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n long car trips, or even short jaunts to the store, the person who gets to fiddle with the radio has a coveted spot, the car music czar. But lately around Concord the privilege has come with a special challenge, too: remembering which station plays what.

Over the past five years, commercial radio stations in the Concord area have changed hands, call letters, talk personalities, genres and formats at a fast clip. The financial stakes have grown, too.

Just last week, Nassau Broadcasting, which paid a combined $26 million for nine Concord stations a year ago, announced its classic rock station 93.3 FM, "I-93," would be renamed "The Wolf"and play country. Its country station "Outlaw" 102.3 FM would be called "The Hawk" and play classic rock, broadcasting the same music as another Nassau classic rock station, 101.5 FM in Meredith.

The radio station shuffle in Concord has mirrored consolidation in the radio industry throughout the country over the past decade, since the Federal Communications Commission relaxed ownership regulations and allowed companies to own multiple stations in the same market.

But things have been more confusing in Concord than elsewhere because the city has experienced not one wave of ownership consolidation but two. And that's not the only change: Despite changing hands four times in the past five years, local news station WKXL 1450 AM has returned to covering the nuts and bolts of local life - city council meetings and high school sports. And classical music, which went off the air entirely in 2001, came back last year when nonprofit Highland Community Broadcasting put WCNH 94.7 FM on the air and WKXL started broadcasting classical at night.

If video killed the radio star, no one around here seems to have noticed.

"Radio is a hot property. All of the sudden someone woke up and said radio is important," said WTPL radio personality Arnie Arnesen. "It's the oldest thing around but the most intimate. . . . Radio can go in the car with you, in the tub with you, room to room with you."

Few restrictions

For most of New Hampshire's radio history, stations were owned by small companies or private individuals, who were prohibited by the FCC from controlling more than one FM and one AM station in the same market.

But the recession in the early 1990s took its toll on stations across the band, prompting companies to clamor for looser rules, according to longtime radio personality Dick Osborne, one of the former owners of WKXL. As a result, the FCC eased up slightly on the restrictions in 1992, allowing companies to own two FM stations in the same market, and overhauled them completely with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed companies to own four FM stations in a small market, like Concord, and more in big cities.

And consolidation began.

"Very few restrictions have remained and like in many other businesses, companies found it advantageous to own clusters,"Osborne said. "I doubt very seriously we're headed back the way we came from."

In New Hampshire, the first wave of consolidation occurred in 1999 and 2000, when Delaware-based Tele-Media paid a combined $9 million for three stations, including Oldies 99, and Vox Radio Group bought five stations, including WJYY 105.5 FM and WKXL 1450 AM, for $5.1 million.

Consolidation wave No. 2 happened a year ago, when New Jersey-based Nassau Broadcasting bought three stations from Vox for $9 million, another three stations from Tele-Media for $12 million and three stations from New Hampshire-based Sconnix Broadcasting for $5 million, including WBHG 101.5 FM.

At about that time another Vox station, WTPL 107.7 FM, splintered off and was bought by Great Eastern Radio for $1.5 million, while Vox sold WKXL 1450 AM to Warren Bailey's Embro Communications for $370,000 in 2002 and Bailey sold it to former U.S. senator Gordon Humphrey for $800,000 last year.

'Crying out in the wilderness'

Founded by Dartmouth College friends Jeff Shapiro and Bruce Danziger and Vermont radio station owner Ken Barlow, Vox Radio Group was created in 1999, purchasing WKXL 1450 AM in Concord and several stations in Vermont.

Named for the Latin "voice" and for Dartmouth slogan "Vox clamantis in deserto" ("A voice crying out in the wilderness"), Vox quickly amassed 35 stations throughout New England, taking advantage of the fact that consolidation had hit the big-city radio markets but had not yet trickled down to places like Concord.

"Our whole strategy was to go into a market like Concord and see if we could buy stations from what were still then individual owners, who did not have access to big-time capital and had no plans to expand, but might like to sell," Danziger said.

For Vox, the turnaround was quick. Just five years later, the company has stripped itself of all but a handful of stations, clustered in western Massachusetts.

"Venture capital needs high returns," Danziger said. "For our capital sources, their goal was not to be in there for 20 years, their goal was to invest in us and have us grow their stations and then sell them."

And in early 2004, at least around Concord, the timing seemed right.

"The general reason we sold last year was growth was slowing down and (the stations) were maturing,"he said. "We had taken them about as far as we could take them, and there was demand, so we thought we could get a good price."

At Tele-Media, the story was a bit different. While Vox doubled its investment in New Hampshire stations over four years, Tele-Media made some money, but not nearly a 100 percent return.

"Tele-Media expanded so rapidly and had so many stations in secondary markets and paid too much for these stations," said Ed Brouder, a broadcast historian who works for WZID 95.7 FM in Manchester. "You could speculate that's why Tele-Media sold recently to Nassau, to get out from under it."

For Clark Smidt, the founder of Oldies 99, selling to Tele-Media proved something of a disappointment.

"It was tough being a solo operator," said Smidt, who sold to Tele-Media for $2.5 million in 2000 and is now a consultant. "I wanted to grow, and I really couldn't do the whole thing myself. At the time, radio didn't look as valuable as it is today -consolidation changed that. Tele-Media said they wanted me to help their company, but unfortunately Tele-Media did not grow - they sold their station."

By consolidating stations, Vox and Tele-Media did the heavy lifting, according to Fybush of NorthEast Radio Watch, smoothing the way for the 52-station New Jersey company to come into New Hampshire.

"It was a very convenient opportunity for Nassau to come into the market as easily as it did," he said.

Duplicate programming

A group that stays out of big city markets, preferring suburban and rural areas, Nassau Broadcasting has begun to take advantage of having a cluster of stations in the same market.

With this week's station shuffle, the company has enabled itself to duplicate classic rock programming on 101.5 FM and 102.3 FM, keeping commercials and community announcements local.

It's a strategy that has worked for the company before.

"We did have success with two classic rock stations in New Jersey," said Mark Edwards, Nassau's New Hampshire programming director. "It was a very successful approach."

At the other end of the spectrum, Humphrey, a former two-term senator, has rededicated WKXL 1450 AM to being as local as it can.

"We want to be as good as the Concord Monitor in reporting the local news, stressing the word local, and as good or better than WEVO in providing intellectual and cultural contact in local, again stressing local programming," he said.

With four reporters, Humphrey said WKXL probably has more radio journalists than any other commercial station in the state and boasts the heaviest schedule of high school sports.

"We've gotten rid of all of the horrible nationally syndicated programming the station featured in recent years over the last three months and created local programming of a variety of kinds," he said. The station's new motto is "Celebrating Concord and the Capital Region."

"The quality of radio broadcasting nationally has declined precipitously, and we're out to prove that a small local radio station that's independently owned can make a go of it," he said. "We're trying to be just one little candle in the darkness of radio broadcasting."

He's even decided to air classical music from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. weeknights and challenged WEVO to do the same. "It's really cheeky for a little AM station to be broadcasting classical music," he said.

He has company, albeit on the FM dial.

Classical station WCNH went on the air last February, broadcasting Mozart, Beethoven and Bach 24 hours a day. The nonprofit company gets its music via satellite from Chicago and does some local programming, but it defers to a national music host to give background.

"There was nothing to be gained by doing it locally; it would be inferior," said Highland Community Broadcasting president Harry Kozlowski, a former program director for WJYY and I-93.

The station went on the air for just $17,000, and the organization spent another $10,000 upgrading facilities. But the trim budget was possible only because the station is a low-power frequency, the radio equivalent to community-access television. Otherwise, airtime would have been impossible.

"There was a time when you could buy radio stations for a few thousand dollars, but those day are long gone," Kozlowski said. "Radio stations are beyond the reach of citizens. The average public citizen has no prayer of ever owning and being able to broadcast on a public frequency."

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By ANNE RUDERMAN

Monitor staff