Majic 102.3 and the TJMS Part 2

This morning when I got to work, I turned on the radio and the TJMS is back on the air on Majic 102.3.  So that article I posted yesterday was correct.  Tom Joyner’s show being off the air on Majic was a temporary situation.  I also heard the new radio personality John Monds this afternoon.  Never heard of this guy.

Anyway the latest thing going on with the TJMS is Sheryl Underwood.  Sheryl was a regular visitor on the TJMS.  Well according to the Black Voices Newswire she’s now jumped ship and headed over to Steve Harvey’s show.

Just when things couldn’t get any more heated in the black radio game, comedienne Sheryl Underwood has jumped ship from her longtime gig as a personality on the nationally syndicated ‘Tom Joyner Morning Show.’

And the BET Comedy Award winner isn’t just fading into oblivion – like some others do in the radio game; she hightailed it over to the competition.

In the black radio industry, the buzz about Underwood’s unexpected defection was likened to NBA superstar LeBron James abandoning the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.

It was officially announced that she is, in fact, the newest contributor to the top-rated ‘Steve Harvey Morning Show,’ which airs daily in 64 markets and boasts more than 7 million listeners.

When I first read this article I thought it was strange since I heard from a friend that Sheryl has appeared on Steve Harvey’s show before.  I just figured she was freelancing.  Sheryl’s crazy (in a funny way) and I wish her the best in her new gig, but like I’ve said before I can’t listen to Steve Harvey.  I’m just not interested in his radio show.

Majic 102.3 and the TJMS

I’ve been a long time listener of the TJMS (Tom Joyner Morning Show).  And like I’ve stated before if they get on my nerves I turn off the radio (since there’s nothing else on radio to listen to) and pop in a cd, listen to Pandora or listen to my music on my mp3 player.  Anyway a couple of weeks ago Majic 102.3 fired all of their on air staff including Olivia Fox who I finally got use to. From late June until last Friday morning they just played music with commercials. No dj, nobody talking, nothing. Last Friday after the TJMS, Majic decided to have 102.3 hours of music without commercial interruption. During the times I’ve been listening to the station, it’s been pretty nice to have just music with no commercials. But I do miss listening to the local news announcements.

When I listened to the radio this morning at work (yesterday was my day off from work) I noticed that the TJMS was MIA.  Talk about a strange situation. I’ve gotten so use to hearing Tom, Sybil and Jay. I was wondering if not having the TJMS on Majic is a permanent thing (did they lose their D.C. market) or just a temporary situation while Majic makes changes at the station. I did read the following:

The recent firing of the airstaff and the temporary suspension this week of the Tom Joyner Morning Show are part of the new imaging for Majic 102.3 WMMJ-FM DC. The shift is to a younger Urban AC and the theme is “The 80s, 90s and today.” Majic 102.3 (“My Majic DC”) is now running 102 straight hours of music through Wednesday, ad-free.

Radio One had fired all of its on-air staffers at Urban AC WMMJ-FM (Majic 102.3) DC the morning of 6/28 (with the exception of Tom Joyner). Those fired include Olivia Fox for middays, afternoon driver Alvin John Waples, and nighttimer Mike Chase. They have all likely been replaced by now, as Radio One previously posted job openings on their corporate website for three air talent jobs and a MD for WMMJ.

[ Editor's note: Since this was published, industry vet John Monds has reportedly scored afternoon drive at Majic. Monds’ first day was 7/13. No other staff has been named yet that we know of. ]

So the TJMS is just suspended for this week.  Oh well, we’ll see what happens.

Anyway since I didn’t have Tom Joyner and company to listen to today I listened to my cd’s including Janelle Monae of course

Check out Janelle’s Dance or Die

and Locked Inside

WNUA drops the smooth jazz format

While checking out my google alerts I noticed an item about Chicago smooth jazz station WNUA. Well the smooth jazz format for WNUA has bitten the dust.  WNUA-99.5 flipped to a Spanish hot adult contemporary format yesterday.  Check out this link to a thank you letter to all the listeners.

WNUA swings to Spanish format

Phil Rosenthal
Media

Adios to smooth jazz at Clear Channel’s WNUA-FM 95.5.

Hola, Mega 95.5.

WNUA, a pioneer 22 years ago with the adult-contemporary format that blended pop instrumentals and jazz influences, is poised to become a Spanish-language station, complementing the music of artists such as Shakira, Enrique Iglesias and Aventura with local on-air personalities, news and traffic in an effort to seize a share of a rapidly growing audience segment.

The flip, set for Friday morning, has been the subject of a guessing game within the industry as other smooth jazz stations around the country dropped the format in recent weeks. But much of the speculation wrongly had WNUA embracing country, oldies or classic rock rather than what is being billed as Spanish hot adult contemporary.

A change in call letters has not been finalized, but the new Chicago station branding will be Mega 95.5, and it will be available online through Mega955.com.

Jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis, a long-time WNUA personality, is supposed to bid fans farewell in Friday’s 9 a.m. hour. That will be followed by a brief audio montage recalling the history of the 95.5 frequency in Chicago, from the Moody Bible Institute to WDHF to WMET to WNUA. Then at 9:55 a.m., the plan is to begin playing 5,000 successive songs from the new format over the next two weeks as an introduction before regular Mega 95.5 programming begins. Clear Channel has yet to name the station’s personalities.

It may be small solace for loyal WNUA listeners, but its smooth jazz format will remain available online at yoursmoothjazz.com, as well as on smart phones via iheartradio.com and to those with HD Radios at 95.5 HD2.

Clear Channel has been on a rampage throughout the country firing folks and flipping radio formats.  No wonder more and more folks are switching from terrestrial radio (regular radio) to internet radio, satellite radio and their mp3 players.

I guess this means I will be taking the WNUA link off my blog and taking the link out of my favorites.  For all the WNUA listeners I feel your pain.  Those of us in the Washington, D.C. area lost our smooth jazz station,  Smooth Jazz 105.9 last year.  Other smooth jazz listeners lost their smooth jazz stations all over the country as well including KKSF Smooth Jazz in San Francisco on May 18.  There are still a few smooth jazz radio stations left but I wouldn’t be surprised if they all disappear in the next few years.  I guess Clear Channel and Citadel would have accomplished their mission by then.

As I have stated before if you’re looking for something online, you can always check out Pandora Radio.  Just type in your favorite smooth jazz musician or any other music artists that you like and you’ll get to listen to that musician as well as others with a similar sound.  And check out the following links for more smooth jazz:

SmoothJazz.com

Smooth  Jazz Top 20

Smooth Jazz America

Relaxing Jazz

Smooth Jazz 94.7 The Wave

Smooth Jazz 97.1 WQJZ

Smooth Jazz Radio Stations

Smooth Jazz V99.7

Tom Joyner is back in Chicago

The Tom Joyner Morning Show is back on the air in Chicago.  Reach Media which owns TJMS, reached an agreement to return to Chicago radio with SOUL 106.3 FM which is owned by Crawford Broadcasting beginning today.

Joyner buys his way back on the air here

Phil Rosenthal
Media

All those fans who rallied around Tom Joyner when his syndicated program was knocked off Chicago airwaves abruptly last month no doubt felt a sense of accomplishment upon learning he had reached an agreement to return to local radio with Crawford Broadcasting’s Soul 106.3, beginning Wednesday.

The real work, however, is just beginning—both for them and for Joyner.

“Not only isn’t the signal as strong as we’d like, but the deal we cut with the affiliate is a brokerage deal,” Joyner said by phone Monday. “We bought the time, and that’s something we’re not used to doing. … But if all this outcry and support is with us when we turn this thing on, we should do all right.”

Having leased time on Crawford’s WSRB-FM 106.3 and WYRB-FM 106.3, Reach Media, which owns Joyner’s Dallas-based morning show, will be out selling Joyner’s “party with a purpose” locally.

Check out the entire article here.

Goodbye Tom Joyner, hello Steve Harvey Part 2

The Chicago Tribune has an interview with Tom Joyner relating to the TJMS (Tom Joyner Morning Show) getting booted off Chicago radio station V-103 last month.  He’s been replaced by the Steve Harvey Morning Show.

Tom Joyner calls firing from Clear Channel’s WVAZ-FM 102.7 in Chicago different from the others

Radio host Tom Joyner is based in Dallas but roots are in Chicago

Phil Rosenthal
Media

Monday’s edition of “The Tom Joyner Morning Show” was typical, as far as Joyner was concerned. There were laughs, some solid information and encouragement. “And I talked a little bit about people who get laid off,” he said. “Because every day there’s a story about people getting laid off.”

Four hours or so after he got off the air, he got the call. One of that day’s stories would be his: Clear Channel pulled the plug on his show in Chicago, where his radio roots reach back to 1972.

Joyner’s Dallas-based syndicated program, while continuing to be heard in dozens of smaller markets around the country as well as online, was replaced immediately on WVAZ-FM 102.7, his outlet here for the past 13 years, by comedian Steve Harvey, whose show has been airing on WGCI-FM 107.5.

“I’ve been fired a bunch of times, but this was up there,” Joyner said by phone. “You know, I worked every radio station in Chicago, including as a cab dispatcher. I didn’t walk from one station to the other, I got kicked. But I haven’t been kicked in a long time, so this felt a lot different.”

Suddenly, Joyner was off the air in the city he still considered home long after he returned to Dallas.

“Tom has been a great partner,” said Earl Jones, president and Chicago market manager of Clear Channel. “This wasn’t about that. This is about the direction we have to move.”

Replacing Joyner, 59, on V103 with Harvey, 53, whose show is syndicated by a Clear Channel subsidiary, opened a slot for a new local WGCI morning program the company plans to launch Wednesday. The thinking is it will pay off long term.

Arbitron’s switch from diaries to Portable People Meters to produce the radio audience estimates used to set ad rates has been accompanied by rating declines for almost all urban formats. But it has produced new data on listening habits.

Folks in Chicago are still ticked off but you can listen to the TJMS on Black America Web.

Classic rock 94.7 flips to Fresh FM

Yes folks, another radio station is flipping music formats in the D.C. area.  Last year smooth jazz stations all over the country including Washington, D.C. and Baltimore were flipping over to other formats. You know how much I bitched/vented about Smooth Jazz 105.9 flipping to the oldies format last year. Now I’m reading that 94.7 WTGB will flip from classic rock to the hot adult contemporary format. The station will be called 94.7 Fresh FM.

D.C. Radio’s Last Rock Overturned
DJ Cerphe Signs Off as ‘Classic’ WTGB Switches to Pop

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 4, 2009; A01

No more Zeppelin. No more Skynyrd or Tom Petty or Rolling Stones. And not a whole lot more Don Cerphe Colwell, either.

Classic rock and the DJ who brought that music to local radio audiences long before the rock was considered “classic” are both fading from the airwaves. Beginning Monday, Colwell’s station, WTGB (94.7 FM, “The Globe”), will switch to playing contemporary pop tunes. With the demise of the region’s only classic rock outlet, the music that helped transform FM radio into a cultural force in the 1970s will become just another baby boomer memory.

Colwell — who has always gone by his middle name, pronounced “surf,” on the air — is arguably the voice of Washington’s rock generation. As an undergraduate at American University in the early 1970s, he began working part time at a little FM station in Bethesda called WHFS, where he explored records by such artists as Jimi Hendrix and interviewed such up-and-coming talents as Bruce Springsteen.

WTGB’s end closes a chapter for FM radio in the Washington area. Until the rock era, AM radio was the dominant force, with narrow, Top 40 playlists. But in the late 1960s and early ’70s, lured by the static-free FM sound, young people across the country turned in droves to the free-form, album-rock format pioneered by stations like WHFS. The music was introduced (and personally selected) by DJs such as Cerphe, Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert and Damien Einstein, who became minor stars in their own right (Gilbert was let go by WTGB in October).

You can read the entire article here.

I have 94.7 preset on my car radio.   I like to listen to it when I’m driving around and running errands.  The main stations I listen to in my car are 94.7 and Magic 102.3. I’ll give the new format a listen to just to see what it’s all about but I will miss the classic rock format.  I read that BIG 100.3 plays a classic hits format.  I’ll have to check that one out.  And yes I still miss my smooth jazz station

Tammy Bruce, the epitome of trash

Author and political commentator Tammy Bruce recently guest hosted for conservative commentator Laura Ingraham’s radio show and she didn’t take too kindly to First Lady Michelle Obama’s recent meeting with Anacostia High School students in Washington, D.C.

Bruce called the Obamas “Trash in the White House.”

You can listen to the audio here at Huffington Post.

From the March 23 broadcast of Talk Radio Network’s The Laura Ingraham Show:

BRUCE: But here’s Michelle Obama explaining to some kids what it was like for her growing up because she sounded like a white person, whatever that means.

OBAMA: I did do my best, getting good grades was always important to me, and it wasn’t because my parents were

BRUCE: It’s all about her.

OBAMA: — hounding me or that they had the expectation, it was just something that I wanted for myself. I wanted an A. And I didn’t care whether it was cool, ‘cause I remember there were kids around my neighborhood who would say, “Ooh, you talk funny, you talk like a white girl.” I heard that growing up my whole life, and I was like I don’t even know what that means, but you know what? I’m still getting my A.

BRUCE: What? What? What — what is that? And then she devolves into that weird fake accent, like Hillary did when talking to black people. What? What is that? That’s, that — you know what that is.

DAVID AFTER DENTIST: Is this going to be forever?

BRUCE: Yeah, that – remember nitrous oxide kid, on You Tube. No it’s not going to be forever, nitrous oxide kid. It’s not. Can you — can you believe that?

OBAMA: So do I need to introduce myself?

BRUCE: What a shame. That must’ve just ruined her damn day. “I wanted the A for myself, and I wanted to do it, and ooh, they said you sounded like a white person, I don’t know what that means, but uhh.” Huh?

Man, oh, man. That’s who he’s married to, what does that tell you? This is what we’ve got — you know what we’ve got? We’ve got trash in the White House. Trash is a, is a thing that is color blind, it can cross all eco — ecosocionomic kind of categories, you can work on Wall Street or work at the Wal-Mart. Trash are people who use other people to get things, who patronize others, who consider you bitter and clingy.

Here was Michelle Obama trying to encourage these students (lord knows D.C. students need strong encouragement) to do well in school and letting them know she’s been in their shoes.   It’s a known fact in the black community that black students who do well in school and speak properly are ridiculed by others in the black community. But what does this Bruce woman do? Ridicule Michelle Obama and then procedes to call the Obamas trash.

Tammy Bruce needs to take a good look in the mirror.  What will she see?  The epitome of trash.

Goodbye Tom Joyner, hello Steve Harvey

Speaking of the Tom Joyner Morning Show, it’s been dumped from WVAZ-FM (V-103) in Chicago and replaced by the Steve Harvey Morning Show this week.  Some Chicago listeners are livid over this move.  Chicago was the TJMS’s largest market.   WVAZ  is owned by Clear Channel.

Steve Harvey replacing Tom Joyner on WVAZ
Tom Joyner’s syndicated morning show dumped after 13 years

By Phil Rosenthal

Tribune reporter

March 24, 2009

Clear Channel Chicago is bouncing Tom Joyner’s syndicated morning show after 13 years on WVAZ-FM 102.7, moving “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” from WGCI-FM 107.5 to replace it beginning Tuesday.

Harvey will simulcast on both stations until March 31. Clear Channel did not say Monday what its plans are after that for WGCI-FM. Any change occurring on April 1 risks being interpreted as an April Fool’s Day prank.

“Tom Joyner has been a great partner with V103 for the past 13 years, making it difficult to part ways,” WVAZ-FM program director Derrick Brown said. “We appreciate all Tom’s hard work and wish him continued success.”

WGCI-FM has aired this incarnation of Harvey’s syndicated show since 2007. But he has deep roots in the Chicago market, beginning his radio career in 1996 at WGCI-FM as a replacement for Joyner, whose decades-long connection began when legendary local radio executive Marv Dyson hired him at Johnson Publishing’s WJPC.

“Steve Harvey is an entertainment and marketing juggernaut,” Brown said. “There are very few entertainers who have successfully tackled radio, TV, film, stage, online and publishing. … Being a ‘King of Comedy,’ nobody can beat Steve being funny.”

The Steve Harvey Morning Show airs on WHUR in Washington, D.C. The Tom Joyner Morning Show airs on WMMJ 102.3 here in D.C. I tried listening to Steve Harvey a few times and I just couldn’t get into his show.   He’s a little too country for my taste.  The show didn’t impress me that much compared to the TJMS.  I’ve previously stated my views about the TJMS and how sometimes they get on my nerves.  When Smooth Jazz 105.9 was still around (damn I still miss that station), I use to switch over to them when the TJMS got on my nerves.  It was nice to have a different radio station to listen to.  Now I just listen to my cds, my gigabeat or Pandora.

Van Niece Johnson

At work I usually pop in a cd in my cd player or I switch over to Pandora after 10:00am.  But I kept my radio on 102.3 and heard a voice that surprised me.  Former Smooth Jazz 105.9 radio personality Van Niece Johnson was on the air at Magic 102.3.   Usually Olivia Fox is on at that time but Van Niece was sitting in for her this morning.  It was so nice to hear Van Niece’s voice on the radio again.