My goodness am I getting old.
When I first moved to the Boston area in the early '90s, the radio was alive and well and filled with superb stations. WBCN, WAAF, WFNX, and a host of others were available for your listening pleasure. Each had its own niche to fill and filled it well. This allowed one to smoothly move from one station to the next when a song came on that didn't meet your particular taste and immediately find something worth listening to in the next moment.
This has all gone away now. BCN burned itself out on Grunge and then was sold to do Sports Talk, AAF always had a bit of a harder and sometimes hairband bent but is now all butt rock, all the time. The "oldies" rock stations can still OK to listen to but they are just retreading old stuff over and over--tiresome. 92.9 WBOS dispensed with DJs long ago and just plays an endless loop of 90s music that has been played almost as much as the "classic" rock stations.
WFNX was the last bastion of good, new, interesting rock/pop music in Boston...hell, all of Northern New England (and no, I don't count rinky dink college stations with only enough wattage to broadcast over their campus).
All of that ended today. FNX has fired 17 of their 21 staff members and sold the station to Clear Channel. Clear Channel is not going to leave things as is and will in short order turn the station over to a talk format, likely bringing in one of its AM stations to broadcast on FM or change it to a Country or Spanish talk station.
I can understand FNX's ownership wanting to sell the station as its relatively low ratings did not generate the advertising return sufficient to keep it afloat though this is likely the result of poor marketing and development rather than a lack of on air broadcasting talent. Publishing free weekly papers and distributing them around New England (financed largely by the "personal ads" purchased by hookers and pimps, as this is what the "alternative" newspaper the Phoenix--the now former owner of FNX--does, is quire different than selling advertising for radio broadcasts). The final wind down should occur within about a month and I'll have to reprogram my car radio again...
WNFX fires staff and changing formats...
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