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The Atlanta station has brought in Charly Morgan to head up their midday show. Morgan is currently the morning drive co-host on “Your Georgia Country” (WNGC/Athens) and has also been handling midday fill-in on B98.5 since May 2017.

You could hear the frustration in the Urban One CEO's voice about his company's performance. Alfred Liggins said it was tough all around, lead by a downward trend in the radio business and Reach Media.

At the end of the year, Westwood One will be losing a big-name radio brand. Following the expiration of its distribution agreement with Westwood, CBS News Radio will team with Skyview Networks for distribution, inventory management, and sales. CBS News Radio delivers news, talk, information, and special events coverage to more than 1,000 affiliates, including 13 stations in the top 15 markets.

Entravision's radio segment saw a revenue decrease in the second quarter of $2.4 million. The company says the big drop was due to decreases in local and national advertising revenue, and a decrease in political advertising revenue. Local revenue was down 9% and national dropped 19%.

Meruelo Media has closed on the sale of KPWR-FM, Power 106 Los Angeles from Emmis Communications. The station has been programmed by Meruelo for the last month under an LMA. Meruelo paid Emmis $82.8 Million for the station. 

Bloomberg Radio has begun programming with the intent to purchase WNBP-AM and its translator at 106.1 FM in Newburyport, MA. The stations will be a 100% simulcast of Bloomberg Radio programming that airs on WRCA 1330 AM and 106.1 FM.

Radio's largest advertising category continues to struggle after years of very healthy growth. The annualized pace of U.S. car and light truck sales in July fell to 16.73 million vehicles. That's down from 17.8 million in 2016. Sales of large pickups was also off, by 4 percent. Large SUV's dropped 20 percent. In July, Ford was down 7.5%, Fiat Chrysler dropped 10 percent, Honda was off 1%, Nissan was down 3% Only Toyota was up, with a 4% gain.

Beasley Media Group has hired Steve Mills to program WDRR-FM in Augusta. Mills most recently served as a producer for Sound Solutions, a subsidiary of Cumulus Media. Previous to that, he worked as the Operations Manager for Midwest Communications and was the Corporate Digital Manager for Cumulus and Westwood One in Atlanta.

Mat Bates is the new PD at Cumulus-owned KFOG-FM in San Francisco. He was most recently Head of Programming for Rock Formats at Pandora. Before Pandora, Bates was Global Head of Music and Curation at Rdio and Sr. Manager for Radio Programming at Slacker. Prior to going to the dark side of audio, Bates spent a decade in radio at 91X, KXTE, KQXR, and KRZQ.

(By Michael Botta) I often say to my salespeople, “Nobody woke up this morning wanting to buy an ad schedule, but they did wake up this morning with problems in their business.” And that’s true. Every business across this country has problems, every single one of them; but an ad schedule won’t fix those problems.