It’s a year of big changes across the Boise media landscape. In the wake of KBOI-TV’s sale to Sinclair and KTVB’s pending sale to Gannett, Peak Broadcasting announced Friday it entered into an agreement to sell its stations to Townsquare Media. In addition, Townsquare is going to purchase a raft of stations from Cumulus Media — but not the ones in Boise.
Here’s the breakdown:
- Boise’s Peak stations (KSAS/103.3 Kiss FM, KFXD/Sports 63, KCIX/Mix 106, KXLT/107.9 Lite FM, KIDO/580 AM, KAWO/Wow Country 104.3) will now be owned by Townsquare Media
- Boise’s Cumlus stations will remain owned by Cumulus
- Fresno’s Peak stations will be purchased by Townsquare, but immediately traded to Cumulus
- Townsquare will buy a number of other stations from Cumulus
In all, Townsquare will add 71 net stations across the country. Oak Tree Capital owns debt in both Townsquare & Peak — and may have been the “man behind the curtain” on this deal to some degree. Townsquare will be focused on small & medium markets (hence the spin out of Fresno to Cumulus) and Cumulus appears to be shifting to larger markets (all the stations it trades to Townsquare are in markets on the smaller end of the spectrum).
I’m getting an upbeat and hopeful tone from folks in the Peak Boise building. Four of Peak’s stations were in the first four places in the spring Arbitron book in the A25-54 demo..
The deal will reunite the Boise Peak stations with their former sister stations in Twin Falls which are owned by Townsquare (KLIX, KEZJ, KSNQ). Both groups were once owned by Clear Channel.
Disclosures: I work for KTVB and wrote about radio news for six years on IdahoRadioNews.com