Apparently, the land has been purchased by the neighbouring Ferncliff Cemetery.
EDIT: This is according to posters on the NYRMB. I'm looking for verification.
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Cumulus Surrenders Suburban New York Digital AM(WFAS) - Radio Insight
- Thread starter speer360
- Start date
EDIT: This is according to posters on the NYRMB. I'm looking for verification.
Some how a graveyard is appropriate.
Link to the source? It would be interesting to see how much the land sold for.
1230 is a graveyard frequency, after all.
Or are they talking about the average age of AM listeners?
So far, all I've been able to come up with is this from Cushman & Wakefield Capital Markets, which handled/is handling the listing:
365 Secor Road, Hartsdale NY
The MMTC wouldve ended up just handing it off to someone else.. and some of the groups theyve handed off stations to are really that small or a minority.
but why does ever dying station need to be saved by being donated to someone?
How would we know they didn't offer it first? It's now at the FCC if "another interested party" wants it.
What we know is they've been trying to get rid of it for 5 years. Now they have.
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I wonder if Cumulus has another station lined up to clear its Westwood talk shows in Market #1. Not that I care if any of those hosts ever get heard again around here but maybe there's another shoe to drop?
Who cares? That's Cumulus's problem, and it's not worth furthering that discussion. They wanted out of NYC entirely, and now they are. Good riddance to them.
As for the carnage left in their wake:
WABC: Became the sandbox of a billionaire businessman and failed political candidate pushing a conservative MAGA agenda in deep-blue NYC. And, an internal mess with high turnover behind-the-scenes. However, current ownership deserves credit for going all-local, something Cumulus pulled way, way back on over time.
WPLJ: Very little was done to evolve their sound. The end result: Suburban soccer moms lost their station when it got saved by the Lord, via K-Love.
The former WNSH: Give Cumulus credit with sticking with the country format before handing off the station to Entercom/Audacy. Of course that was Corporate wanting to push the "Nash" brand, which ended up on the wayside.
The former WFAS-FM/WNBM: Was best left alone in the Westchester County suburbs, but Corporate decided they had to challenge the venerable WBLS. And what happened? The move-in into NYC as "Radio 103.9" was an unmitigated disaster. Like 'PLJ, has found Jesus via VCY America.
(D)WFAS (AM): A once-important suburban voice destroyed by the changing marketplace and corporate agendas. Going all-digital AM was a waste. Now asleep with the fishes, with its home to be bulldozed for cemetery plots. The first interrment at Ferncliff's new extension should be the 1230 AM tower.
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Of course money can't escape when there was never any coming into it. And at one point, if there was any, it was gobbled up by the little gremlins that inhabit that mysterious interior.
Paul, if you had a significant investment in a property, wouldn't you try to rescue as much of that investment as you could figure out a way to? There's nothing terribly profound about it. They bought this station once upon a time, then invested additional cash in keeping it alive for some number of years, and they tried to get some ROI back on that clusterf***. But because they (a) ignored the meta-trends in the marketplace for AM stations, (b) waited too long, and (c) were a massively incompetent operator, there was ultimately no way left to stanch the bleeding except to amputate the limb.
The NYRMB poster who shared this info gave a vague response: "I was contacted about the possibility of doing some work at the site. I have done freelance engineering work at the site in the past. No need to list as it is sold."
This leads me to surmise that Cushman & Wakefield brokered a deal between Ferncliff and Cumulus exclusively, either privately (perhaps given Ferncliff's nonprofit status), or via right-of-first-refusal as WFAS is adjacent to the cemetery.
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In a case like this, land and other tangibles are worth more than the station... so this is one of those that maybe should just die, as it has. what value does it have to someone else especialyl if they end up without the tower site?
That's exactly what happened to WVOX. Now they're stringing up a longwire antenna on a rooftop in a last-ditch effort to save the license.
Actually in WPLJ's last few years they were throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Their music playlist shifted from a rock-leaning '90s-and-newer Hot AC under Scott Shannon to rhythmic-leaning and dropping everything older than the 2000s after he left, then swinging back to rock-leaning and adding a lot of '90s, '80s, and even some '70s music in their last year or so. (For example, they played Billy Joel's "Piano Man".)
There are a lot of these 1000-watt AMs that have had their licenses turned in. Just a couple I can think of in New Jersey: WERA in Plainfield and WBRW in Bridgewater. The rest are on life support. The venerable WCTC in New Brunswick was once a live & local powerhouse that is now a satellite for Fox Sports. It was the foundation for what became Greater Media. Those days are long gone. WHWH in Princeton is now Spanish. The original WTTM. Lots of them. It's not "corporate agendas." The FCC over-licensed the spectrum without regard to how these stations would survive. Now they're forced to compete against unregulated online operators and social media. It's really no different from the small, local restaurant I used to go to across the street from the WFME tower in West Orange. Remember Pal's Cabin? Long gone. Just like the small AM stations that used to thrive in the area.
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The type of person who would have once listened to one of those 1000-watt AMs now likely gets their community news and gossip from a local Facebook group, not an online version of radio.
I've updated my post
WERA got paid to go dark to make way for WWRL's upgrade to 25 kW, and WBRW did go dark for a few years in the '90s but re-emerged in 1997 and is still on the air today as WWTR. Their downfall the first time was losing out to WOBM to move to 1160 kHz and upgrade from a daytimer to full-time.
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