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Potential 97.5 Changes Coming

MarkW said:
Leave it to Lew & John Dickey to be stupid enough to believe 97.5 & 103.7 could be viable Houston market stations w/ for-profit music formats despite such lousy signals in the Houston metro.
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I'm not sure Lew Dickey ever believed they would really be viable. John probably did.

That said, they served their purpose. They were the first major market signals that Cumulus had, and they were a vehicle to try to impress investors who weren't radio people. In addition to fluorescent lights, the KFNC transmitter site was equipped with track lighting, and the floodlights in the track lighting fixtures were the same shade of blue as the original Cumulus logo. (No, I'm not kidding.) I doubt any investors ever made it out there, but that's what the lighting was for. The transmitter building for KHJK was nearly identical, but it didn't get the track lighting.

The studio facilities were in a class A office tower attached to the Houston Galleria.

The idea was to look the part and show Cumulus could hang with the big boys. It was more or less a fake it until you make it play. I have no idea how much the stations actually mattered, but the Lew was able to attract Bain Capital, Blackstone, Thomas H. Lee, and Crestview to finance their 2006 acquisition of Susquehanna.
 
2Speakers said:
I'm not sure Lew Dickey ever believed they would really be viable. John probably did.
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From what I could tell from my brief time at Cumulus, Lew was a more or less decent guy who wasn’t always great with people and was largely in over his head. John seemed like the organization's businessman, and, if anyone there was truly evil, he was the guy.

2Speakers said:
That said, they served their purpose.
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Correct. In the sense that they billed more than their smaller market predecessors, they were successful. They were never going to be major players in the market, and I have no idea if they ever covered their expenses, but a poorly rated Houston station will always outbill a successful Beaumont property. If I remember correctly, prior to the Great Recession, the top Houston stations did almost as much in a month as the entire Beaumont market did in a year.

2Speakers said:
I have no idea how much the stations actually mattered, but the Lew was able to attract Bain Capital, Blackstone, Thomas H. Lee, and Crestview to finance their 2006 acquisition of Susquehanna.
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Lew was always good with the investors. I never could figure it out, but there seemed to be a collective optimism (at least pre-recession), and it wasn’t just radio. Companies like Theranos managed to get the centi-millionaires and billionaires to turn on the spigot despite not yet having a physical product, and, a decade earlier, Worldcom was a darling stock despite never proving it could run the companies it was buying. If I remember correctly, Lew had to give up his stake in Cumulus and become an employee in order to get the private equity firms to put up the money for Citadel, but he pulled it off. It ultimately came back to bite him, though, unless he really was ready to get out.
 
Kent said:
From what I could tell from my brief time at Cumulus, Lew was a more or less decent guy who wasn’t always great with people and was largely in over his head. John seemed like the organization's businessman, and, if anyone there was truly evil, he was the guy.
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I got along well with Lew. He seemed like a decent guy. Cumulus always sent a contingent from the engineering ranks to the NAB each year, and on a few occasions he invited us up to his suite for a pep talk. He was very charismatic, and it was easy to see how he got the investors interested.

I had to negotiate a few project budgets with John, and it was unpleasant to say the least.
 
Correct. In the sense that they billed more than their smaller market predecessors, they were successful. They were never going to be major players in the market, and I have no idea if they ever covered their expenses, but a poorly rated Houston station will always outbill a successful Beaumont property. If I remember correctly, prior to the Great Recession, the top Houston stations did almost as much in a month as the entire Beaumont market did in a year.
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How much did they pay for the stations and to move them to the new TX sites? For how much did Cumulus sell 97.5 & 103.7 to new owners?
 
MarkW said:
How much did they pay for the stations and to move them to the new TX sites?
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I can't remember how much Cumulus paid for KAYD and the rest of the Beaumont cluster. I remember it was an early market for the company, though. Seems like the concept of moving 97.5 halfway between the markets came several years after Cumulus bought the cluster. Not sure if there was any sort of non-compete that might’ve required Cumulus to pay more upon the upgrade.

Cumulus was able to acquire 103.7 for market value for agreeing to downgrade KBIU 103.3 in Lake Charles so 103.7 could have the upgrade. Looks like it paid just over $32 million, though only $1 million of that was cash. As a typical Cumulus deal, the bulk of it was paid in stock. New Wavo wouldn’t have gotten that amount in the end because Cumulus stock never went up from that point, and there were rules about how much had to be held and for how long. I just hope they got out before the company crashed.

MarkW said:
For how much did Cumulus sell 97.5 & 103.7 to new owners?
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If I remember correctly, Cumulus didn’t get anything for those properties. Seems like they were divested to their creditors, and the creditors got the money for them.

2Speakers said:
I got along well with Lew. He seemed like a decent guy. Cumulus always sent a contingent from the engineering ranks to the NAB each year, and on a few occasions he invited us up to his suite for a pep talk. He was very charismatic, and it was easy to see how he got the investors interested.
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Never got to spend time like that with Lew, but I remember him similarly. He said a few “out there” things, and his commitment issues with relationships were well-known by the time I worked for him, but he was hard not to like in person.
 
MarkW said:
How much did they pay for the stations and to move them to the new TX sites? For how much did Cumulus sell 97.5 & 103.7 to new owners?
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Both stations sold to their current owners for around $5M each.

Technically speaking, Cumulus didn't sell them. They wrote off their debt in the bankruptcy, and the trustee - Patrick Communications - recovered around $10M for the creditors, less whatever his fees were.
 
MarkW said:
Thank you both for the info.
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BTW - Two Cumulus Kansas City properties were also put into the divestiture pool for the creditors, but Cumulus bought them back. Can’t remember for how much.

The story I had heard was that Cumulus was ready to let 97.5 go but wanted to keep 103.7. Ultimately, EMF outbid it for 103.7.
 
Kent said:
BTW - Two Cumulus Kansas City properties were also put into the divestiture pool for the creditors, but Cumulus bought them back. Can’t remember for how much.

The story I had heard was that Cumulus was ready to let 97.5 go but wanted to keep 103.7. Ultimately, EMF outbid it for 103.7.
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IIRC, there was some upgrade potential for 103.7 if KRBE moved west.

It's probably best that didn't happen.
 
Both 103.7 and 97.5 served the Beaumont area just fine. I suppose they still do, although I haven’t listened to 103.7 since they destroyed the AAA format. 97.5 will follow the same fate if they change from their current format.
 
FWIW, it appears the Sugar Land Space Cowboys games in 2025 are no longer carried on the 92.5 side of ESPN 97.5; have not been able to find any info other than articles from several years ago. Draw your own conclusions…🤔
 
Mediafrog+ said:
FWIW, it appears the Sugar Land Space Cowboys games in 2025 are no longer carried on the 92.5 side of ESPN 97.5; have not been able to find any info other than articles from several years ago. Draw your own conclusions…🤔
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Every time I tune into 92.5, the audio is so low it sounds like dead air. I don't understand why it's been left like that for so long.
 
BamaTX said:
It's been back on by accident a few times. But it keeps getting turned off for a reason. The facility needs all the help it can get.

You lived your anecdotal experiences just like other have lived theirs. It doesn't change a thing and it doesn't give you authority to have the last word. No one has any quantitative data to prove who is right or who is wrong.

But to say that KHJK is a worse facility than KFNC because of a handful of instances of severe tropospheric interference each year is silly. The fact of the matter is that your run of the mill tropospheric interference isn't really much of a concern for rimshots across most of the market. For a rimshot to be completely wiped across the entire market, you would need extremely severe flare-ups in the atmosphere (which are rare). Catching stations such as KBPA, KQXY, KSMG, KSAB, WACO, or KISS across our region over a translator is one thing. But a 100kw rimshot getting completely drowned out in the entire market is a different story. Yes, it happens. But not enough to make up for KFNC's awful tower location over KHJK.

I would say the KFNC engineer who visits this board probably knows more about the KFNC site than any of us.
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You may be correct.
 
johndavis said:
Every time I tune into 92.5, the audio is so low it sounds like dead air. I don't understand why it's been left like that for so long.
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Unfortunately, we were leasing the signal and it had issues. I had no access to the equipment. Now I have control of the equipment and it's much better. It sucks that the space cowboys left though.
 


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