Wow! Wow!…
I just wrote earlier today about Bonneville’s fiasco in the D.C. market partnering with Washington Post a few years ago…
Now comes word that Bonneville is totally bailing from Radio except out in Utah and the West coast (Bonneville is a for profit company owned by the Latter Day Saints church (Mormons)).
Out of date profile of Bonneville
DC is probably their highest visibility market – the LDS church has a long history with government and the radio business. WTOP is one of the few all news stations in the country not run by CBS. Bonneville has been a significant influence on the NAB and public policy. Perhaps this is fallout from the split within the NAB about the “performance tax”.
The deal is $505 million for a total of 17 stations, or about $30 million each – almost all of them are major market stations. With the exception of the Los Angeles station (which they are keeping), most of their music stations are what you would expect – very conservative music formats – oldies, classic rock, country…
From the buyer’s standpoint… for an all-news channel, I can’t see it having WTOP landing in much better hands than Hubbard (CBS is in “selloff” mode). They ran the All-News Channel back on TV in the 1990s before being railroaded off by MSNBC. ANC was pretty interesting for a cable news outlet: Hubbard operated it as a sort of cooperative between its local TV stations, with a lot of local news ending up on national outlets. It turned out a surprisingly good product.
Other than that… Hubbard doesn’t have much of a footprint in music radio. They have one music station, a sports talk station, and a chick talk station.
If anything, it gets Hubbard a foothold into some large markets it didn’t have before.