Last week we mentioned an impending format change at KLOU in St. Louis. The change hasn’t happened yet, but more information has begun to appear. St. Louis market vet Smash will take over mornings at the station on Monday, June 18. STLMedia.net confirms from market insiders that the station will be a male-leaning 70s/80s Classic Hits, much like sisters WRIT Milwaukee and WBIG Washington. It’s now just a matter of when the flip takes place between now and Smash’s debut.
Elsewhere in the Clear Channel domain of web-domains:
It looks like Houston could be getting a dose of Mojo. Recent domain registrations include mojo950.com and mantalk950.com. We could’ve pegged these for Seattle’s KJR as opposed to Houston’s KPRC if it were not for the concurrent registrations of sports790.com for KBME and news740.com for KTRH.
Panama City, FL may be the next market to see the WFLA news/talk branding that originated in Tampa and has since expanded to Orlando and Tallahassee. 945wfla.com was registered this week in a state where Clear Channel only owns one station on that frequency: WFBX Parker, FL currently a Classic Rocker with the “94.5 The Fox” branding.
In the interest of fairness to Clear Channel, we do have a domain that we’re pretty sure they have nothing to do with: Fresh1015.com Right now it’s an anonymous GoDaddy registration using Domainsbyproxy.com (a service you’ll hear us mention from time to time, a company that allows registrars to protect their registrations from gnomes like us), but we’ve got a good tip that this one is in fact related to CBS Radio’s current Free-FM in Phoenix. CBS launched the first “Fresh” branded AC in New York earlier this year to good success and recently the consultants behind the brand have been busy preparing for launches in other markets. As always we’ll be following this one closely.