• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

ESPN Exterminating Froggy June 4

Goodbye music radio, it's been nice knowing you! Fortunately, with 1700 commercial free favorites on thumb drive and MP3, you'll hardly be missed.....
 
Interesting that Federated Wfga Auburn is going to put on ESPN when Swick Broadcasting. 92.7 Angola has ESPN, as well in Sturgis, MI AM1230, and can be heard way south of Auburn, and are just a few miles to the north of Auburn and WFGA transmitter site. Federated has figured out WFGA Froggy 106.7 was just a property making a bad attempt at trying to be a local Dekalb County station, and turns out to be a Ft.Wayne station wanna be. A Zebra is a Zebra, and will never be a lion as Federated wish it could be. You cant be everything to all and be effective to anything.
 
Will the Auburn studio and sales office be closing? Does Auburn still need to be measured as an Eastlan ratings market without a local station?

ESPN in Ft. Wayne is currently handled out of Fed Med South. The vacant Fort quarters on Production Dr. might be a more central location.
 
hoosier45guy said:
ESPN in Ft. Wayne is currently handled out of Fed Med South. The vacant Fort quarters on Production Dr. might be a more central location.
Click to expand...

Considering the size of the studio available on Production Drive, it's at LEAST 3 times the size of the closet 1380's run from now on Maples Rd. And considering that Stiller's already there, it's closer to almost ALL of the major sporting events in Fort Wayne (most everything professional is happening on Coliseum Blvd, except TinCaps baseball downtown.) For my vote I'd put them up north.
 
Federated most likely wont be getting ESPN on 106.7 Auburn, when its only 15 miles to city grade to Swick Broadcasting. ESPN 92.7 Angola location. Seems like they might have the cart before the horse, time will tell?? They do have miliage requirements, correct? Just seems funny when you see it on Wayne Tv saying its a done deal with ESPN in a market that is already broadcasting it.
 
Studio / Offices to close. Moved across town just two years ago to save rent. Can't imagine what was spent to do that. Ready-fire-aim.

Regards,

RememberWHEN
 
And Fed moved the transmitter site too, with a new tower to boot. They have a TON of money tied up in that station.
 
Hmmm... Suppose 92.7 might be losing the ESPN affiliation soon? Maybe that's why 106.7 is waiting until June to make the switch?
 
Looks like Federated Media Froggy 106.7 Auburn won't be getting ESPN, Swick Broadcasting has the ESPN contracts in the area that covers Steuben & Auburn Dekalb County on 92.7 & in HD. How do I know?, Hell I called ESPN. Federated really jumped the gun by grandstanding with all the media press releases, A little embassasing don't ya think? How could they be so assumeing, and not have checked. We all know what happens when you ASS-UME?.. Can anybody say hello to the second best sports talk radio network "FOX"
 
I too had a hard time believing Fed would jump the gun, so I did some poking around. ESPN doesn't show 92.7 as an affiliate:

http://m.espn.go.com/general/radio/affiliates?state=IN&fa6aap1m19nx0=GO&y=1&wjb=

And from what I can tell online, 92.7 is suppose to be the translator of WLKI, which is an AC station.

http://radio-locator.com/info/W224BY-FX

I could TOTALLY be missing something, or perhaps the info online is wrong... I'm not in that area, so I don't know what they have on the air for sure.
 
WLKI runs HD on its main channel, and it has two translators relaying its HD2 and HD3 services. One of them (I think the HD2) does rock as "U-Rock" and is heard on a translator at 101.1, the other (I think the HD3) runs ESPN and is heard on the 92.7 translator.
 
Is that way ESPN doesn't show them as an affiliate on 92.7? And because WLKI is running ESPN from an HD feed, does that for any reason not allow Fed to simulcast 1380 on 106.7 for any reason, logistical or otherwise? Again, I have a hard time Fed would just announce it without have their ducks in a row.
 
@Patron: So you called ESPN, that's great... Did you call Swick? Are you able to get an estimate of how long the contract is?

Is it possible that Swick got a 90-day notice from the Worldwide Leader, pending a transfer of the affiliation to 106.7? ESPN doesn't list 92.7 as an affiliate, but then again, neither do they do so for 106.7.

Maybe Fybush can shed some light on this, even though FWI isn't his area of expertise?
 
DToTheJ said:
@Patron: So you called ESPN, that's great... Did you call Swick? Are you able to get an estimate of how long the contract is?

Is it possible that Swick got a 90-day notice from the Worldwide Leader, pending a transfer of the affiliation to 106.7? ESPN doesn't list 92.7 as an affiliate, but then again, neither do they do so for 106.7.

Maybe Fybush can shed some light on this, even though FWI isn't his area of expertise?
Click to expand...

I like to think I know more than a little about Fort Wayne, considering I spend close to a month there every year visiting the in-laws. :D

Without being privy to the intricacies of the Swick-ESPN contract, it's hard for me to know exactly what's going on here, but an educated guess says Swick quietly had DeKalb County included in his territorial exclusivity for ESPN because of his longstanding rivalry with FedMed and 106.7 (they've sparred for years over Auburn ad sales.) Since the 92.7 signal isn't all that great in Auburn (or all that well promoted that far south), nobody at FedMed probably thought much about whether there was exclusivity in place, especially since the WKJG 1380 signal does cover DeKalb pretty well, at least by day, and has been doing ESPN for years with no objections.

(And there's another interesting twist here: 106.7 is actually licensed to Hicksville, Ohio, which is in Defiance County and is almost surely not part of Swick's exclusive ESPN territory for WLKI/92.7.)

The irony here, of course, is that there's no reason to think FedMed has any particular interest in continuing to focus on DeKalb County once it flips 106.7 to sports. The plan appeared to be to shut down the Auburn studio and sales office and operate 106.7 out of Fort Wayne, with the 106.7 signal filling in some of 1380's weakness on the north side of Allen County, where there's been phenomenal growth around Dupont Road and the I-69/469 interchange over the last decade.
 
I find it interesting that Federated put all of that money into essentially giving up on Fort Wayne and moving the station north to better serve Auburn, Garrett and Angola, just to decide a few short years later that they want to once again try to be a Fort Wayne station, but now as an even deeper rimshot signal than before. I wish them good luck.

I've also wondered if Swick is parting ways with ESPN on 92.7. Swick did buy another translator, this time in Battle Creek, and is currently hop-scotching it down to the Tri-State area. I suspect that it may become an FM simulcast for WBET AM 1230 in Sturgis, which was running ESPN programming years before W224BY became a reality. A 250 watt FM translator in Sturgis, if put on a tall tower and an open frequency, could carry from the Ohio/Indiana state line all the way to Elkhart. This would eliminate a lot of overlap between the present 92.7 and the future Sturgis translator and would make Federated's ESPN on 106.7 make more sense on a coverage area standpoint. Never mind the fact that their signal will be less than what they might be hoping for in Fort Wayne.
 
Another interesting thing I've found out is that Swick Broadcasting is behinde WMYQ 101 Warsaw, Columbia City. Interesting!
 
That MIGHT be interesting if Q101 wasn't the most boring station on the planet.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom