Randy's FM news station has about this many listeners.

However, the surprising news is that Randy appears to be actually acknowledging that maybe there are some kinks in the execution of the station’s programming, if not the concept. The idea for WWWN is target women listeners with news more suited to that demographic than the typical news talker.

Chicago media reporter Robert Feder has a source who was in on a staff meeting held Wednesday at the station, and according to the source Randy acknowledged that, “[t]here was a feeling that we’d gone too far in focusing on women.” Feder adds that perhaps part of the problem is due to “the assumption of what women wanted to hear on an FM news station, as conceived by Merlin Media’s chief operating officer, Walter Sabo.”

Having listened to the station myself, I agree with Feder. The station’s news sounds watered down and the overall sound is unpolished. I’m not sure that’s what anyone wants, whatever the demographic.

When last we heard from Randy Michaels he was exiting the Tribune Tower in Chicago, resigning after news broke that he turned the company’s broadcast division into Animal House. While the architect of Clear Channel’s buy, consolidate and gut approach to broadcasting was busy allegedly throwing poker parties, he shuffled beloved hosts and drove down ratings at Tribune’s flagship station, WGN-AM. You’d think going home with a fat severance after his frat party at Tribune came to end would be enough for Michaels. But you’d be wrong.

Randy is back with a new company, Merlin Media LLC, and he’s busy buying up stations and flipping formats like it’s 1999. His newest innovation, if you will, is to bring news-talk radio to the FM dial. In Chicago the station is the former alternative rock station Q101 WKQX, and in New York it’s 101.9 FM WEMP, which also was airing alternative rock prior to the flip, but in a previous life had been home to smooth jazz for two decades.

WKQX stopped being alternative rock Q101 on July 15 and officially started as FM News 101.1 on July 29 with new call letters WWWN. Apparently to meet the new challenger head-on, CBS Broadcasting started an FM simulcast of its 24-hour AM news station WBBM, replacing an adult contemporary format known as “Fresh 105.9.” Previously WBBM-AM aired on the HD2 channel of that station. And, for what it’s worth, listening to the main analog channel FM simulcast of WBBM this past weekend I found the sound quality to be no better than the relatively mediocre quality I reported hearing on the HD2 channel last October.

Q101 R.I.P.

Q101 was the first commercial alternative rock station in Chicago, going live with the format in 1992, the year after Nirvana broke and Generation X embraced the Alternative Nation. Even though the station sputtered with the format in the 2000s, it is fondly remembered by many listeners who first heard Seattle grunge bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden, along with Chicago’s own Smashing Pumpkins and Urge Overill on Q101. This week Time Out Chicago published a remembrance of the station, including staff recollections of the time when the station made the shift from playing Don Henley and John Mellencamp to the Cure and REM.

Time Out also features a less nostalgic look back by shock jock Mancow Mueller, who hosted his successful morning show on Q101 from 1998 to 2006. Mueller calls the celebration of the station “repulsive,” sour over the poor relationship he had with much of the station’s staff and perceived lack of recognition for the big ratings he scored there. These days Mancow isn’t even heard in Chicago, where he still produces his show, though he does do Sunday evening’s at New York City’s WABC-AM.

Randy’s New York FM newser went live on August 12. There haven’t been many heartfelt eulogies for the station’s previous format, since it was only a few years old, and the beloved smooth jazz format was killed off in 2005.

It’s anyone’s guess if FM listeners in Chicago and New York really need a news station on that dial. Listening to 101.1 in Chicago the station sounds unremarkable, with the typical big city weather and traffic every ten minutes (on the 1s, whereas WBBM is on the 8s), news headlines and lifestyle features. I’m not sure what service they’re getting their national and international stories from, they don’t announce any network affiliation. The lifestyle and entertainment stories do seem to be a bit more frequent than other news stations, along with more cheeky comments from anchors. Even two weeks in I’m still hearing flubs and missed cues more frequently than other stations.

I’m not really sure what FM News 101.1 offers that’s different from WBBM. They do make sure to remind listeners that “it’s not AM news on FM,” whatever that means. I also don’t konw why someone would tune in to FM News station instead of WBBM, which has a long lived legacy and brand in Chicago. For his part Michaels says that “as music moves to the iPod…it’s time for spoken word to move to FM.” Uh, sure, whatever you say, Randy.

No doubt, the nation’s biggest radio owners will be watching Randy’s little experiment closely. However, news radio can’t be cheaper to run than your typical voicetracked FM music station. So his FM News adventure will have to be wildly successful in order to encourage many followers. I also have little doubt that many, many folks in the business will not be disappointed if it turns out to be a failure.

Last night I was reminded again about why I like the station when it aired a full concert set of the British post-punk band The Jam recorded back in 1980 at the Park West theater in Chicago. The Jam were very popular in the UK, but never achieved much more than cult status in the US. While contemporaries like the Clash will find their way onto most classic rock stations’ playlists, it’s much less likely you’ll hear the Jam on those same stations.

So it’s remarkable that WXRT has that 31 year-old concert recording in its archives, and all the more remarkable that it gets played three decades later. WXRT plays all of its Sunday night concerts commercial-free, aside from a short sponsorship announcement at the top and bottom. It’s a home taper’s delight, if there are any of those left. (Actually, I did record it, straight to a USB thumb drive using the MP3 record feature on my home receiver.)

I don’t habitually tune in to WXRT’s concerts, nor do I check the website schedule (which currently hasn’t been updated for over a month). I just happened to be listening during a car ride Saturday, heard an announcement and made a mental note to tune in Sunday night. The station doesn’t always feature artists I’m that interested in. Nevertheless, looking back at the past schedule I’ve missed more good concerts than I realized.

Certainly I can go and search the internet for torrents of bootleg recordings, many actually recorded off the radio back in the day. And there are plenty of sites that legitimately record and feature live sets, especially of new artists. But I really never would have thought to look for a Jam set, nevermind one recorded in Chicago in 1980. Hearing a promo for it on the radio is what made me realize it’s something I want to hear.

It’s that kind of synchronicity that radio can uniquely provide, and which, sadly, most commercial stations fail to even attempt. That’s why I celebrate it when it happens.

Use the comments to share with us if there’s a station that continues to provide you with that kind of synchronicity.

Record Store Day, now in its fifth year, is an annual celebration of the independent record store. This year it goes down next Saturday, April 16. Participating stores hold special events, like in-store concerts, while selling limited-edition singles and albums. I’ve been attending since 2008 and enjoy the recognition of the threatened species of the indie music store, even if the day seems to be getting a little too focused on standing in line to snap up the limited releases. This year I’ll be using Record Store Day as an excuse to visit stores around the city that I’ve never been to before.

Chicago’s Numero Group is a record label specializing in releasing compilations of lost and forgotten music, especially regional soul and R&B records from the industrial Midwest. This year the Numero Group is joining the celebration by opening a pop-up store in the Wicker Park neighborhood. To go along with the store they’re also broadcasting a pop-up radio station called WTNG at 89.9 FM. Though no technical details have been released, the folks at Numero have said “pirate” or “low power” are sufficient terms to describe the station. In a follow-up blog post they predict a five-mile listening radius, which certainly requires more power than a “legal” Part 15 transmitter would provide.

Listeners tuning in can expect to hear

“The Eccentric Soul Hour,” “Cutty’s Cutting Room Floor Cuts,” and Mad Dog Sevier’s “Severe Morning Advisory.” We’ll also play vintage regional advertisements (“Funtown,” “Ember Furniture,” “Friendly Dodge”), air checks, bumpers, news, weather, and if things get really hot we’ll dust out the Browns/Raiders live broadcast from 1967. PARTY YA’LL

For those outside a five-mile radius of the pop-up store, Numero is promising a live internet stream as well.

I really like the idea of running a pop-up station to coincide with an event, show or celebration. It’s not dissimilar to the Monkeywrench Radio station Pearl Jam set up outside of concerts during the band’s 1995 and 1998 tours. Putting on such “run and gun” broadcasts helps mitigate the risks associated with a regularly-scheduled or 24/7 broadcast, while still providing a special and interesting radio alternative for a day (or more).

Vocalo is a rimshot station owned by Chicago Public Media‘ based in Chesterton, Indiana that went on the air in 2007 as an experiment in bringing user-generated content to broadcast radio. When it launched CPM president Torey Malatia hailed the idea with a lot of rhetoric about making radically public radio, emphasizing public affairs and public service, but in a more grassroots manner than traditional public radio. Early on, however, some staff at CPM’s main station, WBEZ, expressed some skepticism about the project, especially the relative amateurishness of some contributed content and the how the cost of running Vocalo would affect the mothership. A similar concern was aroused amongst WBEZ’s donor base who were surprised to learn that their donations were being used to help fund this experiment.

Located nearly 50 miles from my far north Chicago home, I have mostly only heard Vocalo online. When I first heard it in 2008 it really was just a continuous stream of user-submitted content and music, with minimal announcements. It could be as exciting or frustrating as such a format could be. Since then the station has become a bit more conventional with some regularly scheduled shows. Until recently CPM tried to develop the Vocalo website as a home for complementary content, mostly provided by a team of locally prominent bloggers writing on topics like rock music, restaurants and local politics. However, at the end of last year these blogs were integrated in the main Chicago Public Media / WBEZ site.

Now the station has announced a change in strategy to a more conventional format anchored on music targeted at the 25 to 34 year-old age group. To help forge that direction Vocalo has hired Chicago DJ Jesse de la Peña to focus on hip-hop, electronic and indie rock. The station is looking to expand the number of programs that originate from Chicago-area neighborhoods. There will also be daily programs during morning and afternoon drive. The “Vocalo Morning Amp,” will be call-in while the afternoon “Overdrive” will feature mix music and talk stories.

The change isn’t unexpected, given the difficulty of cultivating a steady stream of interesting and well-produced user-generated programming. Radio isn’t like YouTube. While a decade ago someone might have been excited to wait to hear her piece played on air, the instant gratification of seeing your content up on YouTube or facebook mere moments after uploading it I think has spoiled it for the contemporary youth audience.

Of course the most well-established form of user-generated radio is community radio, which is still alive, well and growing. I do think there’s a big difference between creating a short piece and uploading it to a website versus sitting in a real studio being live on air. And the further lack of immediate broadcast and feedback one gets as a live radio DJ might also have counted against Vocalo’s user-generated format.

Interestingly, Chicago Public Media had a short dalliance with community radio in the middle of the last decade when it took over management of Loyola University’s station, WLUW, operating it as a hybrid college-community station. CPM supplied two full-time staff–a general manager and program director–and otherwise programmed the station using volunteers from both the college student community and the community at large. That partnership ended in 2008 when Loyola decided to bring the station’s management back in-house, making it part of a new communications curriculum.

I’m not sure why CPM chose to make Vocalo an automated station with a seemingly random stream of user-submitted programming rather than a more traditional community station with regularly scheduled shows staffed by volunteers. Perhaps CPM management got its fill of working with a large base of volunteer DJs with WLUW. MP3s uploaded to a website inherently require less managing than flesh-and-blood volunteer DJs.

I wonder if the re-launched Vocalo will start to sound more like some of the newer indie-rock and music oriented public stations, such as Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current or Seattle’s KEXP. It does really seem like CPM wants to provide service to the heavily Latino and African-American audience living within Vocalo’s strongest signal area in Northwest Indiana, and in Chicago’s South and Southwest sides. I happen to think that would be the right thing to do, understanding that a more affluent audience of potential donors might be found amongst indie-rock loving middle-class white folks living on the edge of the signal downtown and in the Near North.

In any event, I do think it’s refreshing to see a public radio operation willing to experiment with a station alongside its primary signal. While the audience for the dominant news/talk format of public radio has steadily grown, I also think there’s a large audience of potential listeners who could be well served by a public radio station that takes a more youthful, but still intelligent, public service approach. Public radio doesn’t have to pander in order to be accessible to new audiences. However, it may take several tries for experiments like Vocalo to figure out what the right approach is.

The Chicago White Sox just signed a new multiyear agreement with CBS Radio station WSCR-AM to broadcast the home team’s games. Normally this isn’t the sort of news we cover here at Radio Survivor, but the unique twist to this contract is that it comes with a all-White-Sox HD channel on WSCR’s sister station, WJMK-FM. Currently WJMK’s HD-2 channel is a simulcast of WSCR’s AM programming. Presumably the new White Sox channel will take over this HD-2 channel, or perhaps WJMK will add an HD-3 channel in order to maintain the WSCR simulcast.

To the best of my knowledge this is the first deal of its kind, giving a single sports team its own dedicated HD channel. Since there’s only so many games to air, the programming will likely have quite a bit of call-in talk programming. According to White Sox vice-president Brooks Boyer,

We want it to be an open forum where fans can talk about the White Sox. It’s not a 24-7 commercial…. It’s a forum for White Sox fans. One of the great things about White Sox fans is they don’t hold anything back.

Of course, call-in talk programming is also very inexpensive to produce.

The station will also air programming covering the Chicago Bull basketball team, which is also owned by White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. However Bulls games are currently aired on the competing ABC-owned ESPN Radio station WMVP-AM and are contracted to stay there through the 2011-12 season.

It’s an interesting idea, and I wonder what the financials looks like. In particular I’m curious if dedicating the HD channel allowed WSCR to pay less cash to the team. That’s because, despite whatever Sox VP Brooks Boyer says, that all-Sox channel will definitely be a lot more like a 24-7 commercial for the team. At the same time, it is an opportunity for CBS Radio to put some original, local programming on its HD channel, rather than a simulcast or MP3 playlist. I would expect that the deal allows CBS to leverage the value of the channel more than it does now.

Still, I doubt this will prompt too many Sox fans to run out and get HD receivers, unless CBS Radio decides not to make the channel available for streaming online. Due to the vagaries of broadcast sports contracts a lot of live game broadcasts are not available online, though this shouldn’t apply to most of the channel’s programming, which won’t be live games. Furthermore, the programming will have to offer something that stands apart from Chicago’s two sports-talk stations to justify fans buying new radios. As I’ve noted before, offering unique and compelling programming on HD-2 and HD-3 channels is an area where the radio industry has mostly been a failure.

WSCR and the White Sox haven’t yet said when the new HD channel will start. It’s a good guess that it will be on the air before spring training begins next year.

The next morning I googled the station and learned that it’s a relatively new one, debuting August 2009 in Chicago after starting on the FM dial in Osh Kosh, WI in January 2009. Since then I’ve tuned in a number of times intrigued both by the introduction of a new radio format and the fact that it’s a new music station on the AM, rather than FM dial. In particular my interest in piqued since this discovery came just a week after Jennifer’s post on the Aesthetics of AM.

When I initially encountered the station it was playing an Ella Fitzgerald number that I can’t recall. So at first I assumed it was an adult standards / nostalgia format station that I’d somehow never heard before or that was coming in from a more distant market due to the luck of nighttime AM propagation. But a couple of songs in they played Steely Dan, which might qualify as classic rock, but is way too recent and rocking for an adult standards playlist.

The Avenue bills itself as “timeless cool,” drawing on artists who seem to have classic jazz elements as a point of commonality, but otherwise might fall more solidly into rock or adult contemporary camps. The website’s masthead features pictures of Norah Jones Diana Krall, Ray Charles, John Mayer, Nina Simone and Harry Connick, Jr–a somewhat more eclectic array than I would normally expect from a commercial station. Even if all these artists have each sold millions of albums none of them are big radio mainstays.

At the same time, many of the artists heard on the Avenue, like Ray Charles, were once radio mainstays, especially during the heyday of AM popular music radio in the 1960s and 70s. So their music sounds quite at home in the restricted audio bandwidth of AM. Many of these other artists, however, came to prominence in the FM and CD era of high fidelity and low noise. I haven’t heard any John Mayer on the Avenue yet, but music from Norah Jones and Harry Connick sounds pretty well at home on this AM station.

Interestingly, the Avenue is only heard at night, signing on at 6 pm and signing off at 5 am. During daylight hours 950 AM is Relevant Radio, a syndicated Catholic format. Both Relevant Radio and the Avenue are owned by Sovereign City Radio Services.

Location map for the Avenue's nighttime transmitter

Also, the nighttime AM dial is notoriously noisy due to overcrowding of stations and an infestation of electrical interference coming from all sorts of appliances from fluorescent lights to computer monitors. All this adds up to making the Avenue a frequently frustrating listen. Even when using a very good receiver with a tunable AM antenna the music is often marred with buzzes, hums and other interference that is too annoying to ignore. Although I’ll attempt to turn off every offending appliance in the apartment, I’m sure my neighbors’ appliances still interfere. Yet, some evenings I’m lucky enough to secure a nice clean signal that shows off how pleasing the rounded off edges of AM fidelity can sound.

Beyond sound quality I find myself actually enjoying the mix of music the Avenue has to offer. To my delight the station steers way clear of smooth jazz, a genre I have little tolerance for, while embracing the intersection of jazz with pop and rock music. The evening mix of music can still be a bit too soft and adult contemporary for my taste, but livens up closer to midnight mixing in more classic standards and be-bop alongside jazz-rock. It’s not a challenging station to listen to, but one I’d feel confident playing in the background during a nice dinner party, feeling assured that it would never get too smooth or too dissonant.

One way to avoid the interference and noise of the nighttime AM dial is to tune in to the Avenue’s web stream. The fidelity there is definitely more FM like, even if it suffers from compression artifacts like a lot of online station. But to me, the station suffers online. There are hundreds of vocal jazz or similar classic jazz and rock stations on the internet, and the Avenue’s isn’t quite special enough to stand out. It’s in the context of the AM radio dial that the Avenue is such a breath of fresh air, ready to accompany someone on a late night drive or settling down for the night.

The Avenue does feature some very Chicago-centric programming that certainly makes the station more unique. In particular Friday nights feature “Live from the Green Mill” which has live recordings from this legendary Chicago jazz club in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. I have yet to hear the program, but I plan to tune in soon.

It will be interesting to see if the station survives to breathe some more life into Chicago’s AM radio dial.

Like a lot of FM rock stations, WXRT’s roots lie in that brief heyday of freeform radio in the late 60s and early 70s. The station’s rock programming began in 1972 as the nighttime portion of a programming schedule that primarily consisted of ethnic and foreign language programs during the day. It went all-rock in 1976 at the same time as most progressive rock stations started to be come more formatted and less freeform, birthing what would become known as the Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format.

XRT remained locally owned until 1995– a year before the Telecom Act triggered the onslaught of consolidation–when it was sold to Westinghouse, which would become Infinity broadcasting, now known as CBS Radio. Yet, somehow WXRT has managed to survive the era of consolidation and avoid becoming a homogenized, voice-tracked, syndication-saturated station. Instead, it remains a Chicago fixture and example of the Chicago approach to rock.

Let me give you an example of how WXRT earns my precious listening time. On the last Sunday of last month I turned on WXRT while cooking dinner. I heard the DJ announce that they would be replaying a concert the station sponsored and recorded at one of my favorite Chicago venues, the Hideout. Non-Chicagoans have to understand that this is not your typical big theater venue, or suburban sports bar that so many stations use for concerts. The Hideout is a small true music-lover’s place, tucked away in a warehouse district, across the street from the Chicago Sanitary Department. Already I was impressed to hear WXRT working with this mainstay of the Chicago independent music scene.

The Swell Season

Not only was the concert a great, intimate performance, but WXRT ran the entire hour-long show without a single commercial interruption. I wasn’t expecting it to be commercial-free; there were none of the typical “commercial-free marathon” sweepers or other hype. Instead, they just played the show, without hype, and without a break.

This is the kind of thing I remember New York and Philadephia radio stations doing during my youth in the 1980s, but had largely considered a lost art in the post-consolidation era. Like WDHA, nobody is going to mistake WXRT for an indie rock or college station. The playlist is still pretty heavy on classic rock, but is also spiced with both older and contemporary alternative and indie rock artists. It still produces specialty programs that focus on the blues and local music, in addition to syndicated fare like Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

Although I still have to wade through obnoxious commercial sets, I find that my patience is still rewarded by WXRT, which is something I can’t say for any other commercial music station in the Chicago area. It may be one of the last of a dying breed, but I’m glad that WXRT has managed to be one of the rare radio survivors on the commercial FM dial.

Last night Chicago’s famed Second City comedy company premiered their newest production, Rush Limbaugh! The Musical! The play follows Rush through his rise to prominence as aided and abetted by comrades like Anne Coulter and opponents like Rep. Barney Frank. Second City says,

The score for the show will feature a pastiche of Broadway musicals such as Spring Awakening, Wicked, and Rent. You can call it “Dispirit of the Radio.”

I have to admit that I am both intrigued by the concept, and a little disappointed. Limbaugh is such an over-the-top personality on-air that he verges on self-parody. Not only does he seem sometimes to know this, but he even seems to revel in it. So aiming a parody musical at him is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

Reading today’s reviews of opening night, it looks like the critics agree. The Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones writes,

this uncertain show can’t compete with the outsize personality of the object of its satire….

In last year’s “Rod Blagojevich Superstar!,” the disgraced former governor of Illinois went down like a nine pin… . But Limbaugh is a tougher customer than the truly weird Blago, not least because (like a lot of successfully outrageous radio personalities) you never quite know with Limbaugh where the revelations end and the act begins.

More to the point, Hedy Weiss at the Chicago Sun-Times simply concludes,

Sadly, the whole exercise… turns out to be largely predictable, unfunny and surprisingly dated.

Even so, I’m not entirely dissuaded from checking out the show. In this day and age, when’s the next time I’ll have the opportunity to see a musical (even a parody) about a radio star?

I first heard about the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP) when I moved to Chicago in the spring of 2008. For all intents and purposes the project grew out of the former incarnation of Loyola University’s WLUW-FM which operated as a community radio station from 1997 to June 2008. In 2001 Loyola announced that it would no longer fund the station and called in Chicago Public Radio (CPR) to operate it. During this time it featured eclectic indie-rock focused programming, supplemented by local specialty shows of type familiar to community radio listeners. But at the end of that run the university took back full control of the station with plans to make it more student-run and student-focus as part of Loyola’s revitalized School of Communication.

Chicago radio veteran Shawn Campbell was WLUW’s program director during the CPR days, and after the hand-over became a prime mover behind the effort to create CHIRP as a true community radio station serving the city. I interviewed Shawn on my former radio program back in Oct., 2008 just as the organization was getting off the ground.

After more than eighteen months of organizing and fund raising CHIRP finally went online this past Sunday, Jan. 17. Although it’s online-only right now, CHIRP plans to operate like a regular broadcast stations with live DJs spinning indie-rock oriented programming focused on the particular taste and music scene in Chicago. The approach is not unlike a Chicago version of Seattle indie-rock powerhouse KEXP, especially since public affairs programming is not currently in the plan.

But in many ways an online station is a stopgap measure for CHIRP while its volunteer staff waits for the Senate to get to work on the Local Community Radio Act, which passed the House in December. You see, there are no open spots for new FM stations of any kind in the greater Chicago dial. But there’s hope that if LPFM is restored to its original specifications there will be an opportunity for some new low-power community stations in and around the city. When and if that happens, CHIRP will be poised to apply for its own space on the FM dial.

While the station’s volunteers worked hard to build its studios in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood, they also helped lobby on behalf of LPFM expansion alongside groups like Free Press and the Prometheus Radio Project. As a result the project received attention from the New York Times back in December.

With a real studio, a staff of volunteer DJs and an online presence it looks like CHIRP will be in a good position to hit the air running if it’s able to get a LPFM license. In the meantime it will be interesting to see if an online station can be regarded as a community station even without a broadcast signal. CHIRP has made a very good start of it, maintaining a strong public presence at cultural events across the city over the past year. The station is starting off with an unusual amount of momentum for an online station, so it will be interesting to see how it grows and develops during its first year.

I’m not aware of any other online-only stations operating as a fully human-staffed community stations elsewhere in the US. If any of our readers know of any, please tell us about them in a comment to this post.