As of this morning, troubled radio station KJLL stopped broadcasting on its frequency, AM 1330.
As detailed in Media Watch in this week’s issue of the Tucson Weekly, the station recently underwent a major management change. Dawn Avalon took over as vice president, and in short order three long-time employees concluded their associations with the station. One, former business manager Nicole Cox, has filed a lawsuit against the company, Hudson Communications.
Efforts to reach Avalon this morning have been unsuccessful. As of now, there is no indication when or if KJLL may resume broadcasting.
This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2011.
This is bull,,I and a lot of people here in tucson listened to this station for years and to be just turned off is crap,,But in reality the reason it was shut down is the station was bought out by a right leaning corporation and they wanted to silence the progressive voices that were broadcast on KJLL,usually when a station is bought the format can change but to just pull the plug is total bullshit,thanks asshole.
Who the hell is this Dawn Avalon ? They won’t get a response from her. She wouldn’t even respond to the advertisers at the Jolt. She single handedly took the station down, the same station that its long term employees worked so hard to get back up and running after some very poor choices were made by formur management 3 or 4 years ago. My hopes go out the those people that this Dawn Avalon has hurt so very deeply. Hey Stan, wake up……
Just a matter of time until the foothills property on which the station’s towers sit is put up for sale. That’s what the ownership of this radio station has been all about anyway. VALUABLE foothills property. Once Aldona died, KJLL became a “plaything” no longer.
Dawn Avalon. You have failed.
By putting you in charge of Tucson’s Jolt, Owner Stan Sprie has sent that radio station to its destruction. After all the damage that every single GM has done to that station, only YOU were a big enough failure to shut it down for good. You fired the people that mattered, chased off all the money that actually saved KJLL, and p*ssed on the grave of former owner Aldona.
Well done. Well done indeed.
The only good station in AZ — probably in the entire SW — the far right is going to drive everything political into the awaiting arms of the One World Order — God help us all !!
I’m, sure it was Stan’s choice to shut it down… Good riddance.
If it was really “Stan’s choice” to shut it down, then why did he not have the testicular fortitude to do the deed himself? Why wait nearly 2 years after his wife’s demise to pull the trigger and send an incompetent excuse for a manager to do it? Only Mr. Sprei or the mushwitted drag queen that glommed onto him can answer those questions. How about it, “Karma”, any ideas? Or will you just keep taking the coward’s way out and deleting my posts to keep people from the truth of the situation?
I’ve got news for all you…those who loved the station and those who despised it. The fact is that it NEVER had a chance of succeeding for a number of really critical reasons including:
1) awful signal
2) bad ownership
3) antique equipment
4) lack of capital to improve ANYTHING
Whoever it was that mentioned that the land the towers occupy if far more valuable than a broken down radio station with bottom-of-the-heap ratings. If you’re the owner, it makes a lot more sense to shut it down, sell the signal to some dimwitted sucker and then sell the land the transmitter and towers occupy.
The station has had a number of talented and caring managers in the more distant past whose efforts were frustrated at every turn by Aldona who preferred advice from her ouija board over that coming from experienced broadcasters. It was never a question of whether the station would ultimately fail.; The question was when. Even cats only have nine lives.
I have to agree with your assessment, tsnguru. It’s been that way for years and it indeed makes much more business sense to shut the station down. Had it been presented in that way to the staff, their lives would have been just as destroyed but they would have at least understood WHY it was time to move on.
But that isn’t what happened-these people were strung along, paid when the new manager felt like it, lied to and generally screwed when they stood up for themselves and refused to agree with insane, counterproductive decisions.
In terms of “advice from experienced broadcasters”, it was taking advice from alleged experts like Jerry Meisner (formerly of Lotus Broadcasting) that put the station in a massive hole. Advice like 300K in billboard advertising for the disastrous Mancow Muller morning show, another piece of expert advice…add in being ripped off for 100K+ by the following “expert”, Kim Kelly, and you’re right-the station was pretty well hosed from the git-go for any manager. But Scott pulled it out of the hole financially, if not ratings-wise, and was making good strides toward respectability when he got hobbled by the boss’ girlfriend-that’s what the whole story boils down to from my perspective.
Why wasn’t Kim Kelly ever prosecuted after stealing over 100K from the station? Her short sprint at megalomania destroyed any chance of success. The equipment was good and the staff who worked on bouncing pay checks even better. It doesn’t matter that the signal was at 2500 Watts. The internet put them in a World playing listening field. No one knew how to market the web site. Dawn Avalon was the final straw, and no doubt the worse choice to have any pretext at running anything. she should have let John C pull it back together. R.I.P. AM 1330 for when a station goes black it’s BLACK
Well Soulmechanic, the signal seems to have been restored, but it’s very obvious to even a casual listener that things are utter chaos behind the scenes. They’re having a minute of silence at the top of the hour where there’s usually a local commercial (one of their few opportunities to play one of their own) and the FCC-mandated station ID isn’t playing, which means nobody knows how to program their automation now that they fired their chief engineer. Mix in nobody around to fill out the discrepancy logs and it all adds up to big fines with the Feds and a zombie station stumbling toward oblivion. Should have left the signal off…all the weekend of silence did was demonstrate the truth of the former employees’ claims about managerial incompetence.