'Moscow in the Morning' Off Air

Moscow's first English-language radio program, "Moscow in the Morning," went off the air Friday to make room for more profitable Russian programming.Shortly after news anchor Cami McCormick read her last weather forecast and ended the show at 10 A.M., her employers at Radio Maximum sent out a press release announcing that her program would be replaced by a Russian morning show.Moscow in the Morning first went on the air in early 1992, giving high publicity to the newly founded station Radio Maximum, a U.S.-Russian joint venture of Moscow News weekly, Westwood One, Harris Corp. and Storyfirst Communications. The show, starring McCormick and Charles Bornstein, quickly became famous among expatriates and some Russians for its combination of hard news, improvised jokes and Western pop music.Broadcast from the office of the Moscow News weekly on Pushkin Square, the program hosted a wide range of guest columnists for anything from "The Legal Minute" to the "Goroscope," and plugged in taped feature stories from the U.S-based Mutual Broadcasting System.The owners of Radio Maximum on Thursday refused to confirm or deny persistent reports about the impending closure of the program. But the vice president of Moscow News, Yevgeny Abov, said Thursday that advertising revenues were down, while the potential Russian audience was expanding rapidly.In the press release, the president of the joint venture for the U.S. partners, Bert Kleinman, said "We regret that we cannot continue 'Moscow in the Morning' but we see a much bigger future in a Russian morning show."McCormick, sportsreader Matt Yust and business newsreader Tamsin Rose went out in style Friday. Rather than ending on a somber note, they read the news and cracked jokes, some racy, some at their owners' expense. As the managers of Radio Maximum had refused to tell them whether Friday's show would be their last, the disc jockeys could only hint at their possible departure with casual remarks like "it could be the last time we hear that" and "this may be our last O.J. Simpson report."The last song McCormick put on the air was "I'll Stand by You," by The Pretenders -- a last jab at her employers."I thought it was going to be a lot of fun, and exciting. And it has been," McCormick said. "We never expected the show to be this popular and to be this big.""I know that every time I think back on this I'm going to get so upset," she said.