Wednesday, April 4, 2018

4.4.18 Bee-otch of the Day: terrestrial radio


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Bee-otch of the Day honors are awarded Monday through Thursday, Bee-otch of the Week is awarded Friday on Chuck69.com.

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Name: terrestrial radio
Age: 98
Occupation: entertainers and informers of the general public
Last Seen: everywhere
Bee-otched For: not knowing where the hole in their ass is

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One Mitten is removed while another is put on.

Last weekend, Traverse City adult alternative radio station WWMN/106.3 The Mitten signed off for good and flipped formats. However, it's not totally the end for the station, since it's still on 101.5 in Manistee. It's too bad, however, that people in the Cherry Capitol area will have to find another home for Mumford and Sons, The Lumineers and Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats.

So what is The Mitten's replacement? Mitten News.

Mitten News, LLC is the name of the company that owns right-winged asshole talk 1110 WJML in Petoskey. And whad'ya know, 106.3 is now simulcasting WJML. So instead of hearing those aforementioned bands, there's another station up north that airs talk radio that appeals to those who moved to northern Michigan from Detroit to get away from the niggers.

WJML - for the time being - is still heard on 1210 AM and 101.1 in Traverse City. No word on if those stations are for sale. I know of a few stations and companies that would love to have those frequencies, but I sure as hell won't name them in hopes of not further jinxing those channels.

Granted, I'd rather listen to Dave Matthews Band and Portugal. The Man over the idiocy spewed by Laura Ingraham, Chris Plante, Michael Savage and Dave Ramsey, but the sad truth was that The Mitten was a failure from the get-go. I wouldn't be too surprised if the station was up for sale the second it went on the air. FTR, the station used to be the old WKLA 106.3 in Ludington, but it moved to Thompsonville by Traverse City almost two years ago. I've listened to their online stream a few times and they had few advertisers. On their Facebook page, their listeners seemed to be beyond disappointed.

WJML and Mitten News are owned by John Yob, a political strategist from Grand Rapids. In the past, he worked on presidential campaigns for John McCain and Rick Santorum, plus the gubernatorial campaigns for Rick Snyder in 2010 and 2014. He lives in the Virgin Islands where he and his wife are Republican delegates.

But of course, 106.3 isn't the only radio channels up north having cash issues.

Recently, it was revealed that Sovereign Communications, a company that owns a crap ton of radio stations in Michigan's upper peninsula has fallen well behind in their mortgage payments and their properties are now going to auction. According to this Google cache of an article from the Iron Mountain Daily News, Sovereign is over $3 million in the hole.

But things are a little dicey right now at Sovereign.

Late last year, Sovereign co-owner Bill Gleich (mugshot seen above) got thrown into jail for the third time for DUI within the past few years. Whether or not the fact that he owns a bunch of radio stations in some of Michigan's most-repressed areas is the reason for his drinking problems is beyond me. I've even read that one of their Marquette stations has been off the air for over a year because they don't have access to the transmitter site. Plus, many of Sovereign's stations' websites were down for over a year.

The point is that radio is becoming more and more of a bad investment all because of niche formats like the one The Mitten has and the type of audience WJML is looking for. Doing radio in an area where the only major shopping mall is down to ten stores isn't great thinking, either.

In the case of Bill Gleich, I've met him and found him to be a super nice guy. Hell, the fact that Sovereign's co-owner is former Howard Stern Sirius channel programmer Tim Sabean was also super cool, but that doesn't help the fact that even though they own almost all of the non-Canadian stations in the Soo and they're bust.

At we'll always have SiriusXM and Pandora to look upon.



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