Farmington…?
WTIC-am’s newscasts now begin with an announcer intoning, “Reporting from Connecticut’s capital – we are WTIC Newstalk 1080....”
But the station moved out of Hartford to a Farmington office park in the late 90s.
Whatever…at least they still do local news for which we must be grateful these days.
I’ve heard this new top-of-the-hour station ID for the last few weeks. The words and the music bed underneath sound more dignified than previous IDs that had an electric guitar riff playing under the announcer’s voice. This new version is more in keeping with WTIC’s legacy. I also like the fact that it doesn’t include the words, “A CBS Station”, as predecessor IDs always added as a tag. I thought that maybe WTIC decided that it needed a more sober ID in the event of having to follow it with news like Sandy Hook.
Now if the station could only time the preceding commercial so that it and the ID end just before the four note time tone. Usually the time tone goes off during the commercial that runs before the top of the hour, meaning that the station’s schedule is late and the personnel are sloppy about having things run on time. I read that during the Travelers years, it was stated policy that nothing step on the time tones.
It would also be nice if the station got rid of that annoying long horn honk that they use as a sounder to introduce the traffic report. I don’t need to hear that at 5:39 in the morning. When the station was locally owned by The Ten-Eighty Corporation, The Hartford Courant had an article about WTIC’s policy of declining any ad that had car horns or sirens. Station management did not want to risk having listeners in cars thinking that those sirens were the real thing.
This is just typical of a Right Wing propaganda station.
The studios are in Farmington. The tower is in Avon. The station is licensed to Hartford. It’s all about how management chooses to position the station overall – and they’ve apparently decided they want a Hartford presence. Insiders get it – the average listener does not have a clue – and that’s what management is banking upon.