CJAD

CJAD
City Montreal, Quebec
Broadcast area Greater Montreal
Branding CJAD 800/Newstalk 800 CJAD
Slogan "When Montreal needs an answer."
"When Montreal needs to talk."
"When Montreal needs Impact soccer."
Frequency 800 kHz
Repeater(s) 107.3 CITE-HD2
First air date 1945
Format News/talk
Power 50,000 watts (daytime)
10,000 watts (nighttime)
Class B
Transmitter coordinates 45°14′49.92″N 73°31′23.16″W / 45.2472000°N 73.5231000°W / 45.2472000; -73.5231000
Callsign meaning Joseph-Arthur Dupont (founder)
Owner Bell Media
(Bell Media Radio)
Sister stations CFCF-DT, CHOM, CJFM, CKGM, CITE, CKMF
Website www.cjad.com

CJAD is an AM radio station, owned by Bell Media, operating in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The station has an English language news/talk format and identifies itself on-air as 'CJAD 800'. Owned and operated by Bell Media, it broadcasts at 800 kHz. It has a daytime power of 50,000 watts and a nighttime power of 10,000 watts, as a class B station, using a very directional antenna with different patterns day and night to protect various other stations on the same frequency, including CJBQ in Belleville, Ontario; a vacant allocation in Quebec City (formerly CHRC); CKLW in Windsor, Ontario; and Class-A clear-channel station XEROK-AM in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The antenna is a four-tower array and is located near Saint-Edouard, while its studios are located on Rene-Levesque Boulevard East in Montreal.

History

The CJAD studios in 1948

CJAD was founded by J. Arthur Dupont in 1945, on whose name the call letters were based. It is often called Montreal's heritage anglophone station, particularly since the demise of the city's oldest anglophone station, CINW (successor to CFCF, Canada's first radio station). It signed on the air on December 8, 1945.[1] In its first years, CJAD was based on De La Montagne street in Montreal (now the site of O'Sullivan College).

In 1961, CJAD was purchased by Standard Broadcasting. In 1978, control of Standard Broadcasting was purchased by Conrad Black via Hollinger Inc.. In 1985, Standard was purchased by Slaight Communications, a privately held company owned by J. Allan Slaight.

In 1962, a sister station, CJFM, was launched. Always separately programmed, CJFM's programming became totally different from CJAD only from about 1976. For much of its life, CJAD had a full service format. The music was mainly adult contemporary plus two specialized shows on weekends — The Bandstand with Dick Irvin, and Starlight Concert with Rod Dewar. In 1995, CJAD shifted its format to full-time news/talk, dropping all music and entertainment, save for the Sunday morning Trivia Show and the CJAD Comedy Show.

Starting in 1992, almost all of CJAD's programming was simulcast on Corus Entertainment-owned CKTS 900 in Sherbrooke. On November 19, 2006, CKTS ceased broadcasting and its licence was surrendered to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). This, according to Corus, was because of high ongoing maintenance costs that neither they nor Standard were willing to cover.[2]

In April 2007, Astral Media and Standard Broadcasting announced that Standard had agreed to a purchase offer by Astral.

On Labour Day Weekend, 2012, CJAD, as well as its sister stations in the Montreal Astral cluster, moved from 1411 Fort Street to new facilities in the Bell Media Radio building at Rene-Levesque East and Papineau.

1998 Ice Storm

In 1998, all four of CJAD's broadcast towers toppled during The Ice Storm. CJAD's first attempt to get back on the air was to use CKGM's former 980 transmitter, re-tuned to the 800 frequency. This, however, turned out to be impossible as the 980 site was damaged by ice as well. The radio station then made arrangements to broadcast on CFMB's former 1410 transmitter, but the signal was poor to the west. They then reached an agreement with CHUM Limited to use their CKGM transmitter on 990 kHz until new towers were erected.

News

A large part of CJAD's daily programs are talk shows discussing local and international news, as well as various other subjects. CJAD broadcasts a news report every 30 minutes on local and major international news. This excludes the slot 23:30-5:30, where newscasts are delivered every hour, on the hour. Traffic updates are delivered every 15 minutes.

CJAD newscasters are Andrew Peplowski and Trudie Mason in the mornings, Jason Mayoff and Richard Deschamps in the afternoons, Kelly Lapare and Luciano Pipia in the evenings (with Pipia also acting as weekend daytime anchor), James Foster overnight, Shawn Dearn weekend mornings, Andrew Brennan weekend afternoons/evenings and Sean McKeogh weekend overnights. Benson Cook is a frequent fill-in at the anchor's desk. Longtime anchor and reporter Tom Armour retired in 2015.[3]

CJAD reporters include Shuyee Lee, Andrew Brennan and Emily Campbell. Former reporters include Patrick Lejtenyi, Angelica Montgomery, Tina Tenneriello, Michel Boyer, Natalie Nanowski and Taylor C. Noakes.[4]

Sports

CJAD is the exclusive English radio broadcaster of the CFL's Montreal Alouettes. Some game broadcasts are simulcast on sister station CHOM 97.7 FM. CJAD was the longtime English radio home of the Montreal Canadiens until the 2010-11 season. In June 2010 it was announced that then sports-talk rival CKGM will be the new English broadcaster through the 2017-18 season.

In July 2012, Bell Media, owners of CKGM, announced that English-language rights to the Canadiens could return to CJAD following its proposed acquisition of Astral Media, if its conversion of CKGM to a French-language sports station (which would have been done to satisfy ownership limits preventing the merged company from owning both CJAD and CKGM if they both broadcast in English) were approved by the CRTC.[5][6] On October 18, 2012, the CRTC rejected Bell's proposal to acquire Astral Media; since the application to convert CKGM into a French station was contingent on the approval of the Astral merger, it too was rejected.[7]

On March 5, 2012, it was announced that CJAD will be the exclusive English language radio broadcaster of Montreal Impact for the next two years.[8]

As of September 2013, CKGM provides the sports updates for CJAD. Rick Moffat does the weekday morning sports, Mitch Gallo does the weekday afternoon sports, and Amanda Stein does the weekend morning sports (all for CJAD and TSN).

Transmitter

CJAD broadcasts with 50,000 watts in the daytime and 10,000 watts at night to avoid interfering with other stations using the 800 frequency, such as the country-formatted CJBQ in Belleville, Ontario, the moribund CHRC in Quebec City (which is approximately 250 miles [160 km] away and has shut down in September 2012), and CKLW in Windsor, Ontario.

Current hosts

The previous logo of CJAD from 2007-2011 used until Aaron Rand returned to the station. During the Standard Radio era from 2002-2007, the words inside the red rectangles were in black.

Former

References

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