The board structure is based on a nearly 25 year old layout that doesn't fit the industry anymore... There were other St. Louis boards so this one never took off. One deal will not change that.
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Audacy Sells St. Louis Cluster
- Thread starter Kent
- Start date
Not speculation. And one deal does not make a trend.
Why wouldn't they have just added multiple markets in one deal then?
From what I've gathered, Hoffman basically made Audacy an offer they couldn't refuse. They are not looking to sell anything but were given a deal they couldn't pass on.
Very astute question.
I have no good answer. Perhaps more capital needs to be raised before he does more radio deals. Perhaps an amendment to a debt agreement needs to occur in order to make a larger acquisition. Maybe he wants to assimilate this set of radio stations and see how things fare before wading deeper into the radio pool?
Tough to say. All I can do is guess.
Hoffman may very well be interested in buying Cumulus. They said in the article I read that they will be the second largest media company by years end. Very interesting they'd say that. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There still could be horse trading that wouldn’t involve outright station purchases.
The Nexstar-TEGNA legal fiasco has likely but a major chill on station transactions.
I think the P-D is printed in Peoria now. That's not quite as bad as the KC Star in Des Moines, but it's still a two-hour drive.
That type of travel time from the press to the market is becoming common.
Here in Palm Springs, the Desert Sun is printed in Phoenix. It is about 4 hours, so, given that the Phoenix printing facility also has other papers to print, this means that the Palm Springs newsroom must put the paper to bed at 8 to 9 PM at the latest.
I recall when my stepbrother took me to the Cleveland Plain Dealer when they started the print run of 400,000 copies. He showed me how there was truth in the "stop the presses" and an updated edition could be done well after midnight and still get the papers to the store racks and to the kids who did home delivery.
Today, what we get with a print paper is news that is already about half a day old. With so much occurring in other time zones... such as Iran and the Ukraine... it is even more important to have new sources up to date. Printed newspapers just can't do that, particularly if printed elsewhere.
As long as they have the Cardinals, KMOX will be fine. As much as they're a News/Talk station, like a similar one in Denver in KOA with the Broncos, KMOX lives & breaths the St. Louis Cardinals, they need them more than the Cards need KMOX.
A surprising transaction, not so much that Audacy would sell but that they would find a local-ish buyer for the whole cluster.
I'll be very interested to see the sales price. There aren't a lot of large market transactions where a complete cluster is sold for cash. The only recent one I can think of was the Bonneville cluster in San Francisco for $10 million.
I'll be very interested to see the sales price. There aren't a lot of large market transactions where a complete cluster is sold for cash. The only recent one I can think of was the Bonneville cluster in San Francisco for $10 million.
Well, WBT-FM runs 100,000 watts on a 1,700 foot tower. Also, at night WBT (AM) switches from non-directional to directional, using three towers. It had been a Class I-B station. So its tower array footprint is fairly large. More acreage to sell.
KMOX-FM is 50,000 watts on a 460 foot tower. And KMOX (AM) only uses one tower day and night. It had been a non-directional Class I-A station. It sits on less land than WBT. So I would guess for the farther suburbs, KMOX should stay on 1120 AM as well as 104.1 FM.
I was wondering about that, too, when I read that line. If Hoffmann really wants to buy one of the big radio companies, that would seem to be the easiest one to get. Plus, it has a digital strategy, which any media company needs. Having said that, Hoffmann also clearly said "media" and not "broadcasting" or "radio." If it intends to expand in the newspaper business or into TV, it could still hit that goal without significantly expanding its radio holdings.
KMOX doesn't do that well in the far western suburbs of St. Louis after dark. AM tends to have a dead spot where the groundwave and skywave signals cancel each other out. For KMOX, that falls in far western St. Louis County and much of St. Charles County and has been a much bigger problem over the last 30 years as that's where the bulk of the metro's growth has been. AM 1120 does better in Columbia and Rolla at night than it does in Chesterfield. I haven't listened to 104.1 in decades. I used to listen to it occasionally when it was the Mall and, until the novelty wore off, Red @ 104.1, but I think my recent college graduate niece was in diapers the last time I tuned it in. So, I'm not sure what the signal's like today, but, despite being mediocre in much of St. Louis, it used to get out quite well in the rural areas when it was licensed to Jerseyville. If you'd said what started as WJBM-FM would one day be the home of the Mighty KMOX when it signed on, you would've been thought to have been crazy.
The newspaper here in Atlanta doesn't even have a print edition anymore.
Radio One just bought Service Broadcasting KRNB/KKDA-FM in Dallas/Fort Worth for 22 million.
The Audacy CEO has commented on the sale:
barrettmedia.com
Audacy CEO Kelli Turner on Potential Future Sales: 'Everything Has a Price'
"I think it's hard for anyone that's a business person not to be open for business for the right situation."
barrettmedia.com
KMOX is also on FM now.
The fact that a class B signal was sitting up there in Jerseyville always seemed wild to me. But some research showed that WJBM actually got the allocation through an NPRM that it requested in 1966. It wasn't just sitting there in the table of allocations waiting to be used; someone actually did the analysis and figured it out.
By that time, "Doc" Ferdinand Gorecki and his wife Janet owned WJBM. They had gradually bought up other stockholders starting in 1963. The Goreckis ran a medical clinic in Jerseyville. I haven't found any indication of why they became interested in running a radio station as well. Then they added the FM facility, first at 15 kw in 1968, and then up to a full 50 kw in 1972. But both the stations and the clinic kept going until "Doc" died a couple of days after Christmas in 1978. Janet kept the stations until 1984. She sold them for $1 million, contingent upon FCC approval of a new transmitter site closer to St. Louis.
Before 1984, WJBM-FM mostly simulcasted WJBM(AM). I spent my high school years in St. Charles County, Missouri, where WJBM(AM) simply could not be heard but WJBM-FM was easily received. For much of my time in the area, the stations simulcasted from 6 am sign-on until 5 pm. THe format was typical small-town radio. One morning feature was bingo, sponsored by an IGA supermarket in Carrollton, Illinois. A small staff broadcast news and other announcements during the day. Music was filler, more or less either oldies or country. The FM was in mono.
At 5 pm, the AM signed off, the FM flipped to stereo, and a show featuring western swing and old-time country music aired. I don't remember the name of the show, nor the host's name, but he sounded as if he were 90 years old. I believe the program was brokered.
At 7 pm, there was "Ed and Alice's Old Rock and Roll Show". This was a brokered program, with quite a few ads from businesses, not just in nearby Alton, Illinois, but also in St. Louis County, especially North County, where WJBM-FM reception was more likely compared to other parts of the city and county. Of course, recpetion was just fine in St. Charles County, but there didn't seem to be that much of an advertising base there. I'll note that St. Charles had lost its daily newspaper in May 1978 and KIRL in St. Charles was beginning to struggle by that time as well.
At a time when oldies, when present, were a format mostly limited to AM radio, the WJBM-FM show was one of the few places it could be heard on FM. I recall the audio processing on the station: it had a "level devil" quality to it. It also sounded as if there was no noise gating. You could hear every breath an announcer took.
After Alton's WOKZ-FM sold to St. Louis' Laclede Radio (KATZ) at the end of 1978, becoming WZEN (now KATZ-FM) with only the daytimer WOKZ(AM) remaining as a station serving Alton, some local sports play-by-play that WOKZ-FM had carried was broadcast on WJBM-FM.
By 1984, my last year with any ties to St. Charles County, WJBM-FM had gone stereo full-time. "Ed and Alice's Old Rock and Roll Show" was still going. I have one recording of it; unfortunately, it was from a night when Ed and Alice (who were real people) were off and there was a substitute host instead. Monday nights by then were also given over to a show featuring contemporary Christian music, something that you also didn't hear much on the radio in 1984.
As indicated by the 1984 sale, the 104.1 frequency was an obvious St. Louis rimshot. The station's new site in Alton was farther south and closer to the St. Louis area. By 1985, it had become WKKX, a country station targeting St. Louis. I found a Post-Dispatch column by Eric Mink, published September 23 of that year, expressing some skepticism about the station's ability to survive in what had become a market with three country stations. But WKKX did survive.
In the 1990s, Zimmer Radio bought that station as well as 106.5, a full-market signal, once WGNU-FM, then WWWK, then KWK-FM, then WKBQ. Zimmer moved the WKKX country format onto 106.5, with WKBQ's CHR format moving to 104.1. While diminishing WKBQ's coverage in the St. Louis metro, reception of 104.1 in outstate Missouri was actually better. I could pick it up in Columbia about as well as most St. Louis FMs, but 106.5 always had to fight interference from a Kansas City-area station on the same frequency. The 104.1 frequency was a much clearer channel in east-central Missouri and even in Columbia.
Even with the move of 104.1 to an Alton site, I'm sure there was still spotty coverage in South County. KATZ-FM had the same problem with South County coverage. Ultimately, those stations' cities of license were changed to the North County suburbs of Hazelwood (what's now KMOX-FM) and Bridgeton (KATZ-FM), enabling the use of transmitter sites in St. Louis County itself.
Janet Gorecki passed away in 2012. Here's her obituary: Janet Gorecki of Jerseyville Obituary | EdGlenToday.com - she remained active in business after selling the radio stations. Even though the radio stations weren't her main endeavor in life, I get the feeling that she was an astute operator.
While KMOX(AM) has a storied history of its own, KMOX-FM's history has its own interesting twists and turns, too.
Edit to tag @frank absher , who can correct any errors I might have made above.
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IIRC this is the market that couldn't get any bidders for 2 AMs a while ago. I don't know if translators were available then but it can't keep an NFL or NBA team either.
A lady at my church is from there. She only goes back for the family reunion and funerals
She left because of the weather: Hot in the summer and snow to shovel in the winter. I know it can't be that bad because ever person I ever knew that was from there was super nice to my family.
A lady at my church is from there. She only goes back for the family reunion and funerals
She left because of the weather: Hot in the summer and snow to shovel in the winter. I know it can't be that bad because ever person I ever knew that was from there was super nice to my family.
Zimmer got WKKX in either '90 or '91 if I remember correctly. It thought the format was great and would be amazing if it didn't have a marginal signal. It even brought several WKKX staff to Columbia to fix Clear 99, which it had launched a year or two earlier after acquiring the former KDBX. Turned out, the format was probably more marginal than the signal. Switching the frequencies didn't seem to hurt WKBQ (until Emmis bought it and launched Alice), but WKKX never gained much ground despite getting the stronger signal on 106.5.
I got 104.1 from Jerseyville on my car radio a handful of times on Columbia, even when 104.1 in Jeff was on-air. Both my home stereo and car radio always seemed to favor Kansas City over St. Louis; the big exception to that was 103.3. I don't think I've ever received KPRS on 103.3, but KLOU came in frequently in the car. 107.7 made it to Columbia until Otterville signed on. 100.3 also was a frequent visitor. When I lived north of town, 104.1 and 100.3 were always Des Moines on the home stereo, and 106.5 was usually Davenport. After moving into town, I could occasionally still get 100.3 from Alton, but KLOU was really the only regular St. Louis station on the home stereo.
It was actually 4 AM's that didn't get any bidders, though only one really had a chance of covering the entire market. When it comes to the NFL team, St. Louis didn't lose the Rams for lack of fan support. I don't know how the Rams are doing in LA ten years out, but the first few years in LA didn't sell anywhere near as many tickets as the Rams sold in St. Louis, even with the LA team being much better than the last few years of the St. Louis Rams. Can't speak for the Cardinals or the Hawks, though. The St. Louis Hawks were before my time, and I was a teenager when the Cardinals moved to Phoenix.
St. Louis is an interesting place. In my opinion, it usually gets better weather than Kansas City, though, if you want a Mediterranean climate yearround, you're probably not going to like it. I've always found St. Louisans to be better people outside of their hometown. There's a certain insularity, and St. Louis has its own way of doing things. Within the metro, the people don't have much patience for newcomers trying to figure it out. I have several friends from St. Louis who I met in college at MU, and I never get together with them when I visit St. Louis. I stopped trying to arrange things a long time ago. They never seemed willing to make time for me; they quickly went back to their old social circles or their family. Once-in-awhile, we get together when they go my way, but, otherwise, we just interact on Facebook. I get together with Ex #2's family in St. Louis when I go there, but I otherwise just do the tourist routine when I visit.