In this week’s issue… FMs move in Buffalo, south Jersey – Univision swaps Boston signals -WMEX for sale – HD Radio at the CBC? – New AM in Ottawa
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*We’re always suckers here for good tower pictures – and that one at the right, courtesy of Bill Weeks and his drone, is a doozy for more than one reason. Not only does it depict a tower near us here in lovely western NEW YORK, it may well be one of the last pictures you’ll ever see of this particular tower, the aging guyed stick on Grand Island, just north of Buffalo, that holds Entercom’s WKSE (98.5 Niagara Falls).
Antenna bays went up last week on one of the WBEN (930) towers a couple of miles away (left, also courtesy Bill Weeks), and once WKSE starts operating from that site under Special Temporary Authority – which should be any day – the old Kiss tower on Staley Road will come down and construction can get started on its replacement. (Entercom had planned at one point to abandon the old Staley Road site entirely, moving WKSE permanently to a new tower it planned to build on the WBEN site.)
The Staley Road site dates back to the 1950s, when Niagara Falls’ WHLD(AM) moved from 1290 to 1270 and built a new two-tower array on Grand Island; WHLD eventually moved off the island and down to a diplex on the AM 970 site in Hamburg, south of Buffalo, leaving WKSE (the former WHLD-FM) all alone on Staley Road.
*There’s a tower coming down in NEW JERSEY, too, where Press Communications’ WBHX (99.7 Tuckerton) tells the FCC it lost its lease on its longtime tower last week, with demolition set to begin on Friday. After losing its battle to move to 99.3, swapping frequencies with Equity’s WZBZ, WBHX had to settle for now for a temporary antenna on one of those “COW” (cell-on-wheels) trailers, which will be parked next to the water tower in Beach Haven while Press keeps looking for a new permanent tower site.
And if you don’t have your Tower Site Calendar, now’s the time!
If you’ve been waiting for the price to come down, it’s now 30 percent off!
This year’s cover is a beauty — the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. Both the towers and the landscape are gorgeous.
And did you see? Tower Site of the Week is back, featuring this VOA site as it faces an uncertain future.
Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (buy the calendar to find out which ones!).
We still have a few of our own calendars left – as well as a handful of Radio Historian Calendars – and we are still shipping regularly.
The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025, too. Why not order both?)
Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the new calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too!
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*In MASSACHUSETTS, silent WMEX (1510 Boston) is headed to auction in less than two weeks. Broker George Kimble is advertising a Dec. 15, 5 PM auction for the 50,000-watt station, which fell silent in July. Minimum bid for the license is $300,000 (with a $25,000 deposit), but that’s just the start of the complicated economics that have doomed previous attempts to keep the venerable signal alive. There’s a $6,000 monthly power bill for the aging Nautel transmitter – and on top of that, the lease for the Waltham transmitter site, which is $12,000 monthly on a 10-year agreement the buyer would have to sign.
Can WMEX find a bidder willing to shoulder more than $200,000 in annual expenses just to put out a signal, especially when the market knows that at least one other AM (iHeart’s WKOX 1430) has to be sold in the near future, while another (iHeart’s WXKS 1200) may at least be available soon for lease? We’ll know in time for our Dec. 18 issue, perhaps…
(And then there’s the translator issue, with no space available on the FM dial for WMEX – or WKOX or WXKS – to pick up an FM home in the next translator window in 2018. One more AM that also won’t be going to FM is Principle’s WESX (1230 Nahant), which has dropped its proposal for a 92.1 translator after getting MX’d out of contention in the last window.)
*Why is Entercom moving a venerable Boston callsign back to the market whence it came? “WBMX” was on 102.7 in the Chicago market for most of the 1970s and 1980s before arriving in Boston on 98.5 (ex-WROR) in 1991, then moving to 104.1 in the 2009 format shuffle that killed WBCN. Does the WBMX callsign really carry any heritage back in Chicago? Entercom seems to think so, which is why it’s putting WBMX on its new “104.3 Jams,” ex-WJMK, in Chicago – and why it’s filed to make Boston’s “Mix 104.1” into “WWBX.”
*Univision and Entravision are swapping channels in four of their shared markets nationwide, including greater Boston. Entravision-owned WUNI (Channel 27), which has carried Univision since 1995, moves its programming today to Univision-owned channel 66, formerly WUTF with the secondary UniMas network. The stations are swapping calls along with their affiliations, so it will be WUNI on channel 66 with Univision and WUTF on channel 27 with Unimas. Both stations will apparently continue to be operated under an LMA by Entravision, which produces the “Noticias Univision Nueva Inglaterra” newscast that runs in both Boston and Hartford.
Univision says the changes (which are also happening in Tampa, Orlando and Denver) won’t affect cable or satellite viewers, so it’s apparently working with those providers to keep “WUNI” and “WUTF” where they’re presently seen, which is 17 (SD)/816 (HD) for WUNI and 21 (SD)/817 (HD) for WUTF for Comcast’s Boston-area systems.
Sunday was also “rescan day” for WFXZ-CD (Channel 24) in Boston, which sold its spectrum at auction and had its “zombie license” donated to public broadcaster WGBH (Channel 2). As of today, WFXZ is now sharing spectrum with WGBH, currently on RF 19 but moving to RF 5 once the repack kicks in next year. (Want to learn more about how this whole “zombie license” thing works for public broadcasters? I have a long article in the new issue of Current for your perusal…)
One more channel share that’s coming: Ion’s sale of the spectrum out at WDPX (Channel 58/RF 40) on Cape Cod won’t kill that license – instead, the “zombie” WDPX will share ion’s own WBPX (Channel 68/RF 32) in Boston, presumably giving the “ion Life” subchannel must-carry status as its own “separate” license. (And no, you won’t get the WBPX signal very well, if at all, out at its old community of license on Martha’s Vineyard, which is why WDPX will change COL from Vineyard Haven to Woburn when it begins sharing on WBPX.)
*And we note the passing of Kevin Linagen, whose many years in broadcasting included long runs on WPLM (1390/99.1) in Plymouth and the old WJIB (96.9) in Boston. Linagen was 74 when he died Nov. 24 at South Shore Hospital.
*Two RHODE ISLAND AMs have new FM translator sisters to kick off December. As we noted last week, WSTL (1220 Providence) has its new 94.9 on the air from the WHJY (94.1) tower in East Providence – and the new FM came with a return of the AM signal, which had been silent. It’s now “Mega 94.9,” doing Spanish tropical under the aegis of Quilvio Perdomo, who’d been programming crosstown WKKB (100.3) for John Fuller. Perdomo’s apparently in the process of buying the AM and the translator, and presumably selling WSTL’s other translator at 93.7.
Meanwhile, iHeart’s acquisition of the former EMF K-Love translator at 104.7, W284BA in Warwick, has created (at least for now) an FM outlet for iHeart’s talk WHJJ (920), giving it at least some FM presence to counter Cumulus’ WPRO (630) on full-power (but not quite full-market) WEAN (99.7 Wakefield-Peace Dale).
*The VERMONT Association of Broadcasters celebrated the state’s top broadcasters at its annual banquet Saturday. This year’s Hall of Fame class included Tom Beardsley, who worked for WDEV/Radio Vermont for 30 years as part of a career that also included time at WIKE in Newport, WHWB in Rutland and WPTZ-TV (Channel 5); WSYB (1380) morning man Brian Collamore (a fixture there since 1974!) and WCAX-TV’s Judy Simpson, Vermont’s first female news director and still host of the station’s “Across the Fence” midday show.
Distinguished Service Awards went to Lynn Beaudoin of Vermont Broadcast Associates, Mark Esbjerg of Sison Broadcasting and Steve Pelkey of Hall Communications. Brattleboro’s WTSA took home the Alan Noyes Community Service Award for their annual “Project Feed the Thousands” campaign, and Greg Towne, engineer for WVNY-TV (Channel 22) received the Snyder-Teffner engineering award.
*Radio People on the Move in New York: Jill Kempton, who’d been APD, music director and imaging director for iHeart’s WLTW (106.7 New York), moves down to Washington as the new PD of sister station WASH (97.1). That creates a hole for Cara Hahn, who takes over next week both as WLTW APD/MD and in the same role down the hall at WHTZ (Z100), where the APD job had been vacant since Jagger’s departure for Hartford more than a year ago. (And here’s a Where Are They Now – Kempton’s new morning man at WASH is Toby Knapp, who got his start at WBHT in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.)
And former WHTZ PD Sharon Dastur is leaving iHeart, where she’d had a senior management role, to join Republic Records as senior VP of promotion.
Up the Thruway in Albany, Ashley Marie has exited mornings at WFLY (92.3), where they’re now looking for a co-host to work alongside Jake Allen.
*Is there a post-Christmas format change coming in western PENNSYLVANIA? WCNS (1480 Latrobe) dropped its talk format last week for holiday tunes, promising “we have a big announcement to make in December” – and the elves at RadioInsight.com have picked up on a domain registration for “973LiteFM,” which is WCNS’ translator frequency, hinting at AC music on the way, perhaps?
*It was a busy week in CANADA, including some surprises: Canadian Radio News reports the CBC has turned on its first HD Radio signal, putting “ICI premiere” CJBC (860)’s programming on the HD2 of “ICI musique” sister station CJBC-FM (90.3) in Toronto.
To the west, the end of November was supposed to have been the absolute, final, we’re-not-kidding-this-time, drop-dead deadline for Elliot Kerr to put his new CKNT (960) on the air in Mississauga – but instead, the CRTC granted a fourth extension that pushes the deadline out to June 30, 2018. Kerr’s request for the extension cited delays in Transport Canada’s approval of his latest proposed site, which followed several unsuccessful attempts to find workable sites elsewhere in Mississauga.
In Ottawa, an AM frequency that fell silent in 2015 is coming back on the air under new ownership. CIRA-5 (1350) was the Gatineau/Ottawa outlet for Montreal’s Radio Ville-Marie (CIRA 91.3) for three years before leaving the AM dial. Now the CRTC has approved a new license for Radio Communautaire Francophone et Francophile de l’Outaouais to use the same facilities – 1000 watts days, 180 watts nights, non-directional – for its new French-language community station, CHFO, which must be on the air by November 2019.
*Back in Toronto at Corus’ AM640 (CFMJ), Saturday night host Fred Bell lost his “A View from Space” show after complaints about anti-Semitic content on a recent broadcast.
*And while it’s not directly broadcast-related, the big newspaper swap last week between Postmedia and Torstar/Metroland may open up some local advertising opportunities in the Ontario markets where it led to the abrupt closure of daily newspapers. The Barrie Observer and Orillia’s Packet and Times were shut down without any advance notice last Monday after being swapped to Torstar, leaving both cities without a daily print newspaper – and potential new audiences available to the local radio stations in those communities, as well as CTV’s CKVR (Channel 3) in Barrie, which has long been the only TV newsroom to cover that area.
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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: December 5, 2016 *It’s been an interesting downeast MAINE radio adventure for DC-based broadcaster Chuck Begin, but his Pine Tree Broadcasting is now preparing to leave the Pine Tree State. After selling WRMO (93.7 Milbridge) to Maine Public Radio, which took over the coastal FM signal on Thursday, Pine Tree filed on Friday to sell its three Bangor-area AM stations and its remaining Bangor translator to Port Broadcasting. The $172,000 sale of AC “Wave” WBAN (1340 Bangor)/W231CH (94.1 Bangor), classic country “Country Road” WCYR (1400 Veazie) and oldies WGUY (1230 Veazie) came on the heels of a big week for Port, which also filed for a merger with Aruba Capital Holdings that The addition of the Bangor-market stations will give the new Port a reach of more than 200 miles along the New England coast, and we’re excited to see what radio vets Strube and Falconi have planned for their newest market. *In eastern MASSACHUSETTS, we’re remembering two legendary broadcasters this week.
(photo: Garo Hagopian/WBZ) And just as Stern was signing off came some sad news from WCVB (Channel 5), the station where her husband Neil Ungerleider spent several decades as a news manager. After the news in October of the death of one of WCVB’s founders, 102-year-old Leo Beranek, comes word of the death of one of Beranek’s partners in Boston Broadcasters Inc., Bob Bennett. Bennett, who died Tuesday in California, worked his way up from being a CBS page in Los Angeles in 1948 to a sales job at KTTV (Channel 11) in 1952, then worked his way up through Metromedia to management gigs at WTTG (Channel 5) in Washington and, in 1969, to New York’s WNEW-TV (Channel 5). He was serving as VP/GM there when the Boston Broadcasters group approached him to become the founding GM of WCVB, a high-risk and high-profile position for any broadcaster. When Bennett joined BBI in 1971, the company was still waging an uncertain battle to take over channel 5 from the old WHDH-TV. While waiting for the courts to make their final rulings on WHDH-TV’s appeal of its license revocation, it was Bennett’s job to find the new WCVB a home (in a former International Harvester dealership in Needham), a staff and a programming lineup, all against the possibility that the new station might never actually get a license. The high-stakes gamble paid off, of course – not only did WCVB get its license, but under BBI and Bennett it quickly became one of the most lauded local stations in the country, offering up not only top-notch news but also locally-produced entertainment programming. In 1982, BBI sold WCVB to Metromedia for a record $220 million, which reunited Bennett with his old colleagues there. (It also prompted rumbles, never completely denied, that Bennett was engineering a WCVB sale to Metromedia from the time he came on board with BBI.) Bennett became a partner in Metromedia and president of Metromedia Broadcasting, where he oversaw the resale of WCVB to Hearst for $450 million in 1985 and then the sale of the rest of the Metromedia TV station group to become the core of the new Fox network. Bennett later ran the TV division of New World before retiring. He was 89. *The biggest story from NEW YORK this week comes from the CBS Radio News newsroom in the Broadcast Center on W. 57th Street. That’s where the news broke Friday of big staffing cuts, in the form of voluntary buyout packages that enticed several of the network’s signature voices to take retirement. On the air, that includes anchors Bill Whitney and Harley Carnes and Washington correspondent Barry Bagnato. Washington bureau manager Howard Arenstein is out – and so is New York-based executive producer Charlie Kaye, the heart and soul of the New York newsroom. With 34 years under his belt at CBS (and an even longer news career before that at stations such as WHN), Kaye is the most senior of the CBS staffers to take the buyout. Five Years Ago: December 3, 2012 *Off the coast of MASSACHUSETTS, commercial island radio has had a tough time thriving over the last few decades. On Nantucket, John Garabedian’s WGTF (93.5) gave way to WRZE (96.3), with higher power that eventually allowed the station to target the bigger listener base on Cape Cod proper. Eventually, 96.3 moved off the island entirely, and is now the Cape’s WEEI sports affiliate, WEII (96.3 Dennis). On Martha’s Vineyard, the original island station, WVOI (95.9), lasted only a few years in the 1970s, going dark and eventually being replaced in 1981 by a new Vineyard FM signal, WMVY (92.7 Tisbury). In just over three decades on the air, WMVY pioneered the “adult album alternative” format and streaming radio, becoming a listener favorite not only on the Cape and the islands but also drawing a following worldwide as one of the first commercial stations to webcast. And come the new year, the webcast may end up outliving the FM signal that gave birth to it, now that station owner Aritaur Broadcasting is selling the 92.7 facility to Boston public broadcaster WBUR-FM (90.9) for $715,000. For the last few years, “MVY” has quietly become two operations, and only one of them will end when Aritaur sells the license and 92.7 becomes a full-time relay of WBUR. While Aritaur has struggled to keep the commercial terrestrial signal on 92.7 viable – it says it’s been losing money for several years – a separate nonprofit, “Friends of MVYRadio,” has been operating the station’s website and providing streams not only of WMVY’s commercial air signal but also of a noncommercial mix of AAA programming.
If the MVYRadio group can get over that big initial hurdle (it’s already over $126,000 as of Sunday afternoon), it’s hoping for a possible return to the terrestrial airwaves in the future as a noncommercial operation. Could that potentially include a partnership with the new class A noncomm that’s been testing on the Vineyard, WMEX (88.7 Edgartown), or with the island’s existing LPFM, WVVY-LP (93.7)? *In western NEW YORK, it was the end of two eras over the weekend, and both involved public broadcaster WNED. At the very end of November, WNED (970 Buffalo) signed off for the last time, ending 36 years of noncommercial operation on the frequency. When WNED, then a TV-only public broadcaster, bought WEBR (970) and WREZ (94.5) from Queen City Radio in 1976, it marked the first time a public broadcaster had purchased a functioning commercial AM station. But the trend that WNED started didn’t last; as listening patterns shifted from AM to FM, public broadcasters quickly stopped seeking news-talk listenership on the AM dial. WNED’s acquisition last year of news-talk competitor WBFO (88.7) spelled the end for AM 970, which was put up for sale. Crawford Broadcasting paid $875,000 for the AM 970 license and the five-tower transmitter site in Hamburg. After some technical work at the site, 970 will return to the air as a commercial religious station, under new calls WDCZ, simulcasting WDCX-FM (99.5 Buffalo). Crawford hopes the AM signal will give WDCX better penetration to the north into Toronto, where some former WNED 970 listeners are already complaining about losing easy access to NPR programming over the air. Ten Years Ago: December 3, 2007 *The NEW YORK morning radio dial is spinning this week, in ways both predictable and not.
(With Imus coming to WABC this morning, last Friday marked the finale of the station’s very successful “Curtis & Kuby” morning show, albeit without Ron Kuby, who was sent packing from WABC a few weeks earlier. While the station had made noises about keeping Curtis Sliwa on its schedule in another slot, Sliwa didn’t sound all that certain about his future in the Friday broadcast.) Almost as inevitable as Imus’ return was the eventual demise of Whoopi Goldberg’s syndicated morning show. “Waking up with Whoopi” made an initial splash with big-market affiliates that included Chicago’s WLIT, Philadelphia’s WISX and New York’s WKTU. But the show failed to catch on in most of those markets, disappearing from both Chicago and Philadelphia earlier this year. Last week, Whoopi lost her New York flagship, when WKTU abruptly pulled the show after its Wednesday airing, with no replacement in place. Syndication of the show (which actually originated from a studio at sister station WWPR in Manhattan, rather than at WKTU’s Jersey City studios) continues for now, but it’s hard to imagine that Goldberg, with other committments that include a co-host role on ABC’s “The View,” will continue to do the show for very long for a network that now numbers fewer than a dozen stations, the largest in Norfolk, Virginia. (In NERW-land, Whoopi is also heard on Binghamton’s WMXW and Utica’s WUMX.) What will KTU do next? Whoopi’s co-host, Paul “Cubby” Bryant, is a versatile talent who loyally gave up his afternoon slot on Clear Channel’s WHTZ (Z100) to smooth Goldberg’s transition to radio. That should make him a strong candidate for the KTU morning slot – or for afternoons there, if former KTU morning guys Hollywood Hamilton and Goumba Johnny return to mornings there. And then there’s the biggest surprise in the New York morning arena: Star and Buc Wild, ousted from WWPR in a blaze of negative publicity in May 2006 after Star (real name: Troi Torain) engaged in a nasty on-air feud with jocks at rival WQHT, are planning a January return to the city’s airwaves. In itself, that’s not all that surprising – but it’s where they plan to return that’s of particular interest.
There are plenty of unanswered questions here, beginning with the legality of a low-power TV station broadcasting as a radio station, not to mention the unusually strong reach of what’s supposed to be a fairly weak, very directional signal. Even if those are resolved in WNYZ’s favor, there’s the question of ratings: it’s Arbitron policy not to rate TV stations’ audio, and that’s not a policy that’s likely to change, especially given the shaky relations between the ratings company and the commercial broadcasters who pay its bills right now. Then there’s the analog sunset: even though WNYZ, as an LPTV license, won’t be forced to go digital in 2009, when its full-power brethren switch, the FCC has said there will be an end to analog LPTV at some point fairly soon – and with no analog TV signal, there’s no analog audio carrier to hear on FM radios, either. Fifteen Years Ago: December 9, 2002 From MASSACHUSETTS comes word that WLVI (Channel 56) is losing its news director, hot on the heels of the imminent departure of anchor Jeff Barnd. For Greg Caputo, who’s been at the station for seven years, it’s both a promotion and a homecoming; he’s headed to Chicago to helm the news operation at Tribune mothership WGN-TV (Channel 9), where he’ll compete head-to-head with Fox’s WFLD (Channel 32), whose news operation Caputo led from 1985 until 1993. No replacement has been announced yet. On the radio side, Alan Chartrand adds station manager duties for WKLB-FM (99.5 Lowell) to his existing responsibilities at sister Greater Media talker WTKK (96.9). It looks like the end of the line for “Jukebox Radio” in Bergen County, NEW JERSEY. We hear that W276AQ (103.1 Fort Lee), along with sister translator W232AL (94.3 Pomona NY), is no longer translating the oldies/standards format that originated in nearby Dumont, N.J. and was fed to WJUX (99.7 Monticello NY), which then broadcast it back down to New Jersey via the two translators. As we’ve reported in previous issues of NERW, the unusual primary/translator arrangement had led to complaints from competing New Jersey broadcasters and an FCC investigation; it’s not clear exactly what’s led to the disappearance of the format this time, or what’s running now up in Monticello. We’ll be back in that area in a few weeks and will keep you posted… Twenty Years Ago: December 4, 1997 In MASSACHUSETTS, there’s a new format at Worcester’s WNEB (1230). New owners Heirwaves, Inc. took control from Bob Bittner on Saturday, flipping the station from a simulcast of Bittner’s WJIB (740 Cambridge) to Christian contemporary music, as “Hard Rock 1230.” It’s official; as we speculated a few months back, Greater Media is signing a 15-year lease on a Morrissey Boulevard building to house all its Boston stations. WBOS (92.9 Brookline) and WSJZ (96.9) will move from 1200 Soldiers Field Road in Brighton, WKLB-FM (99.5 Lowell) and WMJX (106.7) will move from the Salada Tea building on Stuart Street, and WROR-FM (105.7 Framingham) will move from the Prudential Tower. It’ll create quite the media circus down there; the Boston Globe and WLVI (Channel 56) are already housed next door to each other across the street from Greater’s new home, which is itself just down the block from the 1960s and early 70s home of WHDH-AM/FM/TV. In NEW YORK, the big news out of the Big Apple is the sale of WNWK (105.9 Newark, N.J.), one of the most underappreciated FM signals in the city. It’s just been sold to Heftel Broadcasting for a whopping $115 million. It’ll flip from multilingual to a Spanish-language format once the deal closes. WNWK, being a class B1, doesn’t have the reach of the other large New York FMs (it’s also hampered by a first-adjacent signal in Patchogue, Long Island, among others), but it’s still pretty solid in the city and the Jersey suburbs from its Chrysler Building transmitter. And we join with the staff of Buffalo’s WBEN (930) in mourning the passing of Clint Buehlman, a WBEN personality from the 1940s until his retirement in July 1977. Buehlman was Buffalo’s most popular radio host for years, as the “AM M-C” at the helm of the WBEN Good Morning Show. Buehlman hosted the show from March 1943 (when he joined WBEN from rival WGR) until he left the station. He died Tuesday at his home in Snyder, outside Buffalo. Buehlman was 85 years old. |
In this week’s issue… After NAB, hope and confusion - WZLX, WBEB relaunch morning shows - WJTO, WLAM stay alive for now - MBC takes over Bell stations - Remembering Mimi Griswold, Herb Squire By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME...
In this week’s issue… Fear and Uncertainty in Las Vegas - Memory Stations to sign off - WNED, WBFO rebrand - Najman out at WDEV - Zoomer expands in Ontario By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT...
A visit to many of the sites in Pennsylvania's Poconos, plus Bold Gold's stations in Scranton
In this week’s issue… Remembering Pittsburgh's Quinn - Seven Mountains enters Harrisburg - My launches new brands - Ryan out at B101 - More cuts at Radio Vermont - Another AM deleted
The predictable first: this morning marks the return of Don Imus to the radio, with flagship WABC (770 New York), radio syndication through WABC parent Citadel Broadcasting, and TV coverage via RFD-TV, which is still chiefly available to viewers with direct-to-home dishes, though the network is working on expanding its cable footprint.
That’s WNYZ-LP, the low-power TV station broadcasting from Long Island City on channel 6. As we’ve reported previously here on NERW, it’s not WNYZ’s video signal that’s of interest to Star. It’s the audio carrier at 87.76 MHz (which migrated, briefly and not necessarily legally, up to 87.88 MHz), right at the bottom of the FM broadcast band. The signal’s been on the air for more than a year now, broadcasting in Russian. Last week, Mega Media, which is leasing WNYZ from owner Island Broadcasting, announced that it will relaunch the frequency on January 15 as “Pulse 87,” an English-language top-40 station, with Star and Buc Wild and the rest of their crew in morning drive.
