ESPN Exterminating Froggy June 4

[Patron90]

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"

[umfan]

I'll wait and see. Hard to believe FedMed would make such a mistake.

[kwlz993]

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.

[Scott Fybush]

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.

[kwlz993]

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.

[DToTheJ]

@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?

[Scott Fybush]

@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?

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. 

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.

[Lawppy]

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.

[Patron90]

Another interesting thing I've found out is that Swick Broadcasting is behinde WMYQ 101 Warsaw, Columbia City. Interesting!

[kwlz993]

That MIGHT be interesting if Q101 wasn't the most boring station on the planet.