On October 1, Clear Channel Pittsburgh and the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins will launch a new HD radio channel devoted specifically to the Penguins, the NHL and other hockey-related programming. Pittsburgh Penguins Radio will be a joint effort with 105.9 The X (WXDX), the team’s flagship station, and will be heard on the station’s HD-2 channel. In doing so, the Penguins are the first team in professional sports to launch a 24/7 channel devoted specifically to team coverage. FMQB caught up with John Moschitta for the lowdown on the new Pittsburgh Penguins Radio HD channel.
John Moschitta
On October 1, Clear Channel Pittsburgh and the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins will launch a new HD radio channel devoted specifically to the Penguins, the NHL and other hockey-related programming. Pittsburgh Penguins Radio will be a joint effort with 105.9 The X (WXDX), the team’s flagship station, and will be heard on the station’s HD-2 channel. In doing so, the Penguins are the first team in professional sports to launch a 24/7 channel devoted specifically to team coverage. FMQB caught up with John Moschitta for the lowdown on the new Pittsburgh Penguins Radio HD channel.
eQB presents excerpts from the October FMQB magazine
Rock Up Close with WDVE & WXDX/Pittsburgh, PD,
John Moschitta
“Credit goes to the Penguins. This will be our fourth year with them and we’ve developed a great relationship, so much so that we just agreed to continue with them for the next six years. They approached us, and were intrigued by what radio was doing with HD and were interested in discussing a Pittsburgh Penguins radio channel. We talked about it in-house and thought it was a good idea for everybody all around. We viewed it as something unique that we can offer our audience in regards to a brand that’s very popular and one we’ve developed a great partnership with.”
“We’re helping them with the use of our facilities for what they need to do and passing along our sports expertise in this building. Besides the Penguins, we also have the Steelers, Pirates and the University of Pittsburgh on various stations in the cluster. So they came to us in terms of that from a programming standpoint, but essentially they have their own executive producer in-house. They also have people who are already working on the radio network per se, which we’re the flagship of, who are going to handle the HD channel.”
“The launch of the station is going to be a loop of a six-hour programming block starting at nine o’clock in the morning and caters to what we think the audience is interested in. Tentatively the line-up as it stands now is: the first 45-minutes of the day we’re going to have The Pens Playlist, which is essentially, here’s what’s on Sydney Crosby or another player’s iPod. Then the core of the Penguins programming kicks in. They are going to be doing a live broadcast from practice everyday. After that, the NHL has a show they produce called NHL Live that’s a daily, two-hour show and is broader based about the NHL in general. And then, from 2–3pm during the weekdays, our afternoon jock on The X, Mark Madden, is going to do strictly a Penguins-driven show.”
“The goal is on game nights we want to replay the games after they’re done and if there’s a classic game we want to play it over again. We actually did this already when we got the okay to rerun game seven of the Stanley Cup finals on The X. But we truncated it and took out all the pre-game, intermissions and commercials so it was a two-hour packaged program. We did that as a test run to see how it would work on the HD channel. That’s one of the ideas, and then we’ll expand from there, whether or not we tap into the farm system or some of the other ideas floating around, but the goal is to put on a decent amount of content that we know will attract people.”
“We’ve really spent a lot of time with making plans and coordinating with the Penguins on what we want to do and how we want it to sound. It’s a really cool idea because everybody is trying to figure out why someone would want to buy an HD radio, and we’re trying to give people as many reasons as possible. This is a way to provide unique content that taps into a market.”
“Both the Steelers and Penguins are going to repeat! What else am I going to say? My goal is to see the Pirates don’t lose for an eighteenth straight year. That’s a bigger challenge.”
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