Palm trees? Check. Islands? Check. Pacific Ocean – nope, the two stations being spun on Clear Channel’s behalf by the Aloha Station Trust are on the other side of the US, making the use of Hawaiian terminology only slightly inappropriate. The stations are in the Florida Keys.
The stations are going to The Great Marathon Radio Company, headed by Joseph P. Nascone. He is already up and running in the Keys with a Marathon-based AM-FM combo and a JSA with another FM.
Aloha, formed to contain Clear Channel licenses that lost grandfathered status following the LBO by Bain and Lee, is getting $580K cash for WKEY-FM Key West and WKEZ Tavernier. Jeanette Tully is in charge of Aloha.
GMRC owns WFFG-AM and WGMX-FM in Marathon. The station the company has an LMA with is WKYZ-FM, owned by Keys Media Company Inc. The LMA dates back to 4/15/99.
Here’s how the cluster shakes out, signal-wise. The Marathon stations are centrally located, making it neither to the Florida mainland to the east nor to Key West to the west. WKEY-FM will extend the cluster’s reach in the Key West direction, and WKEY-FM Tavernier extends it toward to mainland.
Key Colony Beach, the location of the LMA’d station, is located to the east of Marathon, but the transmitter is to the west, so it overlaps the Marathon and Key West stations.
