The death of an AM radio station – WTOC-AM

Some things in life are destined never to turn out right. WTOC-AM is an AM station licensed to Newton, New Jersey – a town in the NW corner of the state, near Pennsylvania. It’s still a bit far to commute to New York City, but suburbia is expanding in its direction.

The station is a Class “B” – a regional full time station with 2000 watts during the day, and 320 watts at night. During the day, it covers all of the NJ area near New York city with a weak signal. At night, it is only local in Newton.

The station began life in 1953 as WNNJ as a daytime only station – it arrived too late for the Golden Age of radio and just in time to be overwhelmed by the new FM radio. It played music and went through several owners and format changes. In 1989 following the Reagan era changes, the station became licensed for nighttime, but still turned off the transmitter at 10 PM (per Wikipedia)

With the end to ownership caps in 1996, the station was sold to Nassau Broadcasting – and like most of Nassau’s acquisitions was switched to full time satellite music with little or no local programming. (Nassau was seized by its creditors a few years ago, but that’s another story for another day)

In 2001, Nassau sold the Station to Clear Channel and switched to Scott Shannon’s True Oldies Channel (as in W-TOC). In 2007, when Clear Channel decided to “go private”, it lost its grandfathered status for the big pile of stations it had merged together, and had to move around 100 stations into the “Aloha Trust” – a holding area where the stations would not be run by Clear Channel, but would be sold as soon as reasonably practical to someone else in the market.

The Aloha Trust is now approaching 3 years old – Clear Channel has been playing Washington lawyer games to get some of the stations “Moved” on paper, or waited until other non-commercial stations added to the market to up the limit, etc… but lowly WTOC is not worth the trouble.

Monday, Clear Channel applied to “donate” the station to the Minority Media Council – a group who agitates for a right to own stations based solely on membership in a minority ethnic group. The idea is the MMC can use these defunct worthless AM stations to “train” minority youth in how to run a radio station so they can get experience for a real radio job someday. But running a radio station is a business – there are bills to pay, taxes, insurance, repairs to the equipment. Clear Channel has typically “donated” the stations when the license would expire for having been silent for a year. Clear Channel gets brownie points with the FCC for “diversity” even if the station never actually returns to the air.