Some of the dominoes we’ve been talking about, regarding changes involving at least three Cleveland market radio stations, are falling.
Since he’s the first one who heard the syndicated 24/7 gospel music format “Rejoice – Musical Soul Food” on Painesville’s WBKC/1460 – from all the way across town on the other end of Lake Erie in Lorain County – we’ll give regular OMW reader/tipster Nathan Obral another nod for catching this on the WCLV website’s “What’s New” section:
WBKC NO LONGER SIMULCASTING WCLV
Tuesday, 17 October, 2006
We regret to announce that WCLV’s classical music programing is no longer available over WBKC 1460 in Painesville. Cleveland station WABQ has been sold, and the new owners are changing its format to Sports. The previous WABQ owners, who currently also own WBKC have decided to move much of WABQ’s gospel and religious programming to WBKC.
WCLV goes on to thank not only current WBKC owner Dale Edwards for hanging onto the simulcast, but former owner Clarence Bucaro for originating it in the first place.
We can’t pick up the WBKC signal here at the OMW World Headquarters, so we don’t know what’s airing now on 1460 in Painesville…but we suspect “Rejoice” wouldn’t be a bad guess.
And the other shoe in this could be dropping soon. (There we go with dropping footwear again.)
In one of his last efforts for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, outgoing sports/media columnist Roger Brown says Good Karma Broadcasting’s WABQ/1540 Cleveland will start airing the ESPN Radio feed no later than Monday, “possibly sooner”.
The Artful Roger notes that WABQ will also pick up NASCAR events, and that it will, apparently, only air the ESPN schedule on its daytime signal.
That would seem to suggest that the proposed deal with Radio One to air ESPN Radio at night on WERE/1300 is dead in the water, at least for now. The deal was once thought to be definite – so much so that Good Karma boss Craig Karmazin even commissioned the “Cleveland’s ESPN Radio – 1540 Days / 1300 Nights” logo shown here.
UPDATE 10/18/06 10:05 PM: And thanks to our readers for pointing out what probably should have been obvious to us.
A closer reading of an article published under the Roger Brown byline in the weekly newspaper Cleveland Scene seems to indicate that it’s a parody, something the alt-weekly has done before.
That’d certainly explain the items about FOX Sports Net/Shaker Heights native Chris Rose’s hair, and the swiveling chairs at SportsTime Ohio. But to the guys and gals responsible for this at “Scene” – no real estate listings? No Ronnie Duncan mentions? You’re slipping!
As we pointed out before we realized (thanks to OMW regular reader Johnny Morgan and others) that we were duped by the Scene folks, the weekly newspaper was the outlet which published the now-infamous dissection of Roger and his work at the Plain Dealer back in 2005, a not-very-favorable article by Michael C. Fitzpatrick titled “The Sniper”.
Yes, when we’re hurried and ready to go out the door to visit family, perhaps OMW is a bit more gullible than we should be…or maybe the Scene folks were more on-target with their parody than they realized…
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