WALL

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WALL

City of license	Middletown, New York
Broadcast area	Orange County
Branding	"1340/1390 Radio Disney" (simulcast of WEOK Poughkeepsie)
First air date	1942
Frequency	1340 kHz
Format	Children
Power	1kW daytime 1kw nighttime
'Class	D
Callsign meaning	We cover ALL of Orange County (see article for alternate meaning)
Owner	Cumulus Media

WALL is a radio station licenced to Middletown, New York that serves Orange County, New York. WALL is owned by Cumulus Media and broadcasts in 1340 kHz with 1 kilowatt daytime and nighttime, both nondirectional.

WALL simulcasts the Radio Disney programming of sister station 1390 WEOK in Poughkeepsie, a simulcast where WALL actually gets top billing based on numerical order. The simulcast with WEOK has been in place since 1999 and has lasted through three format changes.

[edit] History (to 1999)

WALL signed on in 1942, the first radio station in the western part of Orange County. Part of a parade of low-powered local stations that signed on in the period leading to and after the 1941 NARBA treaty and realignment, WALL originally sought the WMID calls (for MIDdletown). However, an FCC mixup led to another station at 1340 mHZ in Atlantic City, New Jersey to get the WMID calls whereas the Middletown station got the WALL calls that were intended for Atlantic City (named after that city's sea WALL).

Identity crisis aside, WALL signed on with a full-service popular music format with a heavy amount of local news, and with only newspapers as competition were very successful. By the 1960s, WALL would evolve to a Middle of the Road format and in 1965 would add FM service at 92.7 Mhz (today's WRRV). It was with the FM launch that WALL evolved into a Top 40 format which became more successful than the previous MOR format.

In 1979, WALL and sister WKGL (the former WALL-FM) were purchased by a consortium headed by media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman and legendary New York air personality Bruce Morrow ("Cousin Brucie"). Headquartering their group in Middletown, major changes took place with WALL flipping to an Adult Standards format; WKGL, meanwhile, would go to an oldies/adult contemporary hybrid. The drastic change was not a long-term success and around 1985 WALL began to regroup by flipping to a community-based oldies format. With this change came the acquisition of sports product such as New York Yankees baseball, New York Giants football, and various local sports. A highlight in the station's history occurred on the weekend of August 2-3, 1987 when the station celebrated its "45th" Anniversary...the station looked back to its past and reunited air personalities that weekend including Morrow, Howard Hoffman, Dave Charity, Randy West, Gene Pelc, Alex Miller, Jim Frey, Mark West, Dick Wells, John Moultrie, Jim Pappas and Al Larson.

The commuinty mindedness of WALL would be short lived as in 1988 Orange & Rockland Utilities purchased WALL and WKGL from the Sillerman/Morrow group shortly after the station upgraded from its original 250 watts to 1000 watts after FCC loosening rules for "local" frequencies. With the sale came a mass purge of staff with WALL flipping to a News/Talk format with satellite programming in all but mornings and late afternoons. A byproduct of this was the station not looking back when WALL's 50th anniversary came in 1992.

In 1994, Orange & Rockland would sell WALL and WKOJ (ex-WKGL) to the Poughkeepsie-based Crystal Radio Group with the sale closing in early 1995. Though this meant initial changes on the FM side, WALL's talk format would continue undisturbed. This would last for most of the rest of the 1990s.

[edit] WEOK simulcast history

(for a detailed history on these formats, see the article on WEOK)

While WALL was left alone and did moderately well given it's signal and status in the market, Crystal Radio had problems with WEOK given the aging demographics of that station's longtime adult standards format. Looking at an opportunity to fortify their holdings, in August 1999 Crystal decided to join WEOK with WALL and renovate WALL's talk format into a station that would target all of the Hudson Valley. On September 6, 1999, WEOK dumped pop standards and joined with WALL to simulcast talk, a format known as NewsTalk 13.

Up against the high-rated WABC from New York City, and sharing much of its programming, plus having programming that was considered to be too "Poughkeepsie-centric" by Middletown listeners, the NewsTalk 13 simulcast struggled to find an audience. In August 2000, the ESPN Radio programming that the station aired nights and weekends became the full-time format of the station. Not long after this format flip, Aurora Communications would purchase the assets of the Crystal Radio Group. Both NewsTalk 13 and the ESPN Radio simulcast featured a large amount of sports rights including Yankees baseball, Giants and Jets football, and Marist College basketball.

Aurora's ownership of the station would prove to be short lived as in October 2001 they would be puchased by Cumulus Media, a deal that would close the next March. With the new owners came the idea of changing the WEOK/WALL simulcast in the wake of ABC's purchase of WEVD in New York to become the ESPN Radio affiliate for that market (and whose north-leaning signal was better than WALL in much of Orange County). In September 2002, WALL and WEOK would flip to a Spanish language Hot AC format as El Ritmo ("The Rhythm"), the first Spanish-language station in the Hudson Valley.

While El Ritmo was a hit-or-miss format on WEOK (where the station's success dealt on if ratings diaries hit Hispanic-heavy areas), on WALL the format did not work given that the signal missed much of where the Spanish-dominant population in Orange County resides. Poor ratings and poor revenues led Cumulus to flip the stations in March 2005 to Radio Disney, ironically a format which the stations nearly had flipped to three years earlier.

[edit] External link

• Query the FCC's AM station database for WALL