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The New Entercom Is Now Official

Last of the original Golden Age of Radio names disappears

It’s now really, really official — mark down this date — Entercom and CBS Radio have finally merged, creating a single presence.

The new entity places itself solidly in the top two or three radio companies in the country and sees itself as a healthy competitor for the top position against a financially-challenged iHeartMedia.

Entercom CEO David Field said of the new company, “We now have the scale and capabilities to drive meaningful growth and to compete more effectively with other media for a larger share of advertising dollars. We also look forward to helping to elevate the radio industry, which remains massively undervalued by advertisers despite having emerged as America’s #1 reach medium, delivering outstanding ROI to customers.”

Friday morning Field sent a memo to the Entercom troops, new and old, congratulating them and outlining a very bright future with big opportunities for the company. The enlarged Entercom has 235 radio stations.

Despite a variety of sales and reorganizations in the last couple of decades, CBS Radio could trace its radio presence back to the late 1920s and was one of the two major players in the industry during radio’s most powerful decades before the advent of television. Many of the stations involved in the merger were legacy stations with histories of domination in major markets. That is all now history.

It should be noted that the CBS News Radio and CBS Sports Radio programming operations were not part of the deal so The Eye still has a place in radio, if greatly reduced. 

For its part, CBS Corp. released a final notification as well. It noted that participating CBS stockholders will receive one share of Entercom Class A common stock in exchange for each whole share of CBS Radio common stock they received in the exchange offer.

In addition, the transaction enables CBS to retire approximately 17.9 million shares of CBS Class B common stock.

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