• 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

WSYR / Unacceptable Mediocrity

The early 80s were the high-water mark for Syracuse radio journalism.

You had WSYR and WHEN, each with 10 or 11 person newsrooms, doing heavy news. SYR had an afternoon news block, if my memory is correct. HEN ran live and local newscasts 24 hours a day (the only exception: 1a-5a weekend overnights). Big newsrooms fighting hard in the streets for beats, scoops and good enterprise stories.

Then you had WFBL, WSEN, WNDR putting three or four person newsrooms in the field at various times.

WAER and WRVO had people on the streets, too.

I'd go to a proclamation signing at Mayor Lee Alexander's office and there'd sometimes be five or six radio microphones. Alexander's staff built a slotted microphone tray to hold all the radio and TV mics.

Air traffic: Cap't Scott King vs. Al Verley, both in the air.

Call For Action, Doug Brode reviews, cars equipped with two-way radios and Marti units for live broadcasting in good quality. The Heavy Chevy.

WSYR had their trailer for broadcasting from the State Fair. We had a hand-built (by engineer/jock Roy Taylor) mast U-bolted to the back of a station car so we could go live via Marti from Romulus in Seneca County for the protests at the Army Depot.

What killed it?

Y-94 FM

WHEN didn't stay up with the times. Its music stayed stuck in an older AC mode. When the crosstown folks blew up the great 94 Rock and turned it into Y-94, they got it just right. The music was more current and pulled the younger audience away. They correctly anticipated the end of all-day personality radio. Y-94's first book blew a huge hole in WHEN. I remember the day very well.

It was a long, slow swirl down the drain from there. First, the smaller stations gave up on all but a token news effort. Then WHEN shrank until it was gone, sold to the opposition and turned eventually into an audio phonebooth.

But for a couple of decades, some of the best radio news in the country was happening in Syracuse. We played big, we sounded big, and brilliant managers like Bill Carey made pennies of investment sound like dollars. Was it perfect, No. Was it really good the overwhelming majority of the time? Yes.

Can it happen again? Not a chance. Those days are gone for good. Even the survivor, WSYR, is not what it was, though the people still left there are busting their asses to do their best work. WAER and my new home, WRVO, both work hard at news, but not in the manner of an hourly full-service station.

This is one of those rare cases where "the good old days" were, in fact, as good as you remember them. Maybe better.
 
I second that! Syracuse radio was great back in the 60s and 70s. And the newsrooms and folks in them were a big part of it. Lots of major league talent passed through town on the music and news sides.
 
Busting their a****, my a**

From Dave Bullard:
"Even the survivor, WSYR, is not what it was, though the people still left there are busting their asses to do their best work."

that would explain why nia carter sometimes misses reports at the bottom of the hour right?
 
Rome, my point was that the 80's were the high-water mark of radio news in this town. And, yes, I believe that the folks at the Mighty 570 are going above and beyond on an average day to try to make what they have now sound like what they used to have.

For example: The PD is no friend of mine -- he and I were oil and water from day one, and there weren't that many days after that -- but I couldn't do his job (and wouldn't). PD for two or three stations, including a personnel-intensive news/talker, plus news director for WSYR as I was never replaced. You can critique the quality of the output (I can't; I stopped listening regularly when I was let go and quit altogether when Brent Axe went back on the air, supplementing my iPod and NPR) but you can't question the amount of work those folks are willing to take on.

I missed a few of those half-hours myself when I was there (hell, everyone there has) and, having made enough mistakes in my career to fill the Manhattan phone book, I'm in no position to judge.
 
What I seem to remember Dave is that after your grand departure Chris Weidman, your protege, became News Director. People seemed to think he did a swell job, too. Some of the people who have left say they even liked him better as a leader. Interesting.
 
"WHEN didn't stay up with the times. Its music stayed stuck in an older AC mode. When the crosstown folks blew up the great 94 Rock and turned it into Y-94, they got it just right. The music was more current and pulled the younger audience away. They correctly anticipated the end of all-day personality radio. Y-94's first book blew a huge hole in WHEN. I remember the day very well."

Speaking from an admittedly biased viewpoint as a WHEN alum, I'd partially agree. WHEN never lost its edge on personality, presentation and service while it was a full service AC--but may have stayed with Jim Ashbery's basic 1973 music format a lot longer than it should have (they stayed with it long beyond Ashbery's own move out of the market toward bigger things). They should have de-emphasized the 50s and 60s gold which made up more than 1/4 of a given hour's music rotation, replacing it with newer recurrents. That would have bought WHEN more time to make the other, more substantial formatic changes they needed. What were those changes? Away from music entirely and toward talk. AM Stereo never gelled as an alternative to FM stereo for music (although in the early 1980s it perhaps could have), for reasons I won't get into now, and FM just sounded better for music than mono AM--so FM inevitably got the music listeners gradually over time. Once AM Stereo misfired there was nothing an AM station could do about it except move to a format based on spoken-word programming. WHEN responded to that reality too late with too little.

There was nothing wrong with all-day personality radio on AM...it just needed to keep its newscasters and news schedule in place and move to a full service talk format. WHEN actually had the talented people on staff to bring it off well (Phil Markert would certainly have been a memorable morning talk host if he'd gotten the chance). All they had to do was pull the trigger by 1985 and they'd have been the dominant AM in the market instead of WSYR. One AM full service station running either a pop/CHR or AC format in every large market in the state managed to see the future during the 1980s and make the switch--in New York it was WABC, in Buffalo it was WBEN, in Rochester, WHAM, in the Capital District, WGY. WHEN could have been that station in Syracuse instead of WSYR, and was arguably in a better position with better staff to do it. But it missed the boat just like WKBW did in Buffalo.(KB, of course, is another story for another board...)
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom