New Year catch-up
January 1, 2025Happy 2025!
As we finish up the holiday season and head into the new year, we are catching up on some things we’ve missed and observations we’ve made over the last couple of weeks.
Wheeling reader Bill S. alerted us to the December retirement of WTRF reporter, anchor, and news director Brenda Danehart. Danehart spent her entire 43 year career at the station having started as a reporter in 1981. She was named news director in 2002 and was also seen on the local portion of the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethons and the Easter Seal Telethons until each came to their respective ends. Of course, in Pittsburgh the end of 2024 saw a major retirement from the major three stations – David Johnson from WPXI, Jon Delano from KDKA, and Bob Mayo from WTAE.
The Christmas music season appears to have appropriately extended into the actual Christmas season this year! WSHH (99.7) extended the full Christmas format into the weekend following Christmas Day. Historically the practice ended after “The 36-hours of Christmas” at midnight on Christmas Day itself. Wish is one of two stations in town to adapt to the holiday theme each year, the other being WWSW (94.5). Historically the latter has been the ratings winner for the Holiday book, but Wish was usually a close second. They have been playing its cards a little differently offering “preview weekends” during the early part of November and making the 24/7 switch a little earlier than the competition. This is the first time that we have heard of the 24/7 Christmas music being extended beyond Christmas Day, but it seems listener demand was there if comments on the Wish Facebook page was any indication.
Just this week, Salem Media Group announced the sale of seven of their music stations, most of whom sport “The Fish” format. The buyer: Educational Media Foundation. The seven stations are in Atlanta, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Dallas, Los Angeles, Portland, and Sacramento. The price tag is $80 million plus a $10 million advertising and marketing agreement. EMF will take over February 1 and these stations will either get K-Love or Air-1 formats. The move allows Salem to pay off a heavy debt load.
Salem owns three properties in Pittsburgh. They’ve owned WORD-FM (101.5) and WPIT (730) for at least 3 decades, and have owned WPGP (1250) for the last few years. No word how, if at all, this will affect the Pittsburgh cluster. We do know that John Steigerwald recently left WPGP in favor of podcasting. No word if the move was relative to Salem’s financial burden.
Finally, we were surprised last week to find WKHB-FM (103.9 Uniontown) is once again WLSW. Of course, the station was licensed to Scottdale until 2023. The WLSW calls refer to Ludwig Stanley Wall who founded and built the station in the 1970s. It was sold to Broadcast Communications, Inc. following Wall’s death when it became WKHB-FM. PBRTV initially took notice of the return of the WLSW calls on one of the new regional and non-commercial stations recently built by sister company Broadcast Educational Communications, Inc. and then learned of this change. Stay tuned…
Housekeeping notes
Now on to PBRTV matters.
2024 was a busy year for your editor – at least outside of PBRTV. This year might be just as crazy, but I have promised myself to make better efforts to be more efficient with my time and energy. (This is NOT a New Year Resolution!)
The survey many of you thankfully answered helped me to see where I need to focus my efforts on this website, but most of all it tells me that you still want me around, I think. Please correct me if I am wrong.
That said, here are some things which are taking place right now. I have removed all of the surrounding market (Wheeling, Erie, and Youngstown) pages until further notice. They will be back after I work to clean them up and update the information. Don’t expect them back “overnight”, but the goal is to have them back by this time next year.
I took the Central PA station listings down some years ago and nobody seems to miss it. That’s good because it seems more happens there than in some larger markets and it was hard to keep up!
The other page that is gone is the “Where are they now?” page. I’m not sure it will be back as it’s kind of stale. I’ll figure that out in time.
Again, Happy New Year!
Congratulations to Brenda Danehart. 43 years with one employer is quite an achievement in any field. And one that often goes overlooked when working in smaller markets like Wheeling. I also noticed that legal ID’s on KQV now include a bunch of new simulcast stations.
Yes, but I understand they’ll eventually have format identities of their own