And mostly just clearing out the “inbox” here at your Mighty Blog of Fun(tm)…
TOLEDO OLDIES: Cumulus Toledo market oldies outlet WRQN/93.5 has made a change in evenings.
Veteran Toledo – and elsewhere – radio personality Jim Brady has exited the oldies station’s 6 PM-11 PM slot, and is being replaced by another Toledo and station vet, Buddy Carr.
Carr has been holding down a 10 AM-3 PM Saturday shift, which the station says he’ll keep after taking over nights full-time starting tonight.
No word about the future of Mr. Brady, though, who’s only tersely described as being “no longer an employee of Cumulus Toledo” as of Friday afternoon.
While looking for more information about this story, we stumbled upon some audio of Jim Brady at one of his more famous stops, Toronto’s CFTR/680 – which at the time was mounting a contemporary music format, but is now Rogers Communications’ all-news outlet in Canada’s largest city as “680 News”.
Dip in with us by visiting this CFTR tribute site. Jim opens up the station aircheck taken back in 1980…
“CSN” STOPS PRODUCTION: It’s a bit late, but an OMW reader Columbus-way passes along a recent article about the “Columbus Sports Network”, the Central Ohio regional sports outlet housed at LPTVer WCSN-LP/32 and seen on various cable channels in the Columbus area.
Columbus Dispatch media writer Tim Feran reports that “CSN” ceased all in-house local production on June 7th, bumping a taped Columbus Destroyers arena football game for a live MLS Columbus Crew soccer contest for its final originally produced new event.
Quoting the article and a CSN press release:
A news release yesterday said the network “is suspending production operations while it explores potential changes in its business model. WCSN will continue to air pre-recorded programming while these business decisions are being considered.”
In March, early into its 10-year plan, Nungester said the network was “in good shape,” although he would not comment on whether CSN was profitable.
“Any time you enter a capital-intensive business, there’s going to be a ramp-up,” Nungester said.
Well, you can add the flagging economy, a concern for everyone in media these days. And when you’re working in what is very much a niche part of the TV market – Columbus-based minor league, second tier and leftover OSU sports – it’s tough to keep a new venture, which seems to have spent a lot of money, afloat…
LOW WATTAGE SPORTS DAYTIMERS: What is it about low-wattage, mostly unattended AM daytime sports sister stations in Northeast Ohio, anyway?
We’ve chuckled here from time to time about the occasional disappearance of Media-Com’s WJMP/1520 in Kent, the 1,000 watt highly directional daytime FOX Sports Radio affiliate that has trouble reaching an intended audience in Akron. ‘JMP, of course, is the lightbulb-power sister/brother station of much-more-successful talk WNIR/100.1.
This time, same network, same power, similar frequency, different station.
A heat wave and air conditioning failure at the Galleria brought down the mighty WWGK “Cleveland’s AM 1540, KNR2”, the little brother station to Good Karma’s WKNR/850 “ESPN 850”, for a few hours last week.
Like most things at the Galleria Radio Empire, we learned about this on the air.
We learned about it because it was on the mind of WKNR assistant program director Aaron Goldhammer while he was basically unable to do anything about it. “Hammer” was at a golf course on a remote in his role as producer/sidekick to ‘KNR’s midday “The Really Big Show” with Tony Rizzo.
The heat which led Good Karma to bring in a portable air conditioner for the main WKNR studios apparently didn’t lead them to do the same for the unattended WWGK studios in the same building.
Unlike WJMP’s usual technical difficulties, the WWGK signal and programming did return later that day…we heard the station back up shortly before its evening sign off.
Since we mentioned America’s worst daytime rimshot AM signal out of the Broadcast Trailer Park between Kent and Ravenna, we’ll note that we flipped over to 1520 that same early pre-sunset evening…and WJMP is no longer stretching in its legal ID to claim listenership in Cleveland.
It’s just “Kent/Akron” for now, though with 1520’s anemic signal into much of Summit County, that’s a stretch as well. If they’re staying with “Kent/Akron”, we’ll resist the temptation to add “Mars/Jupiter” like we usually do…
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