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Station Ownership That Doesn't Quite Make Sense

T

trusty

(This thread maybe should go under the general radio board, but it a "stepchild" of another thread here, so here goes:)

I thought WRVA was on 1140 kHz AM??
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There's WRVA 1140 in Richmond, VA and WRVA 100.7 in Wake Forest, NC; 2 completely different stations owned by the same company.
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I have seen a few AM/FM combinations with the same call letters in completely different areas (like WFLA: AM-Tampa / FM Tallahassee), but they were owned by the same company.

Then I checked out WSBB. WSBB/FM, located near Atlanta, is a simulcast of WSB/750 (Cox Communications), while WSBB/AM (1230) is a station in New Smyrna Beach, FL (Diegel Communications). There are many stations that seemed to be "owned" by an independent company but have the same mailing address as Clear Channel in San Antonio, but I can't find any relationship between Cox and Diegel.

I know the FCC "relaxed" the rules quite a bit in the '80s, but so much so as one company can go grab another company's call letters - whether AM or FM, or do Cox and Diegel really have a relationship?

Thanks for your answers. (Personally, i think WSB should have chosen "WSBE" as their FM call when they started simulcasting because "WSBE" sounds like "WSB" with a little southern slur to it, but that's another topic. ;) (but if they had, this thread wouldn't have been started because "WSBE" doesn't exist).)
 
There's WRNR AM 740 in Martinsburg, WV with a talk format, and WRNR FM 103.1 in Graysonville, MD, just east of the Chesapeake Bay, with an AAA format. I think they're owned by 2 different companies, not sure which.
 
WSBE does exist...as a TV station in Rhode Island.

The rules were relaxed more than 20 years ago. They now allow the same base calls to be used on different services by different owners in either the same or different markets, so long as the entity that's held the base calls the longest agrees to share them. Cox probably paid the owners of WSBB(AM) a small sum of money to be allowed to use WSBB-FM in the Atlanta market.

Note that in the WFLA example, there's not only Clear Channel-owned WFLA(AM) in Tampa and WFLA-FM in Tallahassee but also WFLA-TV in Tampa, which is owned by Media General. The TV station changed calls from WFLA-TV to WXFL when it and the radio station were sold to separate owners in the 1980s, but when the callsign rules were relaxed, Media General asked to get the WFLA-TV calls back and was granted permission by the owners of WFLA(AM).
 
Speaking of the call letters WFLA, another station using those call letters is 540 WFLF in the Orlando area.
 
gar fla said:
Speaking of the call letters WFLA, another station using those call letters is 540 WFLF in the Orlando area.
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Different situation. That one has nothing to do with the FCC. From its perspective, the Orlando-area station is WFLF, not "WFLA." The "WFLA 540" branding is just that - "branding." It's no different from WMGF calling itself "Magic." As long as they say "WMGF Mount Dora" once an hour, they can call themselves anything they want the rest of the hour.

But WSBB-FM and WFLA-FM and WFLA-TV really *are* WSBB-FM and WFLA-FM and WFLA-TV.
 
ddsparxx said:
There's WRNR AM 740 in Martinsburg, WV with a talk format, and WRNR FM 103.1 in Graysonville, MD, just east of the Chesapeake Bay, with an AAA format. I think they're owned by 2 different companies, not sure which.
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There are plenty of examples. Some more:

WGCL 1370 Bloomington IN & WGCL-TV 46 Atlanta GA
KASA 1540 Phoenix AZ & KASA-TV 2 Santa Fe/Albuquerque NM
KJZZ 91.5 Phoenix AZ & KJZZ-TV 14 Salt Lake City UT
KSAZ 580 Marana/Tucson AZ & KSAZ-TV 10 Phoenix AZ

None of those stations with the same base calls have common ownership.

Then, there are all those ex-ABC O&O radio stations that are now owned by Citadel (or is it Cumulus now?), while the TV stations with the same base calls are still owned by Disney, as are the ESPN & Radio Disney stations in those cities that have them.

If the old rules were still in effect when the radio stations were spun off, WLS-TV Chicago would have been changed to WMVP-TV or WRDZ-TV, while WABC-TV NYC would have been WEPN-TV or WQEW-TV. Probably the former.
 
KeithE4 said:
If the old rules were still in effect when the radio stations were spun off, WLS-TV Chicago would have been changed to WMVP-TV or WRDZ-TV, while WABC-TV NYC would have been WEPN-TV or WQEW-TV. Probably the former.
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The TVs stayed with their existing ownership, which also retained the contractual rights to the base calls. It's the AMs that were spun off to Citadel that would have had to change calls, so you might have had a WLSS or WWLS on 890 in Chicago or a WABD or WABT on 770 in NYC. But WLS-TV and WABC-TV would have kept their calls. (And even if they had changed, there's no reason they'd have adopted the branding of a sister ESPN or Disney outlet.)
 
Scott Fybush said:
KeithE4 said:
If the old rules were still in effect when the radio stations were spun off, WLS-TV Chicago would have been changed to WMVP-TV or WRDZ-TV, while WABC-TV NYC would have been WEPN-TV or WQEW-TV. Probably the former.
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The TVs stayed with their existing ownership, which also retained the contractual rights to the base calls. It's the AMs that were spun off to Citadel that would have had to change calls, so you might have had a WLSS or WWLS on 890 in Chicago or a WABD or WABT on 770 in NYC. But WLS-TV and WABC-TV would have kept their calls. (And even if they had changed, there's no reason they'd have adopted the branding of a sister ESPN or Disney outlet.)
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You're correct. I should have said "could have been changed to... or maybe even something else entirely."
 
There's also WRDW/96.5(known as Wired) in Philadelphia, owned by Beasley Broadcasting, and
WRDW-TV/12 in Augusta, GA, owned by Gray Television.
 
Im guessing the WRVA call letters both stated in Richmond, VA because the letters RVA but at some point the FM must have moved. Call letters don't really mean much these days compared to what they used to.

In Syracuse, NY WSYR AM and FM both started there but at some point the FM turned up in Florida. Then this year when WSYR AM wanted an FM signal, Clear Channel did a call swap and brought them back.
 
spunker88 said:
Im guessing the WRVA call letters both stated in Richmond, VA because the letters RVA but at some point the FM must have moved. Call letters don't really mean much these days compared to what they used to.
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You guess correctly. It's a very typical story: WRVA(AM) came first, then WRVA-TV and WRVA-FM. The TV was sold to different owners when the FCC started cracking down on radio-TV crossownership in the 1960s/early 1970s and changed calls (to WWBT). And then the FM took on new calls in the early 1970s as FM came into its own. (It's now WRVQ 94.5).

The same story can be told for dozens of AM/FM/TV combos in other markets - WSYR AM/FM/TV became WSYR/WYYY/WSTM in very much the same way. Ditto for WGR AM/FM/TV in Buffalo (WGR, WGRQ/WGRF, WGRZ), WBEN AM/FM/TV in Buffalo (WBEN, WMJQ/WTSS, WIVB) and so on.

For a while there, Clear Channel was trying deliberately to reuse calls from its AMs in other markets on FM. WRVA-FM, WSYR-FM, WWVA-FM, and the list goes on. That ceased to be a good idea when they started simulcasting the AM news-talkers on in-market FMs, at which point they had to start repatriating some of the out-of-market -FM calls like WSYR-FM.
 
An early example was Group One splitting WONE between their AM station in Dayton and FM signal in Akron. When the Bingham family liquidated the assets and WHAS radio and TV were sold to different owners the call letters remained. For a while WHAS radio would air a disclaimer shortly after midnight indicating WHAS radio and WHAS-TV were now different ownership.
 
A good example involving heritage call letters in a Top 10 market is KPRC-TV Channel 2 in Houston, owned by Post-Newsweek, and talk station KPRC 950, owned by Clear Channel. KPRC radio dates back to the 1920's while the KPRC-TV dates back to the early 1950's; it was formerly KLEE-TV, the first television station in Houston.
 
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