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WABC Sold?

But he's also a boomer. Yes he's a rich boomer with a political agenda, but you never know. There isn't anyone who can tell him no.

If he does it, it won't be for ratings. Any ratings are accidental.

What would be the point of that. He's better off sticking with the revenue generating paid programming, rather than going with a money losing oldies format. Music on AM is DOA.
 
I know the price of stations is nowhere near what they were but still, $12.5 million is eye opening. For perspective, consider that his house in Westhampton Beach, New York is valued at $6.5 million.
 
What would be the point of that. He's better off sticking with the revenue generating paid programming, rather than going with a money losing oldies format. Music on AM is DOA.

He's a billionaire. He doesn't care about "revenue generating programming." If he was, he wouldn't have bought WABC.
 
I know the price of stations is nowhere near what they were but still, $12.5 million is eye opening. For perspective, consider that his house in Westhampton Beach, New York is valued at $6.5 million.

From what I can see, he's not getting any real estate. If there was property, such as tower land, it would have been more, or it would have been sold by now. So he mainly has expenses. He's paying the lease for the tower site, for the studio, for the use of the WABC call letters, and then he has the staff to pay for. Not much in terms of tangible assets. Most of the Disney stations were like this.
 
To put this in context, iHeart paid $30 million for WOR-AM (a similar 50K signal) in 2012. But they also got the tower property in Lyndhurst NJ.

https://www.nydailynews.com/enterta...el-deal-sums-radio-troubles-article-1.1142917

Additional context: 1560 (an inferior facility) sold for just under $13 million back in 2015. In reading the Daily News article you linked, the Forward comes off looking like geniuses for selling 1050 for $78 million all those years ago. Seems like cars have better resale value than AM radio stations these days!!
 
Judging by his Gristedes supermarkets, this can’t be good for WABC.

On the contrary. This did not go to a company that will broker it all out, or convert it to another Russian or similar niche format. The buyer is a radio person. He may be a billionaire, but he does a radio show on 970 and likes the medium.

If the station has any chance to do more local and original programming, it is with this kind of owner.
 
Objectively though, Bezos isn’t using the Post as a plaything. He looks to be taking it seriously and is committed to doing it well. Not to say he doesn’t have a healthy ego, to put it mildly, but it seems more genuine business than shiny toy.

Oh, please! Amazon Post is merely Bezos’s anti-Trump blog.
 
Oh, please! Amazon Post is merely Bezos’s anti-Trump blog.

I'm a subscriber to the Post and am not a "progressive" Democrat. I find the Post tilts left, but all newspapers today have some kind of slant... the quality of coverage is good, the reporting is good and Bezos has kept an important legacy newspaper going without the huge staff reductions others have gone through.

While I see bias in the reporting in things like the selection of adjectives and the injection of bias in the way some articles are written, I'd give Bezos a passing grade based on being better than the other potential buyers.
 


I'm a subscriber to the Post and am not a "progressive" Democrat. I find the Post tilts left, but all newspapers today have some kind of slant... the quality of coverage is good, the reporting is good and Bezos has kept an important legacy newspaper going without the huge staff reductions others have gone through.

While I see bias in the reporting in things like the selection of adjectives and the injection of bias in the way some articles are written, I'd give Bezos a passing grade based on being better than the other potential buyers.

Amazon Post is no longer the prestigious Washington Post with Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee. The institutional anti-Trump bias has destroyed that once-great newspaper.
 
Amazon Post is no longer the prestigious Washington Post with Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee. The institutional anti-Trump bias has destroyed that once-great newspaper.

You obviously have never read it. Graham & Bradlee were big liberals who were friends with the Kennedys. Nothing has changed.

The Post is the paper that broke the Watergate story.
 
You obviously have never read it. Graham & Bradlee were big liberals who were friends with the Kennedys. Nothing has changed.

The Post is the paper that broke the Watergate story.

Watergate happened almost half a century ago. Graham and Bradlee had integrity. Bezos is no Bradlee.
 
Watergate happened almost half a century ago. Graham and Bradlee had integrity. Bezos is no Bradlee.

Jeff Bezos is not the Editor of the Post... he is the de facto publisher.

And if you want to talk about a 50-year time difference, Watergate happened before the Internet, before cable news channels, before the start of the dramatic decline in readership of newspapers.

In today's context, one could say that that Bezos is the Katharine Graham of today.
 
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I'd heard that Cumulus' lease on their studio/office space is just about up and they were hoping to sell before having to sign a new one.
 
Now the question is, who wants WNBM with the power of only 980 watts?? I think it would be very hard to sell, no major radio company would buy that. It's better if it goes to a local company. Something like WVIP. Or a satellite feed of some sort.
 
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