Bonneville International will LMA Entercom’s required spin-offs in Sacramento and San Francisco.
Bonneville International will gain control of four of CBS’ five stations in Sacramento: AC “Mix 96” 96.1 KYMX, Hot AC “Now 100.5” KZZO, “New Country 105.1” KNCI, and “Sports 1140” KHTK.
Bonneville also will operate four stations in San Francisco: CBS Radio CHR “99.7 Now” KMVQ and Entercom AC 96.5 KOIT, Classic Rock “98.5 K-Fox” KUFX, and Urban AC 102.9 KBLX.
No sale agreements are in place yet as the licenses will be held by the Divestiture Trust. Bonneville will begin operating the stations as soon as the Entercom/CBS Radio merger closes later this month.
Rhythmic CHR 102.5 KSFM will remain with Entercom and join its current cluster there upon completion of the merger with CBS Radio.
The deal marks a return to San Francisco for Bonneville as the company previously owned 96.5 KOIT as well as what is now 95.7 KGMZ and 102.1 KRBQ prior to trading them to Entercom in 2007. Bonneville and Entercom have been frequent trading partners over the years. Most recently Entercom sent four stations in Denver to Bonneville in 2015 for KSWD Los Angeles to satisfy the DOJ following its purchase of Lincoln Financial Media. Going back to 1997, Entercom sent 94.5 KLDE Houston and $5 million to Bonneville for three Seattle stations and four in Kansas City.
Bonneville is a awesome broadcaster with strong values.
Welcome back Bonneville to the San Francisco Bay Area radio market…maybe perhaps this will be time it will change one of the stations into country music of course not KOIT
But then again wouldn’t be interesting if they decided to add a 4th Sports Radio station in this market…think almost all their radio cluster has at least one Sports radio talk station with the exception of Salt Lake City lol