[BC] All Sports Stations

[SHAFFER, RANDY L]

Tom wrote -

(snip)

>WGLD 1440 Manchester Pennsylvania is now on the air with ESPN
> Sports and WOYK 1350 York Pennsylvania, about five miles
> away, is also carrying ESPN.  WPDC 1600 Elizabethtown
> Pennsylvania had been ESPN but is now Sporting News Radio.
> There is also WTKT 1460 Harrisburg Pennsylvania and WLPA 1490
> Lancaster Pennsylvania with Fox Sports.
(snip)


Tom, first of all, WGLD is licensed to Manchester Twp, not Manchester. They first filed for
Manchester, but then determined that the transmitter was actually in Manchester Twp.,
co-located with 910 WSBA's transmitter site. They then filed an amended license application
simply changing the name to Township, but not updating the entire license application.
This was the former 1440 WGCB-AM station that was located in Red Lion. BTW. Manchester
is not located in Manchester Township as many people believe.
 
WSBA had been airing the Baltimore Orioles.  But, York got its' own baseball 
team which WSBA signed on to broadcast. WOYK picked up the Orioles which made sense.
1350 had aired the Orioles for many years in the 60's and 70's. In the early 1980's they became
co-owned with WFBR in Baltimore and again picked up the Orioles. So, now they had the 0's
again. But, they had to drop the Phillies which went to WPDC, which didn't have good coverage
in York. There weren't enough outlets for all this baseball. All of this happened around the
time that Susquehanna was selling off the flagship facilities and just a year or two after
they had acquired WGLD/WSOX. Cumulus bought Susquehanna and was left to fix the problem.

WGLD had been sitting dark in Red Lion and needed alot of work. The WSBA transmitter site
was planned to be developed. The decision was made to combine the stations at the remaining
Manchester Twp. location. The beautiful building was flattened and a pre-fab unit was placed at
the base of the center tower for the two stations. They really spent a ton of money to rework the
entire location. That allowed the Phillies to move to WGLD which signed on with mostly dead
air for several weeks in April and then a loop of Phillies highlights..

WPDC has been ESPN radio for many years, they have a marketing agreement to operate
1350 WOYK (former WZIX, WORK), hence ESPN on that facility. I'm making the assumption,
w/o really knowing, that Cumulus used their size to wrestle ESPN away from WPDC/WOYK.
WOYK will be Sporting News Radio too in several days.

1460 WTKT (former WWKL-AM, WCMB) and 1390 WLAN-AM had also been branded "The
Ticket" and are Clear Channel stations. Both were Fox Affiliates. WLAN-AM returned to music
and 1490 WLPA (former WDDL, WGAL-AM)  picked up Fox Sports. 
1490 is also airing the new Lancaster baseball team. WLPA is a Hall Communications station. 
I'm not sure if they have other sports stations.

WPDC/WOYK seemed to have been left out in the cold and forced to look for a new relationship.
Sporting News Radio has benefited from the shifting sands. Otherwise, they still may have
been locked out of the market. Cumulus apparently used the leverage of their other stations
by agreeing to cross promote on their other York stations and agreed not to bump ESPN 
programming to get the affiliation. A recent news article says that WOYK bumped ESPN
programming often for Baltimore Orioles and Phillies Baseball.

There must be enough sports fans to make it work. We have a half dozen stations playing music
from the 70's and 80's, why not have a half dozen sports stations too?

I hope I got all of this correct, it can be very confusing.


Randy Shaffer
Harrisburg, PA