There are several posts I’ve written about the peculiar station in Pittsburgh that I grew up not listening to. A station with a three letter “K” call sign in the Eastern United States is a hint right away that the original owners were radio pioneers.
As AM music was dying, both Rush Limbaugh (“Jeff Christie”) and Jim Quinn (“Quinn & Rose”) did stints at KQV playing music. The station was sold to Richard Mellon Scaife, who supervises some of the Mellon fortune – and the man who had been managing the station. Scaife also runs the Pittsburgh Tribune, the newspaper that provoke Theresa Kerry-Heinz to lash out during the Presidential campaign of her husband.
For a while now, the station has been running all news during the day, and reruns of old radio shows at night. It was one of the last affiliates to carry Bruce Williams.
Scaife is selling his 70% interest for $200k, which is less than what he plowed into the station. Yet one more casualty of Rush Limbaugh destroying radio. I can’t imagine KQV will continue their all news format without his money and newspaper connections
Same with stations west of the Mississippi that begin with a W, such as WOAI. KYW in Philadelphia. Also interesting are Canadian stations not starting with a C, such as VOCM http://www.vocm.com/ .
Any non-Canadians and non-British that can explain the stations starting with a V? (That was a hint.)
Yep. I grew up in Texas and never got the WOAI thing. I lived for a few years (and went to radio broadcasting school, for all the good it did me) in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Allegedly, the Ks and Ws were supposed to be split at the Mississippi River (i.e., KSTP in St. Paul, WCCO in Minneapolis), though I can think of multiple instances where this isn’t true.
WOAI, KYW, KQV all became stations and got their licenses from the FCC before the FCC adopted the Mississippi River rule. The rule only applied to new stations and new licenses.
Now what about VOCM? 😉
I didn’t look it up but is that that little island that France owns?
That’s an interesting guess. The there are actually two islands are interesting because they are part of the EU and part of North America. The wiki page didn’t have any call letters for the 4 FM stations on the islands. Here is the URL for one of the FM stations, notice the suffix
http://saintpierremiquelon.la1ere.fr/
The wiki mentioned that the one AM station had been shut down. TV is most interesting and evidently from France, with some Canadian and US channels converted to SECAM, the French TV standard that is not compatible with the rest of North America. From Wiki:
“Television broadcast stations: St. Pierre et Miquelon has two television stations owned and operated by Réseau France Outre-mer (RFO):
Télé St. Pierre et Miquelon (call letters FQN) on Ch. 8, with a repeater on Ch. 31
Tempo on Ch. 6
RFO features a variety of programs from France, as well as local news and sports. RFO broadcasts using the SECAM-K1 colour system as designed for French overseas territories. The local cable system, operated by SPM Telecom, also offers an array of broadcast and specialty channels from Canada and the US in SECAM, converted from NTSC.
“TNT, an aerial digital television service, will be expanding its service to Saint Pierre and Miquelon by the end of 2010; unlike SPM Telecom’s cable service, TNT offers only RFO and Metropolitan France channels”
Back to VOCM which is absolutely in Canada and not France…. any other interesting guesses?
WOIA is also significant in that it was the original station of what would become Clear Channel. A charismatic car dealer figured he would rather own the station than pay for commercials. He and the Mays family accumulated a group of stations and when the merger frenzy started in 1996′, they wound up being the biggest fish that ate all the smaller fish. In retrospect, it would have been smarter to have a transition that was slower, like raising the national cap to 50 stations, then 100, then 250…. A lot of people blew a lot of money on the radio bubble and now plow every penny into debt repayment instead of capital improvements and programming
Is Fibber McGee on tonight? 😉
If you go out 70 or so light years, sure