Tag: SAGA Communications

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Radio silence: Progressive station signs off; Saga sacks six, gears up for more acquisitions

Jeff Lenert's progressive talk radio station WPVC has been forced off the air by communications giant Saga. Photo: Eze Amos

WPVC has been a reliable progressive talk radio voice on Charlottesville’s airwaves since 2015. But on June 17, the low-frequency station went off the air. Michigan-based corporation Saga Communications has reshaped the Charlottesville radio landscape in recent months—Saga has laid off staff from the local stations they own, and filed legal petitions to shut down competition.

When Jeff Lenert started WPVC, “the whole idea in developing the radio station was to turn it on and pass the mic to people to let them tell their stories,” he says.

WPVC had Black Lives Matter organizers on in April 2017, one of the first local outlets to do so, says Lenert. The station also offered the area’s only Spanish-language programming.

“So many people are asking why,” says Mindy Acosta, who hosted a show in Spanish. “It’s very sad. We tried to give information to the people.”

Last year, Saga petitioned the FCC to shut down WPVC and four other low-frequency radio stations in Charlottesville. The petition alleged the five small stations’ underwriting amounted to commercials, which is forbidden for non-commercial broadcasters.

Lenert says his lawyer assured him the petition wouldn’t stick. But legal bills—combined with threats from “neo-Confederates” to Lenert’s underwriters—spelled doom for the small station.

“We generated $1,048 last month in underwriting revenue,” says Lenert. “How [does Saga] know I exist? Am I taking away their money?”

Saga announced June 18 that it was temporarily suspending its quarterly cash dividend, a sign that it’s eyeing further acquisitions. “By preserving the company’s cash position, the company believes market conditions may present attractive acquisition opportunities,” says a Saga statement.

Lenert predicts that during the next FCC filing window for frequencies, Saga will try to take over 94.7.

Meanwhile, over at the Saga-owned Charlottesville Radio Group, six people were unceremoniously shown the door, including some of the stations’ best-known personalities.

The Corner’s Jeff Sweatman was given the ax March 20 while his morning show was still on the air, although he says “no comment” when asked about the manner of his ouster.

Adam Rondeau, co-host of country WCVL’s “Brondeau Show,” was given his pink slip April 15. His co-host, Bryan Shine, decided to depart as well. “The decision to leave was because they weren’t investing in the station and they weren’t investing in the community,” says Shine.

“They make money hand over fist,” he adds.

“Big Greasy Breakfast” host Max Hoecker had been with the Rose Hill Drive stations since 1989, when they were locally owned by Eure Communications, and on 3WV since 1992. He got pulled into the general manager’s office June 5, told the “Big Greasy Breakfast” was no more—it’s been replaced with a syndicated show—and sent on his way.

And Rob Schilling’s local WINA talk radio show has been sliced in half to one hour.

Last fall (pre-pandemic), the company canned operations manager and WINA morning host Rick Daniels, who worked there for more than 30 years. And longtime WINA morning co-host Jane Foy learned she was out of a job the night before she returned from vacation.

Charlottesville Radio Group GM Mike Chiumento did not respond to requests from C-VILLE Weekly.

“We got a lot of lip service that we were a local station,” says Shine, who is now hosting a podcast with Rondeau.

Lenert thinks Charlottesville Radio Group and Saga could afford to have the “Big Greasy Breakfast,” and coexist with stations like WPVC, which generate $1,000 a month. “But they choose not to in an effort to dominate the local radio market,” he says, “which appears to me every month less and less local and more syndicated.”

 

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License to bully?: Local nonprofit stations say Saga is out to bankrupt them

WXRK's Mike Friend calls Saga's petition "legal junk." Photo: Eze Amos

Last month, corporate radio giant Saga Communications petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to deny license renewal to five small, nonprofit Charlottesville stations. It’s a move one station owner calls “a blatant attempt at economic bullying through litigation” that if successful, would shut down the area’s only progressive talk radio and programming geared toward African American audiences.

Saga Communications, headquartered in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, is the parent company of local radio stations WINA, 3WV, and The Corner. Saga earned nearly $125 million in 2018 and owns 79 FM and 34 AM radio stations in 27 markets, Its subsidiary, Tidewater Communications LLC, filed the petition.

Low-power stations have a median range of three and a half miles and were created to foster community radio during a period of massive radio consolidation, following the deregulation of broadcast companies under the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

The five low-power stations—WPVC 94.7FM progressive talk, WXRK-LP 92.3 Rock Hits, WVAI-LP 101.3 Jamz, and oldies stations WREN-LP 97.9 and WKMZ-LP 96.5 in Ruckersville—are independently owned.

Because four of them share space in Seminole Square, Saga says they have a management agreement, which is an FCC no-no. Saga also contends the stations air commercials rather than underwriting announcements, run simulcast programs, and filed applications that are “rife with false certifications,” according to the petition.

WNRN founder Mike Friend owns WXRK-LP, and he’s the first of the five stations to file a response in opposition to Saga’s petition. “It’s legal junk” and a deliberate “misinterpretation” of FCC rules, says Friend. He raised money on air to hire an attorney.

Friend says Saga has gone after low-power stations before. In 2015 Saga petitioned the FCC to revoke the license of WLCQ-LP, a Christian contemporary station in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, for equipment violations.

And in 2004, Saga alleged that KFLO-LP in Jonesboro, Arkansas, was violating its non-commercial license by airing announcements that “sound suspiciously like commercials,” according to Wikipedia. The FCC “admonished the station,” but denied the rest of Saga’s complaint.

“They think there’s a finite pie of ad dollars that they think they deserve,” says Friend. “If we went off the air tomorrow, 3WV would not gain a single listener.”

The allegation that stung WPVC owner Jeff Lenert the most was Saga’s claim that the stations provide no community good or services. “I cannot stand by while they say we do nothing,” he says, listing his station’s public service efforts, including 21 hours a week of the area’s only Spanish-language broadcasting.

“We’ve had an immigration attorney on air to take questions,” he says. “We really focus on women’s health in the Hispanic community.” And the station just partnered with a nonprofit to provide 1,400 backpacks to kids going back to school.

WPCV’s Jeff Lenert

In the midst of dealing with the Saga petition, he says “pro-Confederate statue folks” have been contacting his station’s underwriters with “implied threats.”

By having to hire a lawyer, Lenert says his expenses have tripled and his revenues decreased because of his underwriters “fear of retribution” from the “neo-Confederates.”

Lenert compares Saga going after his tiny station to “The New York Times coming after C-VILLE.” He says, “Their intent, from my perspective, is to drive us into bankruptcy.”

On the plus side, people have been calling and coming into the station “telling me how unfair this is,” he says. The number of people listening has gone up, as have donations, he adds.

“Shameful,” says City Council candidate Michael Payne about the Saga petition on Facebook. “Corporate attacks on local media outlets are a threat to a robust free press and local democratic debate.”

Christina Dunbar-Hester is a University of Southern California professor who wrote Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Activism in FM Radio Activism. She says the Saga petition “does strike me as basically harassment because they have more resources.”

“The threat of pulling licenses sounds like someone knows that’s going to be very stressful and burdensome for those organizations,” she adds.

While the FCC wants to make sure low-power stations are independently owned, there’s an “economy of scale” for small stations sharing resources, says Dunbar-Hester.

“We are nothing more than roommates,” says Lenert about the other stations.

The most serious Saga allegation, says Dunbar-Hester, is blurring the line between underwriting and commercials.

Lenert says that’s “easily fixed.” And Friend says, “We maintain otherwise.”

Nathan Moore, general manager of WTJU, says the FCC typically levies fines that hurt, but are payable. “They renew pretty much everyone unless it’s totally egregious.”

He notes, “David might not be perfect, but no one roots for Goliath.”

Saga attorney Gary Smithwick declined to comment about the petition. And WINA general manager Mike Chiumento, who oversaw the monitoring of the LP stations’ underwriting announcements, did not respond to a call from C-VILLE.

A footnote in Saga’s petition makes clear that competition is a concern. “Whether the renewal applicants are abusing their non-tax status is beyond the scope of this petition or the jurisdiction of the commission. Yet, the competition of an entity that does not pay federal taxes with business entities like Tidewater is grossly unfair.”

Updated to correct typo in WPVC call letters and WXRK’s frequency, 10/16.

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Foy fired: Longtime WINA morning host given the boot

Jane Foy’s new job is to set up a regional survey pool that she hopes will be a national model to measure community opinion. Virginia Hamrick

 

Regular listeners to WINA’s “Morning News” may have noticed the absence this week of co-host and producer Jane Foy, but they were not given a reason why.

Foy, who had been on vacation and was coming back to work Tuesday, only learned in a phone call the night before that she was no longer on the show on which she’d worked since 2001, at the station where she’d worked for almost 20 years.

“It was a surprise,” says Foy. “You always know it’s coming because it’s the nature of the business, but you’re always shocked when it’s your time.”

The morning show is being “retooled,” Foy says she was told. The 6am to 10am drive time slot will lose an hour and go down to one host (her former co-host Rick Daniels).

“It’s just a programming change,” says Charlottesville Radio Group’s general manager Mike Chiumento. “The show with Rick and Jane hasn’t changed in 11 years.” The new version will have more features from CBS and be “more like the ‘Today Show,’” he says.

“It was extremely difficult to think about and execute,” says Chiumento. “She’s just a stellar part of the community.”

Before and after: Foy was still on the WINA website Wednesday, but by Thursday Rick Daniels was shown solo.

“I don’t know how I’m going to wake up every morning,” says regular listener Mary Miller. “Jane’s program was centered on local events. I appreciated her ability to keep us in touch” with news around town.

“I never like hearing this stuff,” says Joe Thomas, who hosts the morning show at competitor WCHV and says he once got fired on the way to a public event. Foy’s abrupt ouster, he says, “unfortunately is way too common in corporate radio.”

Charlottesville Radio Group includes ESPN Charlottesville, 106.5 the Corner, 3WV, Z95.1 and Country 92.7, and is owned by Michigan-based Saga Communications, which purchased the locally owned Eure Communications in 2004.

“I feel for her as somebody who’s committed this much time and effort in the community,” Thomas says. “She brought a great professionalism in journalism from the storied stations she’d worked with.”

A Pittsburgh native, Foy, 70, started her career in broadcast at a television station there nearly 50 years ago, doing film editing, public relations, and promotions. One day, a general manager at a local radio station called to ask what she thought of a show. She described it as “yawn radio,” which must have been the right answer. He hired her to take over the program and become the first female AM talk show host in Pittsburgh, at age 24.

Foy’s colleagues at WINA declined to comment, including Rob Schilling, who himself was dropped by the station 10 years ago. He’d filled in as Foy’s cohost on the “Morning Show” after Dick Mountjoy, another staple of local radio, died in 2008, and then Schilling was given his own show.

After Saga pulled the plug, Schilling’s fans launched a campaign to bring the conservative host back, which it did in January 2009.

State Senator Creigh Deeds was surprised to learn Foy is off the air and calls her “a voice that everybody knows and an essential part of everyone’s morning.” He’s been appearing on her show since he was first elected to the Senate in 2001, and says she’s a tough interviewer. “I know I wasn’t going to get softball questions.”

When reached on the phone, Foy sounds upbeat, and says her severance agreement was “very satisfactory.” Another bright side: She won’t be getting up at 4am and going to bed at 8:30pm.

And despite being the full-time caregiver for her husband, who has dementia, she says she will be looking for another job and hopes to do some volunteer work as well.

She’ll still be hosting the Walk to End Alzheimer’s on October 20–only this time it won’t be as Jane Foy of WINA.

 

 

 

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WUVA sale: Video killed the radio station

Kailey Leinz, a fourth-year and WUVA president, says students are excited about the radio station’s switch to digital news coverage. Photo by Amy Jackson

Folks at WUVA, the university’s student-owned radio station in operation for 70 years, announced January 17 that they were selling their FM radio license to a major radio group in town to endow their online video and news enterprise.

Purchased by Saga Communications for $1.65 million, the license and frequency will be part of the Charlottesville Radio Group, which owns five other radio stations in town, including WINA and 106.1 The Corner. Monticello Media also owns five stations.

In September 2015, WUVA listeners who turned their radios to 92.7 FM, then the only urban station in Charlottesville, were no doubt surprised by the country twang pouring out of their speakers. The station had hired manager David Mitchell to aid in switching to a format that would attract more listeners. The radio station also hired two on-air professionals and a professional sales force.

“It was run primarily by professionals and we began to look at it as a way to finance our digital operations,” says Ed Swindler, a WUVA alumni board member who worked for 32 years as an NBC Universal executive.

“That station sounds very good,” says Swindler. “I think, though, the issue that we have—and it’s the issue in all markets—is that despite what I would call a very successful relaunch, it was still difficult to compete as a standalone station.”

And its new presence as an online video and news source (wuvanews.com) will better prepare students for life after graduation, he says.

“Media is changing so rapidly,” Swindler says. “Digital video and learning to report and edit with video is a really important skill set for people being hired, particularly in journalism and news and the management of news. …Radio is less interesting to students than it was years ago, and we just have to modernize our operations and make sure that we’re forward-looking.”

WUVA President Kailey Leinz, a fourth-year, says students involved with WUVA, which will be keeping its call letters, are excited about the sale.

“The sky’s the limit right now as far as expanding our content goes,” she says, adding that the organization has discussed using the $1.65 million to build a studio for newscasts and to buy things such as high-definition cameras and equipment to record podcasts.

Although Leinz and Swindler agree that journalism is headed in a digital direction, the head of the Charlottesville Radio Group says radio’s still thriving.

“Let me put it this way—I don’t think the owner of the company would have invested more dollars in a radio station if they weren’t pretty happy with the current state of the stations they already own,” says Jim Principi, president and general manager of the Charlottesville Radio Group.

His group will soon initiate a study to evaluate other formats available in the local radio market, but says there’s a chance the new station will stick with country music.

Says Principi, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”