In the home of Purdue University, Bill Christian and Mike Reed have launched a low-power TV station with the dual affiliation and bought four radio stations to go with it.
DMA 187
Lafayette, Ind., Getting Fox-NBC Affiliate
Veteran broadcasters Bill Christian and Mike Reed are piecing together a TV-radio cluster in Lafayette, Ind., a small market (DMA 187) revolving around Purdue University.
The partners just launched low-power WPBI-LD (the calls stand for Purdue Boilermakers Indiana) with a dual affiliation (Fox and NBC), and, yesterday, they made a deal to acquire three FMs and one AM in the market for $2.3 million.
The radios: WSHY-AM/WAZY-FM Lafayette; WCYM-FM Attica and WBPE-FM Brookston.
The seller of the stations is Artistic Media Partners headed by Arthur Angotti. It also owns WDND-AM South Bend.
The deal was brokered by Kalil & Co.
Reached by phone yesterday evening, Christian said he has plans for local programming on the TV stations, but wasn’t ready to talk about them.
BRAND CONNECTIONS
The radio stations have “great tie-ins” with Purdue, and “we’ll try to give the town more choice,” he said.
The current challenge is securing carriage on satellite and the market’s cable systems and that is going well, he said.
The market has been getting its NBC and Fox stations in “spillover” from stations in Indianapolis, Chicago and Terre Haute, Ind.
The only other station licensed to Lafayette is Media General’s CBS affiliate WLFI. Nexstar Broadcasting is merging with Media General, but is spinning off WLFI to Bob Prather’s Heartland Media.
Comments (2)
Patrick Burns says:
October 26, 2016 at 2:04 pm
Bill & Mike,
The dynamic duo of drop ins where once there were singletons, Very very savvy operators.
By Kim McAvoy says:
November 3, 2016 at 11:08 am
That makes five big-four network startups for them in just three years- a world record!