We’re sorry for those of you who are used to daily updates out of us…but we’re back for a new round on this Wednesday. We think we give you the best publishing frequency you’re likely to get out of a site that doesn’t charge for subscriptions, after all…
DEELY AND WDOK: No less an authority than WDOK/102.1 program director Scott Miller has checked in with your Mighty Blog of Fun(tm) about a rare bit of uncertainty at the CBS Radio Cleveland AC outlet.
A number of OMW readers caught now-former WFHM/95.5 “The Fish” afternoon driver Dan Deely, who left the Salem Cleveland CCM station, on WDOK on Saturday afternoon.
PD Miller checked in with OMW to let us know:
“Dan Deely was gracious enough to step in and help me with a scheduling problem on Saturday.
WDOK actually believes that having a live jock on the air. Even on the weekends.”
Ah, but as we noted in our item at the start of this week, WDOK has something very rare right now – a gaping hole in its full-time schedule in afternoon drive, thanks to the recent departure of Chris Fox.
Is Dan Deely in line for the job? Scott Miller isn’t saying:
“I’ve had number of very talented people in my office over the past 3 weeks. Dan is one of them.”
Scott says we should know about a new afternoon drive host for WDOK, whoever it is, later this week.
Now, the above is basically everything the WDOK PD had to say about this to us. He gave no indication of his decision.
But we wouldn’t be surprised to see market veteran Dan Deely in afternoon drive when it’s all said and done. That’s just a gut feeling here…in part because it would seem to be a perfect fit.
Oh, and Scott reminds us about something we never got around to mentioning – the 20th anniversary at WDOK of midday host Nancy Alden. Now, that’s longevity!
CHERRY LANDS: We recall spending some time determining the job status of Steve Cherry, then program director of Clear Channel AC WLZT/93.3 in the Columbus market.
As it turns out, Cherry was indeed let go in that large round of job cuts at the CC Columbus cluster.
But he’s now landed.
AllAccess reports that Cherry has taken a job at NextMedia in suburban Chicago, as program director of hot AC WZSR/105.5 “Star 105.5” and operations manager of both WZSR and urban oldies WWYW/103.9 “Y103.9”.
But there’s more than just a “Columbus radio guy lands in new gig” story here.
Cherry and NextMedia group programming VP Harve Alan are both former Akron radio types. Alan, at Rubber City Radio’s WAKR/1590, and Cherry, at the company’s country WQMX/94.9 – we believe before WAKR/WONE made WQMX a sister station. (We’re sure those with longer memories can fill that blank in.)
Quoting Cherry from the AllAccess item:
“It’s great to work with HARVE again. The last time we saw each other was pouring over diaries at ARBITRON when we both worked in AKRON.”
That’s Northeast Ohio again, the crossroads of media…
AND A CLARIFICATION: When we posted the item below about WJW/8 “FOX 8” news director Greg Easterly’s rise to the station’s general manager post, we were under the impression that it wasn’t widely known.
So, an OMW apology to Plain Dealer entertainment/media writer Julie Washington, who actually had the story on Friday afternoon on the Cleveland.com Entertainment blog.
There are policies we try to hold to, without exception. One of them is “giving credit where credit is due”.
Though we did not get the story either directly or indirectly from Ms. Washington, and our primary source was direct, we didn’t know her article was up online. (It apparently didn’t make it into the Dead Trees edition of the PD, and we hadn’t looked at the Entertainment blog for a long while.)
In the past, we’ve also not been used to newspaper reporters covering the media beat getting things right, let alone getting a jump on us, after all…so our kudos to Julie Washington, and our sincere apologies for A) missing the item and B) not noting that she had already put the item out…
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