition to his on-air work at WBEN, Steve’s also renowned for his collection of bowties – and for his other career as a local history author, most recently of the newly-released “Irv! Buffalo’s Anchorman: The Irv, Rick and Tom Story,” a volume we very much need to add to our bookshelf here at NERW Central.

Ten Years Ago: November 13, 2006

*What’s the most stable radio station in the nation’s number one market, NEW YORK? You could make a pretty good case for Clear Channel’s “Lite,” WLTW (106.7), where morning man Bill Buchner had been in place for 17 years, midday jock Valerie Smaldone for 22 years and night jock J.J. Kennedy for 18 years.

That longevity, however, was apparently no match for the nationwide restructuring that’s hitting Clear Channel markets from coast to coast. Early last week, WLTW pulled Buchner and Kennedy off the air. While PD Jim Ryan tried to paint the moves in the best light possible, telling the New York Daily News that Buchner’s dismissal was “100% based on improving the product” and unrelated to the nationwide Clear Channel shakeout, it’s hard to see the timing as coincidental. (For whatever it’s worth, Ryan says that while Buchner’s numbers overall were good, the station was weak in the morning hours before 8:00; he also tells the News that Clear Channel considered putting Whoopi Goldberg’s new syndicated morning show on WLTW before placing it on sister station WKTU over the summer.)

Buchner’s been replaced with a team that includes his former co-host, Christine Nagy, along with Karen Carson and weather from Nick Gregory. The new morning show debuts today on WLTW.

*Binghamton’s not the sort of market you’d think of as a hotbed for progressive talk, so it’s no great surprise that Citadel is pulling the plug on the format at WYOS (1360) after a year and a half. The format never got much promotion at WYOS, which has the city’s worst AM signal (5000 watts days, just 500 watts at night) and has long been a weak sister to the city’s heritage news-talk outlet, WNBF (1290). As of Monday, WYOS joins ESPN Radio, becoming Binghamton’s second all-sports station after Clear Channel’s WENE (1430 Endicott), which programs Fox Sports Radio.

*We can now set a date for the long-awaited format swap in eastern MASSACHUSETTS: WCRB (102.5 Waltham) is now promoting December 1 as the date when its classical music moves down the dial – and 25 miles north – to what’s now WKLB-FM (99.5 Lowell). WCRB will keep its present Waltham studio and its airstaff when it changes dial positions and owners, passing from Charles River Broadcasting to Nassau. Meanwhile, WKLB is promoting a “big change” on the air, but it’s not yet directing its listeners to its new, full-market spot at 102.5; those promos will presumably appear a little closer to the day of the swap.

Fifteen Years Ago: November 12, 2001

Last week, we had no news from CANADA…so why not start off this week with news of a new AM outlet for Montreal? The new 1000 watt station at 1610 kHz will be the first full-time expanded band AM station in Canada (the now-defunct “portable” CHEV 1610 Etobicoke, Ont. was the first overall), and it will run a multilingual format aimed at Francophone Montrealers of Haitian, Latin American and African descent. “CPAM Radio Union.com, Inc.” is the licensee for the new station authorized this week by the CRTC, and we can tell you we know nothing whatsoever about them – but we’ll pass along anything we find out!

We’ll slip back across the border, logically enough, in MAINE, where Maine Public Broadcasting puts its newest signal on the air Tuesday (Nov. 13). WMEP (90.5 Camden) will serve an area of the mid-coast that’s had spotty reception from the existing transmitters in Portland, Bangor and Waterville.

Across the river in VERMONT, Bob Vinikoor buys WNBX (1480 Springfield) from Bob and Shirley Wolf, for a reported $75,000. We suspect Vinikoor will use WNBX to relay the talk programming of his WNTK-FM (99.7 New London NH) into the lower reaches of the Connecticut River Valley.

We’ll start our NEW YORK news by observing that no New York City mayor in history has had his own radio station – until now. But don’t expect Mike Bloomberg to sell WBBR (1130 New York) or the rest of his Bloomberg, L.P. empire; despite reports that competitors such as Thomson (which, being British, would have to sell the radio property) have been sniffing around, the word from 499 Park Avenue is that the company is now being operated at a sufficient arm’s-length from Hizzoner-to-be that it won’t be on the block any time soon.

Meanwhile, the New York City schools won’t be handing the keys of WNYE-FM (91.5) and WNYE-TV (Channel 25) to competitors WNYC (820/93.9) and WNET (Channel 13), after all. The school board didn’t approve Chancellor Harold Levy’s plan to let the bigger public broadcasters take over management of the stations; instead, WNYE will stay in school hands as part of a broadband platform for delivering educational material to schools.

Twenty Years Ago: November 14, 1996

Wanna buy a full class B Boston FM? That’s the question CBS will have to be asking, after yesterday’s agreement with the Justice Department to sell Infinity’s WBOS (92.9 Brookline-Boston) and CBS’s WMMR (93.3 Philadelphia) in exchange for Justice approval for the CBS-Infinity merger. Justice was apparently worried that the new CBS/Infinity group would control in excess of 40 percent of the market revenue in both Boston and Philadelphia, as well as giving CBS/Infinity near-total control of the rock audiences in both cities.

This means the final CBS/Infinity group in Boston will include news/talk WBZ (1030), smooth jazz WOAZ (99.5 Lowell-Boston), classic rock WZLX (100.7), oldies WODS (103.3), and modern rocker WBCN (104.1). What happens to WBOS now? It’s possible that one of Boston’s other major groups will work out a trade with CBS for WBOS. Likely candidates include Evergreen and American Radio Systems. Other possible local buyers include Woody Tanger’s Marlin Broadcasting, which is known to want a stronger signal for its North Shore classical outlet, WBOQ (104.9 Gloucester), and which is flush with cash after selling its Philadelphia and Detroit stations. And who’s celebrating the most? Probably the folks at little WXRV (92.5) up in Haverhill, who could end up as the city’s only AAA outlet if new owners change WBOS’s low-rated “rock of the 80s and 90s” format.