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from Scott Fybush's North East Radio Watch:
on the radio side of things...lawyers for veteran WRKO (680 Boston) afternoon talk host Howie Carr announced last Monday that he would leave the Entercom talk station when his contract expires September 19. Instead, Carr's representatives said, the Boston Herald columnist would take over the morning shift formerly occupied by Don Imus on Greater Media's WTKK (96.9 Boston), the FM talker that's been rapidly eroding the comfortable hold WRKO once had on the city's talk audience.

For Carr, the move would mean head-to-head competition with WRKO's floundering Tom Finneran morning show - not to mention a higher salary, a more prominent role in a WTKK lineup that's live and local most of the day, and no more pre-emptions for afternoon Red Sox games. For Entercom, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars to renew its deal with the Red Sox in part to provide a promotional boost for the WRKO lineup, Carr's departure is a potential disaster, since his show represented the biggest revenue draw on the talk station's schedule (as well as a lucrative syndication offering to other stations around New England.)

As news of Carr's planned move splashed across the headlines in Boston, things started getting even testier. WRKO, which apparently had declined to exercise a one-year renewal clause in Carr's contract, told the Globe that it had the right to match any offer Carr received from Greater Media. Carr's lawyers responded with a lawsuit seeking to declare that clause unenforceable, thanks to the state's new ban on non-compete contracts - and they noted that while WRKO was willing to match WTKK's salary offer, it couldn't match the other terms of the new deal, most notably the morning slot on the FM dial.

Carr was off the air at WRKO for most of the week, but returned on Thursday with a prepared statement that had been drafted for him to read. Any illusion that Carr might have agreed with the words he was reading ("My job is to provide you with the most entertaining and compelling show that I can do each day, not to discuss my personal matters") was carefully shattered with a few "it says here" comments inserted in the reading - and at week's end, the only certainties were that the lawyers on both sides will be paying for plenty of summers on Cape Cod with whatever time they'll lose this summer hashing this mess out, and that we'll be hearing a lot more about Carr's planned move in the next few weeks.