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WCNW 1560 Goes Dark. Forever.

So the license is being turned in?

This is one station I've never really thought about at all. Did it ever appear in the ratings? There were other small stations in the area that somehow eluded appearing the ratings, but at least I thought about most of those from time to time.

I remember WCNW coming in fairly clearly in northern Kentucky the very few times I ever stumbled upon it.
 
It's been mostly brokered religious for decades. That high-band signal has been DXable for me on some winter days in East Tennessee and in Lafayette, IN. The towers were visible from Jungle Jim's.
 
I used to work at a Daytime only station on 1560 am in Chardon, Ohio. When I was there, it was WBKC. It was sold to new owners who changed the format to Country, and let some people go. Some years later, the owners purchased WQLS 1460 am in Painesville, which was a 24-hour station, and new owners bought 1560. Somewhere over the years, the station's call letters became WATJ and nearing the end, they would sign off at 5 p.m., even when they could stay on well past that. One of the few times I was able to tune it, they had a strange music program, or format, that featured some rather inaccessible acoustic based - I guess - Folk music.
 
I didn’t see this coming but have to admit, every time I dialed up 1560 they seemed to be tracking CDs. You’d hear the 4-5 seconds of silence in between tracks. Only occasionally would an announcer pipe in and it was always the same guy. Virtually no commercials and a notable lack of preaching programs In recent years. Not sure how the station was sustaining itself.

Sad to see the continued demise of AM. But when the land the towers and facilities sits on is more valuable than the station itself, as seems to increasingly be the case all over, I guess it only makes good financial sense.
 
keys2 said:
Sad to see the continued demise of AM. But when the land the towers and facilities sits on is more valuable than the station itself, as seems to increasingly be the case all over, I guess it only makes good financial sense.
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I don't believe that the shutdown of high band, daytime-only, and signal impaired AM stations is as dire for AM radio, in general, as some would make it out to be. When big 24 hour operations, like WLW-AM go dark, that's when it's "Oh-Oh" time. What would also give me concern is if some long-time successful local stations would go dark. I think that one of the challenges, in an environment where its more difficult to keep billing up, is having the money to properly, and fully, repair and/or purchase new things that affect the stations signal/coverage. I wonder how often technical maintenance reasons are what brought on the shut downs. For example, in Northeast Ohio, day timers, WKNT AM 1530(?) in Kent and, most recently, WWGK AM-1540 in Cleveland permanently shut down.

In the case of WKNT, I think that was the owners first station, and I'm guessing they had an emotional attachment to it, so they kept it going by operating it on an 'as-cheaply-as-possible' basis, even lowering themselves to carrying audio from (their?) locally owned cable TV station and positioning it as "TV on the radio" until they picked up syndicated talk.

In the case of WWGK, they had an actual worthy use for it with all of the sports-overflow programming, and network programs that they didn't carry on their main station WKNR-AM850. It's where Jim Rome's syndicated show went after WKNR added more local content.
 
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