Wednesday, September 06, 2006

ESPN Cleveland - Coming Soon?

In the item about the FCC approving the sale of WABQ/1540 Cleveland to "ESPN Milwaukee" owner Good Karma Broadcasting, we mentioned that Good Karma could take over as soon as later this month, and likely for sure by October 1st.

It looks like Good Karma's Craig Karmazin is already thinking about a website.

Credit eagle-eyed long-time OMW tipster Nathan Obral for this one - the new website under the domain "ESPNCleveland.com" is up and running - with just one line of test text:

Welcome to the espncleveland.com test page!

That's it. No graphics, nothing else...in fact, there's not even any other visible HTML coding underneath that single line of text that's holding down the domain for now.

OMW dug into WHOIS registration information for the domain, which is hidden by the "Domains by Proxy" service. However, look at this:

Name Server: NS2.MEDIANEXT.COM
Name Server: NS1.MEDIANEXT.COM

And look at the name server information for Good Karma's ESPNMilwaukee.com:

Name Server: NS2.MEDIANEXT.COM
Name Server: NS1.MEDIANEXT.COM

It's not like Karmazin's plans for WABQ and potential nighttime hours on Radio One's WERE/1300 are secret. But this would seem to confirm that the ESPNCleveland.com domain name is indeed "official" - and that "ESPN Cleveland" would be the new station's branding, though that really wasn't any secret, either...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's about time for Cleveland to have an ESPN station. I can't wait for it to come.