BATC plans diversity ball

By Miguel Fenrich Staff Reporter

Donald Meriam, event organizer for the June

23 Gender, Diversity & Equality Masquerade Ball has put months of love and tears into BATC’s first-ever LGBTQ2+ event.

“This event will bring our city the proper

News Watch

Continued from Page 4

But the decline clearly is now on and you notice it any time you pull in a distant signal on the AM dial. Whenever my car radio picks up WBBM on 780 AM now from Chicago, I notice they no longer refer to themselves as “Newsradio 780.” Now, they call themselves “105.9 FM!”

If you tune in to the powerful 1160 signal from KSL in Salt Lake City, they now call themselves “Newsradio 102.7 FM,” If you manage to get the signal on 1070 from KNX Los Angeles, they’re “97.1 FM.”

That’s right, a lot of powerful AM stations have switched to FM signals. They seem to be keeping their AM transmitters on just for laughs.

For how much longer, you have to wonder. There are more and more stories about AM signals going silent. Just this year, down

LGBT-based education it deserves, to be able to teach traditional twospirit teachings, LGBT sex education that’s so needed within our communities, LGBT history and the struggles of making our voices heard,” Meriam said.

The event includes dinner, dancing, live music, a in my favourite city of Las Vegas, Audacy Radio sold off their AM transmitter site and shut down their powerful KDWN transmitter on 720 and their allsports signal on 1140.

Those stations have now gone FM-only, not to mention available online. That’s the other thing: people can still tune in these distant stations online, anyway. So what good is an AM transmitter when the signal is clearer hooking up to the Wifi?

I shudder to think of the future, because AM is still my go-to on my car radio. As it stands, the decline of AM is starting to get noticeable in the programming, especially from the United States. Cost-cutting rules the roost, and local programming is getting shoved out so AM stations can air syndicated stuff like Coast to Coast AM late at night, or Dave Ramsey with his financial advice, silent auction and speeches from guests and dignitaries from across the province, and is being held June 23 from 5:30 p.m. to 12 a.m. at the Western Development Museum in North Battleford.

The event will feature an exhibit of LGBT-based objects from Saskatchewan, photos collected from not to mention a multitude of syndicated conservative talk shows.

I know folks like the late Rush Limbaugh liked to brag that conservative talk was what saved AM radio. The problem is there is now so much conservative talk on American AM stations that even the conservatives are sick of it.

You also have syndicated all-sports talk where the hosts beat the same topics into the ground over and over again. (“Who’s betterLeBron or Michael?!”) With legalization, there are even syndicated all-sports betting formats. (They killed an entire AM talk radio station in San Francisco to make room for this.)

Now in a sure sign the end times are coming, you have a ton of all-religious stations on AM. And there are now a ton of “all-Mexican” formats on AM -- IN THE UNITED STATES.

Seriously, what’s next the USask Neil Richard’s collection and artifacts from WDM’s LGBTQ+ collection.

NDP MLAs Betty Nippi-Albright and Nathaniel Teed will be speaking, along with Jazz Moise and Councillor Trina Albert from Sweetgrass First Nation. Melissa Squire has designed gender-neutral clothing for the event, and Hilberg and Berk have donated earrings and necklaces from their down there? “All-Canadian?”

Don’t get me started with what’s happening in Canada, where we saw entire all-sports AM radio stations blown out and closed, not to mention layoffs and programming cuts at other places. Many of the same folks who got thrown out of their AM radio jobs are now doing prism collection.

“I’ve been to the university and sat down for hours going through photos, articles and books … tearing up seeing all these beautiful photos I had never seen before of protests in Saskatoon and Regina from the Doug Wilson Era of the 1970s,” Meriam said, having worked with BATC since April 2022.

“... (they) approved it without hesitation, knowing that I’m helping to podcasts or live-steaming on internet platforms, helping bleed even more listeners away from AM.

You even have AM stations here in Canada that are mailing it in with all-comedy 24-7. I kid you not, this joke of a format is for real in Canada’s major cities like Calgary, Vancouver and Winnipeg, consisting of comedians’ open BATC to the LGBT community,” Meriam said, describing crying after the board approved the event, knowing that he’s helping to open BATC to the LGBT+ community.

“I wanted to see BATC involved more in the LGBT community, bringing in education to Atoskewin and taking that education and training out to our seven communities to honour the history of our peoples” standup routines replayed all day and night. It’s a total waste of 50,000 watts of power that could be better used in your Tesla.

Anyway, put me down as an unhappy AM radio listener. Times are changing, but from this listener’s standpoint you have to wonder if it’s really for the better.