A Few Random Items, AllAccess Style

Here are some local quickies, courtesy of AllAccess:

WHBC IS FOX: With a nod to our ongoing coverage of the move of NextMedia oldies WHBC/1480 Canton to talk, AllAccess reports another piece of that puzzle is complete.

As rumored here for a long, long time, WHBC is indeed turning to a sports network to fill its non-game-night evening hours. FOX Sports Radio will begin airing on 1480 starting next Monday, from 7 PM to midnight and "around the clock" on weekends.

We presume WHBC will keep its existing late night syndicated talk offerings, including Westwood One's "Jim Bohannon Show".

We have no idea, at this point, if this means weekend air personalities like former WNIR/100.1 talk host Jim Albright will be taken off the air. We hear Albright does full-time off-air work for the station, so he won't be unemployed as far as we know.

Anyway, the FSR move means the oldies format will be officially be history at AM 1480 - after it adds Westwood One's Dennis Miller, and the 10 AM-noon show hosted by long-time local activist and community leader Ron Ponder - both expected to happen on April 2nd.

Former WHBC-FM/94.1 "Mix 94.1" personality Brady Russell has been doing local talk for the past couple of weeks in afternoon drive. Now, if only people would stop calling him asking for movie times...

And with the changes to 1480 all but complete, we'd like to do a victory lap.

Months ago, we started telling you about these rumblings, and many were skeptical. We took a lot of heat for some items, and even removed some stuff we thought to be premature.

With the moves reported above, just about everything we've ever reported on the changes at WHBC has come true.

It took a long time, longer than we expected, but here we are. And it's a new era for the historic station. We'll just see how it "takes"...at least some of the moves are very, very risky.

It's not all "positive" for us on this. We don't like to see people A) lose their jobs or B) worry about such loss by reading about it being possible, say, in some local media blog.

But we've heard from more than one person in the know - "this never would have happened under Beaverkettle and Ray Hexamer".

If there's instability at Market South, don't blame folks talking to us, or even local management as it exists now - blame the NextMedia suits flying in from out of town. In our humble opinion, of course...

SCHWAB LEAVING: No, we don't mean WTAM/1100 afternoon sports anchor Mark Schwab, as far as we know.

We mean one John C. Schwab, who's general manager for the Metro Networks operation in Cleveland, along with heading up the company's operations in Columbus and Toledo.

AllAccess reports that he's heading back to Philadelphia, where he'll become general sales manager of CBS Radio talk WYSP/94.1 "Free FM". Schwab has extensive sales/management experience in that market, including stints with other stations in the same now-CBS Radio cluster, as well as sports and TV sales positions.

He'll be heading to the City of Brotherly Cheesesteaks on April 23rd, according to the AllAccess folks. (And we don't normally, as a rule, deal with off-air moves...but it was in the AA scroll Thursday.)

VALENTINE MOVING IN QUEEN CITY?: And almost as a throwaway for us, AllAccess reports that syndicated morning star Valentine could be headed away from Cincinnati Clear Channel top 40 WKFS/107.1 "Kiss FM" "down the dial to another non-Clear Channel station".

Hmm. We didn't know Valentine's show ever left the CC universe.

The Los Angeles-based host also airs in morning drive, of course, on the company's Northeast Ohio "Kiss FM" outlet, WAKS/96.5. We haven't heard any word of that changing...