Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Post 3348 - Media News

Sorry I didn't write the last couple of days. Wasn't feeling well.

The new Frank went online yesterday and features a full 6 pages of content from yours truly. Over 3000 words. Start the party. Two pages consist of radio and other media news. An item or two were snipped from it, for length. As well, some news came in yesterday. Since this issue of Frank will be on sale for a full 4 weeks, and the news items are time sensitive, I have been given permission to report the following items. As other news items come in over Frank's hiatus, I will report them here as well.

Last week, Alison Clements resigned from Bridgewater's CKBW. She told her colleagues that she would be working at a Halifax radio station, but would not reveal which one. She had experience at MBS, so I looked into my sources there. No dice. By the end of the week, just past my Frank deadline, I heard she was going to News 95.7. I figured she she would be going to mornings, succeeding Brynn Langille and Shelli Summers.

Wrongo.

Alison IS going to News 95.7, but will be joining Tyler McLean on the Afternoon Drive news wheel.

I am glad that News 95.7 has extended its local content day until 7pm again. I am delighted they dropped that 1pm hockey/baseball/whatever sports talk show. But I am not sure that it was a good idea to have a news wheel drive home show again. They had one when they first went on the air, years ago. When Rick Howe's show was on in the afternoons until 7pm, that was wonderful. But the very nature of a news wheel, where you get the weather and traffic on the 1's, and sports at :15 and :45, et. al, doesn't reward continued listening, the way that a Rick Howe or Sheldon MacLeod talk show does. Just sayin'.

Over the last 5 years, in Tatamagouche, we had the only East Coast horror-based convention, called Summer Fear. It was held in a building next to where they have the Farmers' Market every Saturday. It is owned by the man who ran the convention, Richard Duggan. He's a real horror fan. Every year he would hear and read about these horror conventions in the United States and wondered why there couldn't be one in Canada.

He started Summer Fear in 2011. The main guest that year was Gunnar Hansen, who played the original Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974. Gunnar announced that year that he would be appearing in the 3D remake of Chainsaw in 2013, so he broke that bit of news in little old Tatamagouche. The news went viral and was picked up by horror websites like Dread Central and Rue Morgue.

Summer Fear will not take place in 2016. They're hoping to revive it in 2017, but it is anybody's guess. The Canadian dollar being what it is, the cost of bringing American guests up here, housing them, driving them around, paying their appearance fee, and so on, was just too much given the revenue stream Richard Duggan was able to generate.

Let's hope that Summer Fear can come back in 2017.

And, while we're at it, let's hope that we get more smaller conventions in the province. Time was, we had Wolf Con in the Annapolis Valley. There was another con in the Valley for a couple of years there. I remember that Frederik Pohl was a guest at one of those cons.

Send your news items to me here.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy

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