NERW Year in Review 2024 Part II – The Year’s Top Stories

We almost didn’t do it this year, but with a few days before we’re back with our first regular NERW report of 2025 (coming Monday, January 6), we’re offering up a little gift at the end of the holidays – a brief version of our usual Year in Review, running down the top ten stories of 2024 in two parts, one yesterday and the rest today.

If you enjoy this roundup of the year’s top stories, we hope you’ll support the coverage we’ve been providing in this space for over 30 years now. Consider subscribing to our weekly NorthEast Radio Watch column, and if you haven’t picked up a Tower Site Calendar yet, we’re shipping them out daily.

If you missed part one of the series, you can find it here, and for the rest of you – on with the second half of our roundup…

5. It Is High, It Is Far, He Is Gone – And Back – And Gone Again

It’s not just his play-by-play calls that were dramatic. John Sterling, the longtime voice of the New York Yankees, kept making headlines throughout the season.

First, the 86-year-old made an abrupt exit from the booth early in the season, leaving with almost no notice in mid-April and leaving the play-by-play role to a series of fill-in announcers. But as the season came to a close, Sterling decided he wasn’t quite done yet, returning to the booth for a few regular-season games and the post-season before heading off into retirement for good.

Only the Yankees could make a 71-year-old a newcomer to the booth, but that’s what happened after the season ended, when the team picked Dave Sims as its new voice for 2025 and beyond, leaving some of its promising younger voices such as Justin Shackil to wait longer for their chance at the mic.

Things went more smoothly up the road at the Boston Red Sox (at least in the booth, if not on the field), where Joe Castiglione didn’t look back after calling it quits at the end of his 42nd season. While an official announcement hasn’t been made yet, it appears Will Flemming will get promoted to that job for 2025.

4. Public Radio’s Reckoning

One of the few bright spots of the pandemic years was public radio’s resurgence. When listeners were stuck at home in search of trustworthy information, they reacted by tuning in and supporting public broadcasters. But as the years dragged on, something else happened – the level of underwriting support for many bigger broadcasters began to slip precipitously.

That meant some big cutbacks at some of the largest stations in the region. At Boston’s WBUR, that meant a 14% staff reduction to help close a $4 million deficit – and the cancellation of the station’s “Radio Boston” midday talk show. Across town at WGBH, the unusual dual-host setup at Morning Edition went away, too, with Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel reassigned to new duties.

And then there was New York’s WNYC, which held a series of celebrations for its centennial, but also cut more than 20 jobs through a combination of layoffs and voluntary buyouts. Among the exits was Andy Lanset, the station’s longtime historian who oversaw much of the centennial celebration and did a magnificent job organizing the station’s archives.

As perilous as 2024 was, there are plenty of worries ahead for 2025, as public broadcasters confront an unfriendly new administration and serious threats to make big cuts in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an essential source of support for smaller public outlets.

And it’s not just public broadcasters facing some big uncertainties in the new year…

3. Turnover at the FCC

…it’s all broadcasters looking toward Washington with plenty of questions and few answers, as the FCC prepares to change hands under new chairman Brendan Carr.

While transitions at the FCC tend to be somewhat sleepy affairs as the status quo tends to hold, Carr has already made plenty of noise about his plans to bring bigger changes to FCC policies.

As the Commission wraps up the last bits of the LPFM window from late 2003, which has already yielded a few dozen new construction permits around the region, broadcasters will be looking to see if the next FCC opens new windows for commercial FM translators – but that’s just the start of what a new Commission might bring.

Will the Carr-led FCC pursue more broadcast deregulation, including the possibility of raising or even eliminating ownership caps? And if it does, what broadcasters will be in a financial position to take advantage of that opportunity?

There’s also a counter-trend toward more content regulation, at least where Carr’s political opponents are concerned. Even before assuming the chair, Carr has been unusually vocal about using the FCC’s powers to try to control content he doesn’t like – just ask ABC about Carr’s threats to put its owned-and-operated station licenses under greater scrutiny.

It will be an interesting year ahead, and then some.

2. Cutbacks in Canada

If the big US broadcasters were busy cutting jobs in 2024, Canada’s big conglomerates had it even worse. Rogers, Bell and Corus all made significant cutbacks, many of them blaming Canada’s regulators for failing to give them enough flexibility to compete with streaming content, especially from south of the border.

The cuts were most dramatic at Corus, which all but eliminated local content at several of its radio clusters, most notably in Kingston, which also suffered cuts on the TV side at Global News. Its Toronto talker, CFIQ (AM 640), also cut much of its newsroom and several talk hosts.

But the worst came in Hamilton, where CHML (900) was silenced completely with almost no notice on August 14 as part of a nationwide series of cuts that also affected stations in Edmonton and Vancouver. Staffers had no time to say goodbye to listeners after the mid-morning announcement; by 1 PM, the 50,000-watt news and talk voice for the Steel City was silenced completely after 97 years on the air.

CHML’s abrupt exit followed Bell’s decision to sell many of its smaller-market signals. That was a boon for some of the smaller station groups in the region: Neeti Ray, known mostly for his multi-ethnic stations, acquired Hamilton’s two remaining AMs, CHAM (820) and CKOC (1150), turning CHAM into a Punjabi music station and returning CKOC to its longtime oldies format. Ray also picked up Windsor’s CKWW (580), retaining its oldies format as well.

The Caine family’s Whiteoaks group picked up Bell’s stations in St. Catharines and its remaining Hamilton station, CKLH, while Moses Znaimer’s Zoomer group acquired CJOS in Owen Sound.

1. Audacy Shutters WCBS, TJ Takes Over 98.7

There was no question at all about what the year’s biggest story was, and it broke as a series of summer bombshells from New York City.

At the end of 2023, we knew Good Karma Broadcasting would be dropping its lease of Emmis’ WEPN-FM (98.7) when it expired Sept. 1, 2024, and we thought ESPN Radio programming in New York would simply drop back to Good Karma’s own AM station, WEPN (1050).

But it turned out Good Karma had a plan B, and a huge one at that: it approached Audacy with an offer to begin leasing WCBS (880), one of the biggest AM signals in the city.

For Audacy, the deal solved a problem: while WCBS was one of the highest-billing stations in the #1 market, its all-news format was also one of the most expensive in the company to run, even after a renegotiation of the union contract to allow staffers to work on both WCBS and sister station WINS (92.3/1010). What’s more, the deal allowed Audacy to keep the Mets on 880, retaining the revenue from the games.

What may have made sense to the bottom line was still a huge blow to the city’s listeners and the devoted staff of WCBS, who had just a few days to say goodbye to the audience they’d cultivated for 57 years. To Audacy’s credit, they allowed WCBS the farewell it deserved, with former staffers returning for an on-air reunion and a magnificent goodbye montage produced by the station’s creative genius, David Plotkin.

Once “ESPN New York” moved from 98.7 to 880, launching a new all-local lineup for the first time in the format’s history, we got a surprise answer to the question of what Emmis would do with the 98.7 signal.

“TJ 98.7” proudly proclaimed itself to be a “pop-up” radio station, a partnership of the syndicator behind the “TJ Show,” which gained a temporary clearance in the New York market and the radio.cloud technology folks, who have the station’s hot AC format operating entirely virtually, feeding the transmitter at the Empire State Building with no studio at all.

What happens next? We don’t know, and that sets up one of the big questions we’ll be waiting to answer in 2025. The reason “TJ 98.7” exists is that Emmis, which is trying to exit the radio business, can’t find a buyer for the 98.7 signal at the price it’s asking (reportedly $50 million). As station values continue to sag, that’s probably not a sustainable price.

How long will the “TJ” pop-up last? Will a deal emerge for WEPN-FM or its sister station, WLIB (1190)?

Stay with us in 2025 as we wait for answers.