Another Aloha moment for Clear Channel

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Jeanette Tully, the trustee of the Aloha Station Trust, has found a buyer for yet another station on the Clear Channel overstock station shelf. This time, the market is Laurel-Hattiesburg MS, the station is WHER-FM and the buyer is Telesouth Communications Inc.


Tully has been operating and spinning off a platoon of Clear Channel stations ever since the radio giant was sold to private equity partners.

WHER-FM is licensed to Heidelberg MS, and it’s being bought by Telesouth for $375K cash. The buyer is headed by Stephen C. Davenport.

The station plays Country, and is a Class C2 on 99.3 MHz with 50 kW @ 492’ – a textbook definition of the classic engineering parameters for a C2 station, for those of you keeping score at home.

Telesouth says it has several stations in the general vicinity, but only one that is part of the Laurel-Hattiesburg market. That would be WFMM-FM Sumrall MS, a Class A News-Talker on 97.3 MHZ with 6 kW @ 328’ – a textbook definition of a fully-powered Class A FM, again for those of you keeping score.

Although the pair of stations forms an FM duopoly under the FCC’s market-based definition, they would not constitute a duopoly under the old contour overlap definition. They come close, but do not actually share any 60 dBu overlap. Although WHER gets very close to the upper reaches of Hattiesburg, it is basically oriented to the Laurel, or northern portion of the market. Meanwhile, the smaller signal of WFMM is local to Hattiesburg, coming into that town from the northwest, and does not put a good signal into Laurel.