"I agree with Bob that syndicated mornings have had a bad track record here - but the landscape is changing, and the longer Wease stays off the air, the more the landscape will keep changing. Interesting times ahead..."
If CMF tries to replace Wease (one of the city's best-known and best-liked personalities) with syndicated outsiders, the new act will be rejected the same way New York radio listeners rejected Jack when CBS-FM was killed. Wease has his detractors like any long time personality does, but he's also got his fervent fans in still larger numbers, and they will accept no substitutes.
Playing hardball and threatening to dump the signature personality of a station, is the kind of thing a company does when it decides to shift strategy and dump the station--it makes no sense to blow off the station's principal source of revenue, ratings and profit if they plan on doing anything else but cutting their cost base to prep it for sale. The more I think about it, the more it looks like Entercom has changed its mind about future strategy in the Rochester cluster and decided to keep Warm 101.3 while dumping a couple other full-coverage stations adding up to the same ratings and revenue total in order to stay under FCC limits. (Two full Class B stations, plus two class As, add up to a more salable cluster to peddle to someone else than a single B and two As in any event...)
If I'm right and the for-sale sign gets pulled off Warm and put on CMF and PXY, anyone want to guess who would pony up for a four station FM cluster? We can rule out religious broadcasters since they never build clusters that big in any market, not even Salem. Clear Channel's already at its limit at least until it dumps channel 13 and isn't in the market for anything new these days anyway, so forget them. CBS' new national management might be having regrets at leaving town but I don't see them coming back now.
Citadel/ABC and Regent, however, might each be interested in coming into town if they had enough signals to work with, they might be bidders if they're offered a four station package. Maybe Lew Dickey at Cumulus (who had a disastrous turn in the market with WSAY-AM back in 1981-82) might be interested in giving Rochester another try as well. And who knows about what Randy Michaels, who just linked up with Sam Zell to take over the WGN properties in Chicago and has a lot of other radio and TV irons in the fire, might be thinking about this area? He knows the turf, he cut his radio teeth in Buffalo and helped bring the WHAM/WVOR/WHTK cluster into the portfolio of Clear Channel's predecessor Jacor back in the 90s when Bud Wertheimer and Jack Palvino sold out. There's no shortage of bidders for a four station FM cluster in a market with a million potential listeners if the price is right.
