If things go as planned, Christmas tunes should be ending on WRIT-FM (95.7) at this hour and the station should be going back to a regular play-list -- although the music is changing a bit.
Instead of the 1970s and '80s tunes that have been the hallmark of "My 95.7," the focus will be more 1960s and '70s on the retooled "Oldies 95.7 FM."
"It's not really a format change," general manager Kerry Wolfe told me. "It's more of a brand. People still consider us 'oldies'."
Winding back the musical clock to the Beatles era means there's less overlap with stations WKLH-FM (96.5) and WLWK-FM (94.5), along with Clear Channel sister station WQBW-FM (97.3), better known as "The Brew."
"We'll lock up an era of music that's not heard anywhere else," said Wolfe. Another Clear Channel station, WOKY-AM (920) had played "oldies," but moved to Classic Country as "The Wolf" in September 2008.
The new/old playlist will feature songs like Abba's "Dancing Queen," Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," and America's "Sister Golden Hair."
Wolfe says the music change won't mean a change in on-air voices.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
