NYT gets cash, QXR gets bumped
The cash-strapped New York Times Company’s last remaining broadcast property, radio station WQXR in New York, will be sold, in pieces.
Two of them, precisely. NYT will swap the license for WQXR (96.3 MHz, 6000 watts) for the license for Univision’s WCAA (105.9 MHz, 610 watts); Univision will pay $33.5 million to NYT. And public broadcaster WNYC will acquire WQXR’s studio facilities, intellectual property, and the 105.9 license for $11.5 million.
This is not the first time a classical-music station has been shunted off to a poorer dial position in exchange for cash. I said back in 2003:
The historical record shows many instances where a classical station relocated to an inferior facility in exchange for lots of money; the best-known, perhaps, was the move of Cleveland’s WCLV to a 6-kw channel in exurban Lorain. It was argued at the time that the move would help secure the station’s then-uncertain future, and maybe it did, but I’d hate to have to try to tune them in from the parking lot at Severance Hall.
Next time I was in Cleveland, I tuned in to WCLV to see how well it reached the city’s east side. The answer: not very. WQXR’s tower isn’t moving — it will remain on the Empire State Building — but cutting its power output will definitely reduce its availability to fringe-area listeners.
(Via Doc Searls.)
fillyjonk »
20 July 2009 · 12:57 pm
I missed hearing about WCLV’s move. That makes me sad. WCLV was the station I listened to as a young classical-music geek. It came in pretty well in the little town some 35 miles to the south where I grew up. I wonder if it still comes in clearly there.
I know there was some talk about WRR (Dallas) doing a similar swap; I guess I never heard if that happened. (I can’t pick up WRR here, hard as I try with antennas and tinfoil and such. I can sometimes pick it up when I’m driving around Sherman – or at least I used to, I haven’t tried for it in a while).
Locally, there are really no music channels that appeal to me, so I fall back on my extensive CD collection or Internet radio.
CGHill »
20 July 2009 · 1:05 pm
WRR is still at 101.1, and is still owned by the city of Dallas.
I only recently (as in the last twenty minutes) found out that WCRB Boston went through similar gyrations, moving from 102.5 (Waltham) to 99.5 (Lowell).
CGHill »
20 July 2009 · 10:45 pm
I see that I’ve had a couple of visitors from WNYC. The station blogs have had responses all over the map: one common complaint is that WQXR had gotten stodgy. (Do we want non-stodgy classical radio?) Just as common: the poorer reach of the new 105.9 facility. WNYC is saying that it will reach about 86 percent of the audience who were able to tune in WQXR at 96.3, which seems a little high, but only a little. My brief drives through New York City suggested a difficult reception area, owing to multipath reflections; then again, at the time I had a fairly crummy embedded-in-the-glass antenna, which surely didn’t help.
What no one has suggested, and presumably what no one wanted, was the idea of the Times Co. selling off WQXR to the highest bidder, and format changes be damned.
Jeff Shaw »
21 July 2009 · 2:59 pm
I listen to WQXR over the internet frequently. Stodgy? I dunno, it’s classical music, right? Music for kings and queens, ladies & gentlemen; mad dogs, Englishmen, high church and the like. That’s stodgy?