Educational Media Foundation is acquiring three stations from affiliates of Withers Broadcasting.
EMF will pay WYNG, LLC $450,000 for what is now AC 94.9 WYNG Mount Carmel IL/Evansville IN. WYNG will join EMF’s “K-Love” Christian AC network as a satellite of 91.9 KLVR Middletown CA. The K-Love programming is already heard in the Evansville market on 95.3 WKVN Morganfield KY, whose coverage reaches the areas where WYNG does not.
EMF will also acquire two stations in Keokuk IA paying $500,000 for Withers Broadcasting of Iowa’s Classic Hits “Kool 95.3” KOKX-FM and David Lister’s Classic Rock 96.3 KRNQ. KOKX-FM will also join “K-Love” as a satellite of KLVR, while KRNQ will flip to Spanish Christian “Radio Nueva Vida” as a satellite of 90.9 KGCL Jordan Valley OR. The other two stations that made up Withers’ Keokuk cluster were sold to Riverfront Broadcasting in December for $100,000.
I’m just glad EMF didn’t snatch up WUEV from the University of Evansville. An unnamed company tried very hard to acquire WUEV in 2006, but luckily station alumni (including me) got wind of it and managed to convince school administrators to keep the station. It wasn’t an easy battle, but we prevailed.
I may be driving up to Evansville for the Wichita State basketball game on 1/31. If so, I’ll effort landing a legal ID of the new 94.9 EMF format (and one would guess new call letters are imminent since there’s almost no way are they keeping it WYNG) while I’m there for Tophour.com. Speaking of which, I have a serious backlog of IDs that I plan to start extracting and uploading there soon…