By David Scott
Boston Sports Media Watch

Following up on a story that broke over a week ago (#10A in Scott Fybush’s countdown), Entercom today confirmed to Shots that the 11-station deal with Nassau Broadcasting is dead. In a 67-word statement released this morning, Entercom said:

“Entercom Communications Corp. and Nassau Broadcasting have reached an impasse in their efforts to form a partnership under which 11 Nassau stations would carry the programming content of Entercom Boston’s WEEI Sports Radio and the two companies would form a joint venture to own and operate Nassau’s WCRB-FM in Boston.

Entercom will continue its efforts to expand its network of stations that carry WEEI Sports Radio’s programming.

Nassau had confirmed the “impasse” last week to the Boston Globe. (Funny how both sides chose the word impasse, isn’t it?)

Perahps the most incredible thing about the demise of the deal that would have expanded WEEI’s footprint is that it took Entercom this long to acknowledge its failure. The company had been drafting the announcement since at least last Thursday, seeming to signify that even the most rudimentary of company statements need to be vetted through a myriad of suits, lawyers and pretenders earning too much money for too little work.

Instead of sweeping the story under the rug in a short holiday week like last week, the deal’s death lingers into this week and extends its shelf-life. Must just be another case of us simple folk not understanding the beach walks taken by the rich and famous as they “relax, reflect and think” of what to to say in a simple statement.

It wasn’t exactly crisis management, which makes you understand a bit of why they came off so poorly in the still-stigmatizing METCO affair and more recently in trying to re-vamp WRKO 680 AM. They may know radio at the Big E, but they sure don’t seem to understand PR very well.

• It was ignorable when Hall of Famer Earl Campbell said his moronic statements about Bill Belichick last month. Unfortunately, it will not be so easy to ignore now that The Tyler Dope has reiterated his statements to the cameras of ESPN (below).

Earl, meet Don Shula. Don, meet Earl. Now go away. Both of you. (And I can’t be bothered with whatever illness Campbell may or may not be suffering from - sick people say dumb things too.)

• As a follow-up to Monday’s report on the George Kimball rip job of WCVB’s Bob Halloran’s new book, Shots did receive a return phone call from Halloran on Monday at 1 p.m. Halloran claimed he hadn’t seen the Sunday review in the Herald and that he would go seek it out and call us back after he read it. As of this posting, Halloran (despite a follow-up call on our part early Tuesday afternoon) has not returned Shots’ second call. Halloran returned our call on Tuesday afternoon in the 5 p.m. hour.

He did say during our brief Monday phone conversation that he was prepared for the criticism.

Halloran, who has written a prior book called Destiny Derailed, acknowledged the spelling errors that Kimball pointed out.

“George was right about those spelling mistakes and I take responsibility for the errors,” said Halloran over the phone. “I stand by the body of work and the 120,000 words that were written. I feel like George had a very small sampling of what was written and I’m quite proud of the book and I think there is a lot of journalistic quality to it.”

Halloran, who does not know Kimball personally, also said, “I don’t think spelling errors should take away from my credibility. I feel bad about the spelling errors getting through. I’ve read an awful lot of books with spelling and grammatical errors,” he said. “I don’t think, in this case, those errors should make me feel badly about the extensive work of writing and research that went into it.” (He worked on the book for two years, he said.)

Halloran said the book was in the editing process for some nine months but would not identify who the editor(s) working with him on the project were.

“I will say this,” he said. “I feel like Micky is very proud of it and he’s been promoting the book with me. We had about 100 people at a book signing last weekend.”

There is, it should be noted, an “involvement” from Ward regarding compensation from the book’s sales, according to Halloran.

As for the incident where Kimball claims Halloran got a date wrong, Halloran said that he got the anecdotal story from Sal LoNano and took his word on the fight date in question from LoNano. “I relied on Sal’s recollection,” Halloran said.

Halloran, who also does radio work for both WEEI and 890 ESPN, in addition to news and sport-side reporting and anchoring at WCVB said he reacted to Kimball’s review by thinking about that old adage that suggests all publicity is good publicity.

“Not this time,” he said. “This did not help.”

Still, Halloran sees the Kimball coal-raking as “one bad review” and stands by the quality and credibility of the book as a whole. “I don’t know what (Kimball’s) motivation would be for writing a negative review,” Halloran said. “I’ve had a lot of positive reviews and reaction as well.”

Halloran said he has another book just about fully written on the 2006 Chelsea High School Football team (then-coached by lightning-rod James Atkins (book is briefly mentioned in that link) but has no publisher for that project as of yet.

• Norman Chad is at his very best with this Pats-hatin’ effort. It doesn’t even pain me to say that in the least. Pay the Man, Shirley. He earns it every time. The Globe never should have dumped his syndicated offering.

• Fybush speculates on 890 ESPN getting involved with WCRB 99.5 FM and asks, “could ESPN and Nassau team up to flip 99.5 into a sports competitor to WEEI?”

“Team up” is the key term here. Nassau would be fools to buy 890 from the Tang Gang and then move it to ‘CRB becuase virtually any price would be too much to shell out for a start-up that has been so short on basic promotion and marketing. And the Tangers in all likelihood would never be able to afford the price of 99.5 and its stronger FM signal. However, as Fybush is suggesting, if the two groups were to partner and try and make a run at WEEI from the WCRB position, there is reason to think they’d have a fighter’s chance. At least better than the last two weak swings by 890 and 1510 WWZN.

Regardless, Entercom is hardly shaking in its boots from any perceived threat. Despite the hours of nonsense it programs at 850, the station still has the region’s sports audience in a stranglehold.