Townsquare Media Sports 1450 WENJ Atlantic City will drop its simulcast of sister “97.3 ESPN” WENJ-FM and flip to Talk on Monday, October 15.
The new format is to be branded as “Talk Radio 1450 WPG” with actual calls of WPGG. The WPG calls were used on an Atlantic City owned station in the 1920’s and 30’s before being merged into its time-share partner WBIL Kearney, NJ. WBIL would eventually merge into WOV, which today operates as 1280 WADO New York.
Harry Hurley, who returned to host mornings on 1450 this summer will host mornings on the reconstitued “WPG“. The Press of Atlantic City reports the remainder of the lineup will feature Glenn Beck from 10am to 1pm, a local host to be named later from 1pm to 3pm, Sean Hannity from 3pm to 6pm, Mark Levin 6-9pm, John Batchelor 9pm-12am, and Red Eye Radio overnight.
1920s AC call letters. If they go with that, I can imagine some of the local show’s they’d put on:
Nucky’s Corner. Enoch Thompson takes questions from listeners about local government.
Health Talk for Ladies with Margaret Schroeder.
How to Make a Man Happy with Gillian Darmody
Party Planning Tips with Mickey Doyle.
Baseball Talk with Arnold Rothstein.
It pleasantly surprises me that there are managers and programmers who openly want to give historical nods like this, even with a masked fourth call letter.
Unfortunately, when WWWE/Cleveland reverted back to WTAM in 1996, it was more of a pure coincidence that those calls were available. WZAM and WUAM were also under consideration (but were rejected due to similarities between WZAK-FM and WUAB-TV, respectively), and the station was being imaged as “News Radio AM 1100.”
Amen. Look at all the radio stations which lost heritage radio call letters and let a TV station take them when TV owners divested radio stations. TV stations don’t use call letters in branding. Early on viewers started referring to TV stations by network and/or channel number. No regard here for history. WCAU. WXYZ. Both historic calls, now called something else.
And some heritage calls are abandoned because some consultant thinks he has a better idea. Often those calls get taken by some small market station and can’t come back.