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.