Let me jump in here, siren screaming, to rescue this thread from the "Inappropriate Subject Material For A Radio Board" purgatory.
The Clarion was founded by WYSL principals in 1989. I had some history with local print media since my mom was the editor of a small newspaper group headquartered in Livonia, consisting of weeklies issued in Livonia, Lima, Honeoye Falls and Honeoye, NY. Essentially all four editions consisted of 12 or 16 tab-sized "common" pages wrapped in four pages (inside/outside front and back) that carried the local news. My older brother and I had both worked at the newspaper while we were in high school. The papers were published in-house using antique letter-press equipment including Mergenthaler Linotypes.
The "Brador Publications" (Dorothea Bradley, owner) group had fallen on hard times. My mom had passed, and Mrs. B had sold the facility to a crazy guy - actually, a pornographer - from Rochester. Predictably the small conservative Livingston communities became outraged by numerous of his antics, with the result that the papers folded in short order - a tragedy since two of the papers were between 100 and 115 years old.
WYSL was new and having some success, so some community leaders approached us and suggested we launch a replacement for the old Livonia Gazette, since we already had ad-sales and newsgathering capacity at the radio station. Using then-nascent desktop publishing technology, we enthusiastically launched The Clarion in May 1989. The cover story of the inaugural issue was the WYSL-sponsored appearance of Rush Limbaugh in Rochester on his first "Rush To Excellence Tour." I still have the aircheck of Rush and me doing an hour live from WYSL that Saturday.
Starting that freakin' newspaper was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. Talk about a PITA that was 10 times the work of running a radio station with 10% of the revenue potential. By October 1991 I sold my half-interest in The Clarion to by partner and they moved out of WYSL. To my ex-partner's credit, he kept it alive and had some success with it over the ensuing 17 years.
