The Year’s Top Ten Stories
By SCOTT FYBUSH
The fourth installment of our Year in Review (catch up on yesterday’s installment here) spotlights what were, in our opinion, the biggest stories of the year across the region we cover. Think we left something out? Weigh in below in the comments…
1. Entercom and CBS Radio
We knew, going into 2017, that CBS Corp. wanted to unload its local radio assets around the country – with 20/20 hindsight, it’s been clear for a few years that CBS had been expending little to no resources in growing those assets, spending almost nothing on research, for instance. The spring brought the identity of the buyer: Entercom, well-established as a solid medium-sized player, poised to grow under David Field into a major national player as it entered most of the top-10 markets (including New York and its hometown of Philadelphia) for the first time.
The split of the radio stations division from the rest of CBS had other consequences, too. What had been “CBS Radio News” became “CBS News Radio” as it stayed with CBS Corp. – but with buyouts and retirements claiming many of its veteran staffers.
Looking ahead into 2018, we’ll be watching to see whether Field’s big bet pays off. Will Entercom succeed in its industry-wide attempt to grow radio’s share of the total advertising pie? Can it accomplish what has long eluded other players (including CBS itself, years ago) and successfully balance the needs of top-10 market stations against its smaller clusters in places like Scranton and Buffalo? And with CBS out of the radio picture, what will be the fate of two other giants with shaky finances – Cumulus and iHeart?
1a. iHeart and Beasley Reshuffle Boston
It’s not even “story #2,” because it’s really a big part of “story #1.” However you label it, the fallout from the Entercom/CBS Radio deal in Boston was a huge part of our 2017 coverage all by itself.
For a deal as big as this one was, there was surprisingly little overlap: Entercom’s medium-market strategy had largely kept it away from CBS Radio’s focus on top-20 markets. Some markets – Los Angeles on the “huge” side and Scranton on the “small” side – needed only one station to be spun. Seattle, San Francisco and Sacramento all posed bigger complications. None, however, was as complex as Boston, where both CBS and Entercom already had major shares of the market’s revenue – and where, between them, they enjoyed total control of sports-talk radio and near-total control of spoken-word news and talk on the commercial side.
The dust hasn’t fully cleared yet, especially where physical studio facilities are concerned – but the grand outlines of the next chapter in Boston radio are now visible, with three big clusters (Entercom, iHeart, Beasley) where once there had been four (CBS, Entercom, Greater Media/Beasley, iHeart). Can Beasley play in the sports arena against Entercom, which is now the nation’s dominant sports-radio player? Will Entercom make FM format changes now that it has WODS, WBMX and WMJX all under the same corporate roof?
And, of course, the biggest question: how will all-news WBZ fare under iHeart, which has no comparable formats anywhere else in its portfolio? Its unionized newsroom employees rallied advertisers and listeners to beat back iHeart’s initial attempt to wipe out their jobs and seniority. But as iHeart managers reportedly told the union WBZ was “a Ferrari,” they dismissed the top Ferrari manager in the garage, sending veteran PD Peter Casey out after three decades. Can iHeart keep WBZ running smoothly in 2018 with Toyota mechanics at the helm?
3. Repack Money Gets Big
Once the auction proceeds had been disbursed, the industry entered a new and surprising chapter. Even after selling off spectrum, some owners found another revenue stream in selling their “zombie licenses” to other broadcasters looking for additional bites at cable must-carry – or in donating them to public broadcasters for tax writeoffs.
In the last weeks of 2017, and into 2018, the “rescan” buttons started to get active in auction markets as many of these stations moved to their new channel-share hosts.
(Other markets, meanwhile, had little or no auction action, leaving broadcasters to get busy filing their repack plans as they look ahead to the UHF repack process that won’t get started in earnest until 2019.)
4. Harassment Allegations Hit Public Radio
Commercial radio, meanwhile, chugged along largely immune, it appeared. While just about anyone who’s worked in a radio station has stories, there was little actual backlash, save for one Denver DJ whose countersuit against Taylor Swift went rather badly.
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5. WBRU Students Sell FM
While reports would later emerge of attempts by university leadership to provide a loan and stop the sale, the BBS board pushed forward quickly, pulling in $5.63 million (less than many had expected) for the 95.5 signal from EMF Broadcasting, which wasted no time flipping it to K-Love as WLVO.
As for WBRU’s future? While it continued as a stream, attempts to relaunch some form of WBRU as a low-power FM station had yet to bear fruit at year’s end.
(And an even longer-running ownership drama, Pacifica’s WBAI in New York, had its own year of troubles, concluding with a court judgment upholding the Empire State Building’s claim to more than a million dollars in back rent. The outcome of that drama promises to be a big story entering 2018 as WBAI fights to stay on the air, somehow.)
6. WFAN Reworks its Lineup
Be that as it may, the need to reinvent one of the most profitable pieces of the entire CBS Radio empire was still a critical project for the new Entercom management. In the new year, Francesa’s shift will be filled by a new three-person show with Chris Carlin, Bart Scott and Maggie Gray. In the morning slot, Greg Giannotti slides over from CBS Sports Radio to become Boomer Esiason’s permanent co-host after months of fill-ins.
Will one of Entercom’s biggest cash cows stay vibrant and profitable with these new shows? If nothing else, the use of multiple voices in the studio protects against major disruptions in the event of another incident like Carton’s – it’s easier to replace one leg of a stool than a solo voice like Francesa was. (Will we ever see a show like his again?)
7. Venerable AMs Hit a Dead End
If you’re a fan of the romance of radio history, you’re in good company here. But romance doesn’t pay power bills, repair aging ground systems or outweigh the value of big plots of land for commercial development.
That cold reality hit a growing number of venerable AM stations over the course of 2017. In Albany, the old WPTR (1540, now WDCD) once again fell silent after Crawford Broadcasting told the FCC it couldn’t afford to keep running at a full 50,000 watts. WDCD’s plea to be allowed to run at lower power hit an FCC snag – the Commission doesn’t allow Special Temporary Authority to be used just to lower power for economic reasons – and so for now the signal is simply dark.
Boston’s WMEX (1510) made big headlines when it went silent over the summer as owner Daly XXL became the latest to find it couldn’t make money against one of the more onerous tower-site leases out there. A December auction didn’t produce bidders, but South Shore owner Ed Perry stepped forward with a much lower offer to buy the station and move it away from its troublesome Waltham tower site.
WGHT (1500 Pompton Lakes NJ) was donated to the town after falling silent, with its future uncertain; across the state line, WRCR (1700 Pomona NY) lost its transmitter site and its ballpark-based studio, with little visible local reaction to its months of silence that resulted.
Heading into 2018, the question isn’t “will more old-line AMs follow suit?,” it’s “which ones will be next?” And with the FCC winding down its AM translator windows with one more free-for-all at the end of January, it looks ever more likely that there will soon be a second tier of AMs that will be left without a translator, or any chance of adding one.
(And yes, at Fybush Media we’re still working with broadcasters who don’t want to miss that last chance…)
8. Last Local Owners Fade Away
Down the road from WCAX, an even longer thread of family ownership began winding down: WDEV in Waterbury, Vermont and its sister stations have been part of the Squier family since 1935, so it was big news when Ken Squier put them up for sale. While a transfer to veteran talent/sales exec Steve Cormier was quickly announced, no sale had been filed at the FCC by year’s end.
Elsewhere in radio, some new local owners emerged – and whether it was the Landry brothers’ new Sugar River group in the Upper Valley or Buddy Shula at WECK in Buffalo, we wish them many years of success as new broadcast owners.
9. World Trade Lights Up
WNJU’s move downtown was quickly followed by other stations ready to take advantage of a higher perch and more robust backup power than they’d enjoyed uptown at the Empire State Building, where TV had been squeezed back in after 9/11. WNJU itself became the channel-sharing host to sister WNBC later in the fall, followed by sign-ons from WCBS-TV (Channel 2/RF 33) and ion’s WPXN (Channel 31), with public broadcaster WNET and Fox’s WNYW and WWOR joining them in 2018.
(FM, however, remained in midtown; with the Empire FMs newly invested in a 19-station auxiliary combiner and antenna system, there seemed little appetite from radio broadcasters to look south to 1 World Trade.)
10. North Country Cluster Splinters
In recent years, though, the stations had fallen on hard, hard times. The AM in Lake Placid (WIRD 920) went silent, the WNBZ studios and tower site in Saranac Lake almost got claimed in a sale for unpaid taxes, the Lake Placid FMs (WRGR 102.1 and WLPW-FM 105.5) had technical problems and WYZY faced allegations of operation from an unlicensed site.
By mid-2017, all but WNBZ-FM had gone silent, with 106.3 barely kept alive with stale automation, its Plattsburgh studio vacant. For once, the local newspaper not only took notice but did some intelligent reporting that got noticed – which means the Adirondack Daily Enterprise is probably at least somewhat to credit for getting some of Morgan’s licenses into the hands of new owners. The WNBZ AM license went to crosstown competitor WSLP (93.3), while former employees of Plattsburgh’s WIRY came up with a plan to take over WNBZ-FM and restore it to local prominence.
It wasn’t the only “local heroes try to save beloved station” story – a tip of the hat, here, to Jimmy Buff and Peter Buffett’s well-financed nonprofit attempt to revive WKNY in Kingston – but it’s nice to end the year with the hope that these delightful communities up in the Adirondack will still have vibrant radio into 2018 and beyond.
(We’ll wrap up our Year in Review coverage Monday with a comprehensive look at the year in radio and TV obituaries.)
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