In response to Clouseau in Reply No. 11:
Robert Conrad certainly made a mistake back in 2001, but you got the details all wrong. If you had checked
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WCLV, you would have have had the AM station right (it was 1420), but there was much more to it. Let me give you the details.
It was a three-way swap involving Clear Channel, Salem and Conrad's Seaway. Salem had the broken-down 5-kw AM on 1420 in Cleveland and a Class B FM on 98.1 in Canton; Clear Channel owned the Class A on 104.9 in Lorain; and Seaway owned the full-powered Class B on 95.5 in Cleveland.
Salem wanted a full-powered B in Cleveland. Clear Channel, having just acquire Chancellor, was maxed out in the Cleveland market, and couldn't take on another station of any kind (or make a move-in of the Lorain station), but Canton was just far enough away that it wouldn't affect their ownership cap for Cleveland. And Conrad and his partners wanted money -- and, supposedly, a secure future for commercial classical radio in Cleveland.
So a deal was worked out to give 95.5 in Cleveland to Salem, 98.1 in Canton to CC, and the Lorain FM and the 5-kw Cleveland AM to Seaway.
In a Nov. 2, 2000 interview on the NPR program "Morning Edition," Conrad bragged that the value of WCLV's license was so great that he and his partners "were able to get two radio stations and a whole bunch of cash for it."
Yes, but did they get enough for it? Absolutely not. In fact, they got only $10.5 million in cash.
That same day (11/2/2000), the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the 95.5 license was worth about $45 million, while the Lorain station was worth only $8 million. And Salem had paid only $6.5 million for the 1420 AM license. in 1996.
So Conrad got snookerd. He got only $25 million for a station worth $45 million!
Then he set up a non-profit corporation loosely modeled on the one the Bullett sisters set up in Seattle to run KING-FM as a not-for-profit commercial classical station, with its earnings supporting the opera, the symphony and other classical music groups in that market. But the Bulletts gave their non-profit a prime quality Class C with a killer signal, not a Class A rimshot!
By the way, to be (perhaps a little too) indulgent of Conrad, I'll point out that he always stressed the problems 95.5 had in the Western suburbs. That assignment was, and is, short-spaced to grandfathered, super-powered (100 KW) Class B co-channel in Detroit, and there were often problems with co-channel interference that no other Class B in Cleveland had. But that was no reason to think that a Class A in Lorain was the solution, much less that a 5-kw AM could fill the void in the eastern suburbs (especially when classical had already failed dismally on 5-kw AM's in Denver and Detroit).
No matter what you think motivated Conrad to enter into that ill-advised deal -- whether it was stupidity, cupidity, or a combination of the two -- I don't see how that invalidates his position on FM IBOC. Of course, having such a crappy signal makes him much more keenly aware of the system's weaknesses!
