Family Stations Will Sell 94.7FM WFME Newark

[Barry]

I still think 94.7 would be particularly well suited for country music, as a lot of the country fans in the area live in NJ, and would receive a strong signal.
Cumulus could buy it as their second FM outlet in New York. They operate many country stations, such as Kicks 105, in nearby Danbury CT, and The Wolf, in the Hudson Valley.
The people posting about buying WBLS may be oversimplifying the situation. I read that the organization preparing to sell it wants it to be purchased as part of a package including most if not all other Inner City stations. Many of them have urban formats, and a big outcry could result if WBLS drops its urban focused programming. As a result it may be difficult to buy WBLS with the aim of filling a format hole in NYC.

[ai4i]

Just did a quick check of the maps.
Even now, WFME gets out way better in all directions than any of the B1's on Empire or Conde Nast.
Is it really more a matter of multipath than signal strength?
How much of a signal disadvantage are they against the other full B's?

[ansky212]

I still think 94.7 would be particularly well suited for country music, as a lot of the country fans in the area live in NJ, and would receive a strong signal.

I agree, especially since WFME puts a better signal into places like Hunterdon, Sussex, Somerset, and Warren counties than a typical NYC station.  These are suburban/rural areas that would likely embrace country music.  Demographically, these areas are similar to places like the Hudson Valley and Long Island that already have country music stations.

[Scott Fybush]

The people posting about buying WBLS may be oversimplifying the situation. I read that the organization preparing to sell it wants it to be purchased as part of a package including most if not all other Inner City stations. Many of them have urban formats, and a big outcry could result if WBLS drops its urban focused programming. As a result it may be difficult to buy WBLS with the aim of filling a format hole in NYC.

Indeed...and that, as well as the Cumulus speculation, was also something I explored last month in NERW. Here's the link to that column, which I've pulled out from behind the paywall to share:

http://www.fybush.com/nerw-1912-wfme-goes-commercial/

As for WFME's signal, while it looks good on paper as ai4i notes, those contour maps don't take into account two very big factors: the skyline of Manhattan functions as a terrain block to WFME's eastward signal just as surely as a thousand-foot ridge would, and there's also the issue of receiver overload and intermodulation in midtown Manhattan from all those other signals coming from Empire.

[Theater of My Mind]

Just did a quick check of the maps.
Even now, WFME gets out way better in all directions than any of the B1's on Empire or Conde Nast.
Is it really more a matter of multipath than signal strength?
How much of a signal disadvantage are they against the other full B's?

I thought so too, based on the maps and the decent reception I get in Manhattan on my table radio. But I took a walk around midtown a couple weeks ago with a portable FM radio (a better than average Sangean DT-110) and got pretty much zero reception on 94.7. Maybe someone with a car can chime in and report how it is driving around Manhattan but I suspect it's probably not very listenable that way either.

[Nick]

What if Townsquare buys 94.7 and creates a New York version of NJ 101.5, complete with oldies on the weekend? That would blow FM News out of the water.

Why would they throw away weekends just to roll out a deep-playlist, '50s- and '60s-intensive oldies format to compete with a very strong, tightly focused WCBS-FM?

Because NJ 101.5 does the same and that competes with 2 oldies stations.

[Nick]

Just did a quick check of the maps.
Even now, WFME gets out way better in all directions than any of the B1's on Empire or Conde Nast.
Is it really more a matter of multipath than signal strength?
How much of a signal disadvantage are they against the other full B's?

I thought so too, based on the maps and the decent reception I get in Manhattan on my table radio. But I took a walk around midtown a couple weeks ago with a portable FM radio (a better than average Sangean DT-110) and got pretty much zero reception on 94.7. Maybe someone with a car can chime in and report how it is driving around Manhattan but I suspect it's probably not very listenable that way either.

Maybe it's because your portable radio can't handle overloading well. My Insignia portable can not only get WFME right in the shadow of the Empire State Building, it can also get 94.5 PST there too. And yesterday with KTU's HD off, it got WPRB in lower Manhattan.

[Theater of My Mind]

Maybe it's because your portable radio can't handle overloading well.

But then that would be the same with lots of other people's radios too. The Empire signals cut through everything.

[TimeIsTight]

Since we are all just speculating and playing "what if" since there are two frequencies on the market, does anybody else see the possibility of a "grand deal" emerging the way it did when WQXR was sold by the NY Times, and the classical format was moved to the lesser (also Newark licensed) signal on 105.9.

In this case, ESPN has long been rumored to want an NYC FM, which would not only be important in terms of local audience and revenue, but would also be important for brand image in the home market of the advertising and communications industry.

An NYC FM would also be a long-term investment for ESPN, rather than just an opportunity to make a profit in the next quarter.

While WBLS offers the best available signal, at the very least, it also promises to bring public relations problems if the legacy minority programming is dumped.  Any buyer is also going to be paying a premium for that legacy audience and not just pure stick value so it would make economic sense not to throw that established audience away.

In this case, a grand deal maker could have ESPN get the 107.5 signal, which offers better reception in some of the outer suburbs, while the WBLS call letters and legacy would move to 94.7 which adequately still covers the urban core of the metro area whether it can move its transmitter to NYC or not.

If ESPN really is that interested in owning an NYC FM, then this is the time, and they certainly have deep enough pockets to make it happen.  So it does seem that they will be one of the major players in how this all works out.  And it's also likely that the WBLS format will continue on one of the two stations after the transactions.

[badjef]

Scott, you previously pointed out some pretty steep challenges in trying to move 94.7 to Empire. If it's not possible to do that could Family really get a full NYC-market price for this station?

Even so, whatever price ends up being paid for 94.7 will inevitably reflect the 10 million or so potential listeners outside of NJ, not just the 4 million or so in north Jersey.

Which will make the move to Empire necessary to compete for those 10 Million people.

Why sit on the side of the donut when the (w)hole contains more dough.

Jeff in Sa-ra-so-ta!