Media mergers, and the trickle down effect
It's come out from various sources today that The Sporting News empire has been sold off to American City Business Journals, Inc. The Associated Press says the deal is expected to be finished early next month.
Here's the specifics:
Vulcan Sports Media Inc., the company run by former Microsoft kajllionaire (but quickly losing his pocket money) Paul Allen, bought the Sporting News, its website, book publishing company and its radio network, back in 2000.
American City is a part of Advance Publications, which owns Golf Digest, Conde Nast, a bunch of newspapers and The Sports Business Weekly and Sports Business Daily.
Locally, the sale could affect the future of KMPC-AM (1540), aka "The Ticket," the Sporting New radio local affiliate that has been in scale-back mode for the last few months since trying to make itself more attractive to a buyer. We're thinking this won't have any affect on the future of the station until at least the first of the year, at which time, the contract of Petros Papadakis , hosting the only local show left on the station, runs out and leaves him as a free agent.
Station GM Roger Nadel had this to say about today's news: "We continue to operate the same way today that we did last week. As a reminder, our competitors have been speculating about the demise of Sporting News Radio for some time, and it turns out that they were both misinformed and inaccurate. We can’t control the speculation about our radio stations either, and are continuing to focus on the opportunities to serve the needs of our listeners and advertisers.
"We still have a great lineup of talented hosts including Tony Bruno, Dave Smith, 2 Live Stews, Petros Papadakis and David Stein. We still are carrying five NFL games this week (including the opener Thursday evening). We are still broadcasting this Saturday’s Notre Dame game (and the ten that follow).
"It’s business as usual here until or unless someone tells us otherwise. We are still a great vehicle for distributing an advertiser’s message in a top-notch sports environment."
Comments
710 should pick up petros and take either the big show or gary and demarco off the air. they are both terrible and petros would be a huge upgrade
Posted by: matt | September 5, 2006 03:38 PM