Crammed Full Tuesday Update

We've got a whole LOT to cover from the busy Monday that was in the media world - so let's get right to it...

Williams Staying At WXIX: An anchor who not all that long ago was rumored to be headed for the Motor City, is staying put.

Rob Williams signed a new deal with WXIX-TV 19/Newport, which locks him in as morning co-anchor with Sheila Gray for the next three years, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer's John Kiesewetter yesterday.

Last year, in the midst of layoffs happening at other stations owned by WXIX owner Raycom, Williams was speculated by many to be headed to Detroit, Michigan for a higher profile job there. That never happened, of course, as Williams stayed in town. We now know he's staying through at least May 2013.

Of course, we think this is a great move by FOX19 to lock him in longer term. We doubt he was asking much of anything from 19... and the new Clear Channel deal signed early last month may have swayed him, as he's now doing updates for Clear Channel talk 550 WKRC-AM/Cincinnati...

Former WDJO DJ, WCPO-TV Anchor Pass On: Unfortunate news coming out of both Kentucky and Florida, as two different former local personalities passed away over the weekend.

We tweeted the news Monday afternoon about former WCPO-TV anchor Jon Esther, who died Saturday at age 72 in Owensboro, where he lived for quite some time.

The WCPO article does a fairly nice job of recapping where Esther worked.

Esther started out at WEHT-TV (then channel 50, now channel 25) in Evansville in 1962, moving on to Milwaukee's WISN-TV 12, then to WCCO-TV 4 in Minneapolis, WBBM-TV 2 in Chicago, stations in Louisville (WAVE-TV 3 according to the Kiese Blog here) and Des Moines (according to Kiese, that was WHO-TV 13), and then BACK to WEHT, before joining WCPO here in 1976 as Assistant News Editor.

Esther launched WCPO's "7 O'Clock Report" in 1979, before moving up to co-anchor the 11 PM news, the post from which he retired in 1985.

Meanwhile, down in Orlando, Florida, a former DJ for WSAI-AM here died Sunday. Dave Reinhart was 67 when he died from muscular system atrophy, which is a degenerative neurological disorder.

Kiese reports here that Reinhart worked for the old WSAI back when it was on West 8th Street in the Price Hill neighborhood. He left for awhile to work as a stockbroker, but radio was in his blood...he came back to do weekend DJ'ing work for WLW-AM 700 (back before it went talk), then became program director there in the 1980s.

Reinhart's last job in the radio business was for the Clear Channel stations down in Tampa, where he was market manager over stations such as WFLZ-FM 93.3 (don't ask how we knew that; Kiese apparently didn't) and WFLA-AM 970, before he retired in 2005.

Our condolences go out to both Reinhart's and Esther's families, as they both deal with their respective losses...

Regent No More: This will pretty much be our final reference to "Regent Communications" - as that name no longer exists for the downtown based company.

Around 10 AM today, Tom Taylor at Radio-Info reported, and the Enquirer confirmed, that Regent is now called Townsquare Media.

Along with that move comes the exit of both Chairman and CEO William Stakelin, as well as Anthony Vasconcellos, who both resigned.

Steven Price replaces Stakelin and Stuart Rosenstein now replaces Vasconcellos in management.

As Regent has gone private, and now has basically changed names, this is the last time you'll read us saying that name. From now on, if Townsquare should make news in our corner of the world, we'll refer to them as such...

Two Administrative Notes: We have two administrative notes to cover this morning, as well.

Ohio Media Watch, which if you've read us since day one you know they were the reason yours truly decided to cover southwest Ohio media, are changing blog hosts.

Effective immediately, OMW is now at ohiomediawatch.wordpress.com. We've changed the links to reflect the move, and we suggest that if you have not done so, you do the same - as after about a week or two, the old address will no longer be updated, and will remain "As Is" from there on.

It's a process similar to that which we use for Tri-State DTV Watch, which we don't update anymore, as we haven't needed to since the DTV transition happened way back in 2009. (And we doubt that domain name will be needed anytime immediately forthcoming - so for now, we keep it out there.)

The second piece of administrative news is that we've now added a new "About TSMW" page which can be accessed from the top right side of the blog. (Once you're on that page, the other link will, of course, bring you back here.)

Eventually, we'll add more to it...but for now, it's a basic description of this blog, the areas we cover regularly (or don't), and it includes the link to the aforementioned OMW, plus email and Twitter. However, the twitter feed WILL remain on the right side of the blog. This is just a way for us to put all of that information on one page.