Car hits WZGV-AM

Marty Hurney was just wrapping up his afternoon show just before 3:00 PM at WZGV-AM, aka ESPN 730 in Charlotte, NC. He and his co-host Tom Sorenson were surprised to say the least. Two cars collided at the corner of Morehead Street and Church redirecting one of the cars into the one of the cars flew into their building at 801 East Morehead Street. The impact bent the window frame and broke a lot of glass but no radio station staff were injured. More here.

Because this is radio, you can now know what a car crashing into a radio station sounds like:

CLICK HERE

WWDB-AM gets Deportes

As of Monday August 6th  860 WWDB-AM is an outlet for ESPN Deportes. They had been running Business news for years, about a decade actually. Interestingly this is not their first foray into the world of espanol. While the station was still owned by Doug Hibbs in the 1960s the station ran mixed ethnic programming including Spanish music. The only English-language programing was a morning christian show hosted by Harry Bristow.  When Beasley bought  it in 1988 the weekday programming all changed to Spanish Contemporary. The call letters were still WTEL-AM back then and were until 1998. At the time the station simulcasted some programming on WWDB-FM 96.5. In a fit of demographics Beasley moved the talk shows to the AM stick. Things all went to hell.  More here and here.

Listeners got all pissed off.  Then they moved the talk shows back and flipped 860 AM to a CNN feed. then a year later they changed the calls back to WTEL-AM and tried running religious talk. Some records refer to this as "gospel programming" which I think is less of an error and more of a disagreement of nomenclature.  Regardless, that format didn't last either. In November of 2000 they flipped it to Business News. And so it was until 48 hours ago. The upside for them was that a format flip on a daytimer is a piece of cake. One station signs off, and a different one signs on the next morning. No transition, just 10 long hours of blitzing AM band noise.
WWDB-AM Before:


WWDB-AM After:


It made me wish that the Philadelphia Radio Archives had gotten to their history of WWDB. Sadly that page remains blank. Please do excuse the audio quality, it is an AM station after all.

Auto Racing on Radio

In the last century almost any imaginable type of radio program has been attempted. There are book shows, cooking shows, advice programs, political talk, sex talk, interview programs, football, baseball, and basketball. But some sports don't lend themselves to radio, at least I didn't' think so. So of the major sporting seasons there are only two that didn't make the cut. Ones too fast the others too slow: auto racing and golf.ESPN synchronized swimming. For all that's going on, none of it translates to really changed that. They've covered ping pong, sumo wrestling, arm wrestling and even good play-by-play. On 1090 XESPN in San Diego the only local program is an auto racing show on Sunday mornings.

Their Golf Talk program is based at 1230 KGEO-AM. It amazes me but they actually have affiliates for it. If you listen to this I want to know why. As a network they have no programming quality standards of any kind. It's improved since their inception in 1992, but I think it has roots in their cable TV roots.

ESPN is an acronym for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Originally this was a cable network. It was founded by Bill Rasmussen, formerly a reporter for WWLP-TV. His single satellite channel ran sports programming 24 hours a day. In order to do that they broadcast some lesser events: Australian rules football, badminton, pro-wrestling, slow pitch softball... While this was largely cured in their TV programming, this seems to have lived on in their radio programming.