By now, you probably know that Clear Channel officially owns WOR-AM in New York city, a peculiar station with a strange history, tied up in the government going after Howard Hughes and forcing him to sell off his radio stations – in this case, the buyer was a smallish radio company in Connecticut named Buckley Broadcasting. If my memory is right, part of the fallout of that was Buckley had to divest two small AM radio stations that are close enough to New York to be considered part of the NY Metro market.
Back then a station owner could only own one AM station and one FM station in a market, and not more than 20 for the entire country. That prevented any of the other big radio companies at the time (NBC, CBS, ABC, Westinghouse) from picking up WOR since the already owned an AM station in New York. The two stations in Western CT were sold to Cox radio, which has no other AM presence in New England, and recently donated both stations to Sacred Heart University for the tax writeoff.
In keeping with my “Three generation rule”, as a family-owned company passes down to each generation, each generation becomes less and less interested in running the “old man’s” business and want to “cash out” – the elder Mr Buckley died about a year ago, and so the time was right to sell off the crown jewel of the empire. Back in the heyday of consolidation, buyers offering $150 million for the station were turned down. Clear Channel bought WOR-AM for $30 million. Buckley had paid $22.5 million for the station back in 1990 (the license was briefly held by Summit Communications).
WOR-AM dabbled in radio syndication. To be blunt, they were really half-assed. Dr Joy Browne was the only person they syndicated that developed a serious national presence. WOR Radio Network syndicated Steve Malzberg for maybe a year, replaced by Rita Cosby. There are a handful of weekend shows to fill the wasteland of weekend AM radio, but only carried on a handful of small independent stations, and even so were frequently preempted by sports. Over the 10 years or so I’ve been watching closely, they did very little marketing of their products and didn’t seem to really care much about the network. At the end, they weren’t even carrying their own shows live on their own station.
So Clear Channel now owns WOR and were faced with what to do with the syndicated talk business that competes with their own Premiere Broadcasting, the syndicator of Rush, Hannity, Coast to Coast and some other programs.
Dr Joy Browne left at the end of the year, and is starting Monday with Radio America. Tom Taylor tells me that 3 of the shows will be merged into Premiere, and the rest are being cut loose (don’t know the specifics yet). So the WOR Radio Network is officially among the deceased. The only remaining question in my mind is whether Clear Channel will re-image the station and throw away the three character WOR heritage call sign. You might notice that WNBC-AM no longer exists with that name, for instance.