Salem Buys The Last 5 Radio Disney Stations

It's taken about a year between Radio Disney announcing it was selling off all its stations except for Los Angeles to just concentrate on audio streaming. (It gets certain benefits for having at least one radio station airing Radio Disney.) Salem has already bought a big chunk of the Radio Disney stations and is now committed to taking over the remaining five in the portfolio.

http://www.insideradio.com/free/dis...cle_0f8667a4-5c4d-11e5-9d93-9fe9cd510563.html

I filed this story in the Religious format section but I doubt any of these stations, other than St. Louis, will go with a religious format, since Salem already has stations airing its brokered religious format with better signals in Minneapolis, Tampa, Denver (a full-power FM station) and Portland OR (also a full-power FM station). The stations are...

St. Louis...1260 WSDZ...5000 watts
Minneapolis...1440 KDIZ...5000 watts days/500 watts nights
Tampa...1380 WWMI...5000 watts
Denver...1690 KDDZ...10,000 watts days/1000 watts nights
Portland OR...1640 KDZR...10,000 watts days/1000 watts nights

So what will Salem put on these new acquisitions? Probably its brokered business news format. Minneapolis, Tampa, Denver and Portland already have stations airing the Salem Conservative Talk line up, usually dubbed The Answer. And both Tampa and Denver also have Salem's Spanish-language brokered religion format known as Radio Luz. Other than some FM outlets, nearly all of Salem's stations air one of these four formats.

Good for Salem. You might have your opinion of the programming they put on their stations, but I have to say it is a well run company and seems to be open to new things. A guy I know that worked for Salem several years admired how they viewed each market and station as an individual station. He said the approach was certainly not cookie cutter.

Speculating what will go on these stations is anyone's guess but I suspect Salem will attempt to get all their bases covered as far as the formats they do: English/Spanish Christian, Talk and Business Talk. They'll likely look at individual markets to see if they might find an uncovered niche. More or less, that's how their business talk format came about.

At least the stations went at a price that is quite reasonable for them to handle. With the many options for building programming from within the Salem owned stations, they should be able to create a product they can succeed with in each market.

I don't work for Salem and have no ties to them. I've merely sat on the sidelines and watched several companies make moves. Salem seems to have a decent handle on things in my book.

b-turner said:

Good for Salem. You might have your opinion of the programming they put on their stations, but I have to say it is a well run company and seems to be open to new things. A guy I know that worked for Salem several years admired how they viewed each market and station as an individual station. He said the approach was certainly not cookie cutter.

Speculating what will go on these stations is anyone's guess but I suspect Salem will attempt to get all their bases covered as far as the formats they do: English/Spanish Christian, Talk and Business Talk. They'll likely look at individual markets to see if they might find an uncovered niche. More or less, that's how their business talk format came about.

At least the stations went at a price that is quite reasonable for them to handle. With the many options for building programming from within the Salem owned stations, they should be able to create a product they can succeed with in each market.

I don't work for Salem and have no ties to them. I've merely sat on the sidelines and watched several companies make moves. Salem seems to have a decent handle on things in my book.

Click to expand...

I've heard the same thing about Salem.

Excellent synopsis, I think you're spot on.