We know Citadel bit off way more than it could financially chew in buying up the ABC radio station fleet...question is, who might be the buyers if Citadel has to sell?
This is not based on any inside info, but there are a few possible candidates with both money and experience in the radio business...
--Disney could buy the group back at a huge discount and take control just as the economy, and presumably the ad market, is beginning to show signs of a turnaround. They know the business and ran it well while they owned it. They also have a lot of cash.
--NBC Universal could make a radio comeback. It's well known that both Jack Welch and his successor Jeff Immelt, the CEOS of parent GE over the last 25 years, have had only one major regret, one thing they did that looks to them in retrospect like a mistake--getting out of radio in 1988. Buying the former ABC stations and the radio networks gets NBC back into radio in a big way, and at a lot lower cost than they would have had to pay five or even ten years ago. It may be hard to imagine Talkradio 77 WNBC, Talkradio 89 WMAQ, and Talkradio 79 KNBC, but it could happen...they, too, have a lot of cash.
--Another major media company with cash could be one of the major cable operators like Comcast.
--You could see the stations go to various local companies, including some with regional media, entertainment and sports interests in the respective markets. I could imagine the Steinbrenners making a run at Citadel's New York cluster and someone like Jerry Reinsdorf going after the Chicago cluster, while Dodgers owner Frank McCourt (no relation to the late author) or Lakers owner Jerry Buss could bid for the LA stations. The Tribune's marriage of WGN and the Cubs was a model; the Rogers family cable and telecomm empire's control of a fleet of Toronto radio stations while operating the Blue Jays, and the Cardinals' ownership of KTRS in St. Louis, have worked well for those teams and their parent firms, so why not other well-heeled team owners, who already have ownership in their cable channels and might find radio a natural partner?
You can also guess which companies, which might have been in the hunt a few years ago, will not be now. Clear Channel is clearly a seller rather than a buyer these days, given their difficulties in restructuring their corporate debt, and Rupert Murdoch (whose Fox media empire might have been a candidate to buy Citadel) now has its own bad financial news to contend with in the form of lower revenues and cratering profits, so they're not in an expansive mood either. CBS has the money to buy, but they're selling stations in markets outside the top 25 and they already have very successful clusters of stations in markets like Chicago, New York, Boston and LA. They're pretty close to their limit in all those markets and won't be looking for more.
None of these stations will go dark, certainly not WLS. But many, if not all, will be in different hands before long barring a miraculous recovery in the economy and the ad market in the next three months. We are getting a recovery, to be sure, but it'll be a lot more gradual than Citadel needs.
