Global Radio axes all regional/local breakfast shows

There were photos taken on the final day, some were uploaded on Twitter, however, some would vanish as did the official Twitter account @955PLJ. But there are some still up

Sadly PLJ was 17th in the world's most competitive radio market and CBS2 reported that they had losses of over $70m since 2012, so it's no real surprise when a Christian radio group who relies on donations can come in and buy these big heritage stations while providing no local output.

The rot really started programming wise when Scott Shannon left in 2014 who was propping up the station's audience share. It plummeted when Shannon took listeners to CBS-FM and the station's target audience are listening to Lite FM, New York's no 1 station.

Shame. Always prefered that to the over produced Z100 when I could listen online without fooling the servers via a VPN.

I'm pretty sure WPLJ was the model that Heart 106.2 in London was originally based on, rather than the 100.7 variant at the other end of the M40.

Presumably 77WABC is now the only radio station broadcasting out of 2 Penn Plaza now.

Yes, Nash FM was acquired by Entercom as part of a station swap deal with Cumulus, so their only radio station in New York is an AM talk station.

Here's a tidbit on WPLJ's call letters: They stand for White Port and Lemon Juice, as introduced in this song by The Four Deuces
I'm sure not many radio outfits on either side of the Atlantic have been named after an alcoholic beverage.

Well, for people of my generation, PLJ was a popular lemon drink in the 60s and 70s, and still available today it would seem

https://www.healthysales.co.uk/plj

They carried WPLJ live for a while during their test transmissions. That's how I know of the station, it was great, and a novelty back then, being able to listen to a totally different style of radio from another part of the world.

They added London weather and other references to Heart, in fact Scott and Todd got into a bit of a slanging match with Caesar The Geezer who was then on Talk Radio UK.

And now theres a Christian station named after an alcoholic beverage!

Anyone know why radio stations in the US weren’t allowed to simulcast on AM and FM? WPLJ was originally a simulcast of the famous AM top 40 station WABC. It had to close and switch to a talk format in the early ‘80s due to people moving to FM for music. Seems strange from our view that they couldn’t just move to FM.

Jesus did turn water into wine! Not sure about White Port and Lemon Juice though.

I think in this case, it was a purely commercial decision to split the FM/AM services in the 60s. WABC-FM split from AM in 1962 initially when they provided 17 hours of rolling news per day, followed by a period of Broadway show tunes, freeform then experimental rock before WPLJ replaced WABC-FM in 71.

The AM Top 40 jocks also presented on WABC-FM with a completely different format.

FM was still a niche medium, which allowed the stations to provide experimental formats for the time, while AM pumped out the hits.

Incidentally after WABC-AM became talk, PLJ became CHR with the Power 95 format (competing against Z100 which was programmed by Scott Shannon) which lasted until 1991.

The FCC introduced rules limiting the number of hours a station could simulcast FM/AM in the 60s but withdrew them in the 80s with a lot of other deregulation. Though I think simulcasting in the same band in an area is still not allowed


I suspect that the reason was to encourage take up of FM, but also probably the same reason it stopped being allowed here - it's a waste of limited bandwidth. Here the policy was 'use it or lose it'. Two ILR stations in the early 90s - LBC and Devionair - didn't have their license renewed partly because they had the same programming on FM and MW for all or some of the day