En Frecuencia Notebook: August 28
The IFT goes mining for new stations; a programming change in Juárez; remembering another COVID victim in radio
Going Mining
In an August 19 Pleno session, the IFT did something it hasn’t done in a number of months: award new radio station concessions!
Listeners in the Villahermosa area will get a new social AM station courtesy of Álvaro Hernández Hernández, to be located at Buena Vista Segunda Sección. (The applicant is a virtual unknown.) There will also be two new FMs, but chances are you’re not in the areas where they’ll be built.
The two stations are slated for Laguna del Rey in the municipality of Sierra Mojada, Coahuila, and Velardeña (Cuencamé), Durango. In both cases, the IFT adjudicated from among two applicants: Comunicación Agrícola and Centro de Estudios Técnicos Laguna del Rey. Comunicación Agrícola is a serial filer — it filed for 29 different stations last year, most of any single group — and I suspect that the latter applicant will receive these stations. After all, it’s the one who really wants them to serve these areas without any broadcast service.
CETLAR’s story with radio has been a bit long-winded at the IFT. It is a training school that forms part of Industrias Peñoles, a 130-year-old mining and chemical conglomerate. Velardeña is a zinc, lead and copper mine; Laguna del Rey, also known as Química del Rey, is the largest sodium sulfate producer on the continent.
In February 2019, the IFT denied applications from this applicant to open stations in these areas. The difference was that those applications were for community radio stations. The IFT set a precedent thus that a community station application from a mining group must incorporate actual miners and not merely management. That precedent was then used to deny Asociación Amiga, the ex-XHHCC-FM Hércules, Coah. (also in Sierra Mojada municipality), a community concession, though Rafael Eslava Herrada, head of the Concessions and Services Unit, said that it might have been permissible as a pure social station — of the type that Laguna del Rey looks to be getting.
The Pleno meeting also brought approval of a delay for the new IPN multiprogramming greenlit on August 5 and a transmitter donation for community outlet XHCUE-FM in Cuerámaro, Guanajuato.
W Comes to Juárez
A pairing of radio industry flashpoints this year has come to pass in a new affiliation that will start on Monday. Listeners in Ciudad Juárez will hear W Radio programming on XEJPV-AM 1560, a MegaRadio station.
It’s an uneasy pairing not only because of the ownership turmoil that has erupted at Radiópolis this week but also in light of what we know about XEJPV: that its days are likely numbered as a concesión vencida, with only an appeal to the Supreme Court separating it from extinction.
Another COVID Victim
Daniela “Danyta” Arce, DJ at XHEY-FM Aguascalientes, has died of COVID-19.
She was caring for her elderly parents and was the one who did all the shopping in her household, fearful that they would catch the virus. Instead, she ended up hospitalized and on a ventilator, and despite a seeming improvement over the preceding days, she died on Thursday.
