Jeff Smulyan can't catch a break ...

From Tom Taylor:

On a day when most radio stocks participate in the rally, Emmis falls below $2 a share.

Beasley was up 9%, CBS up 3%, Cumulus up 5%, Entercom up 6% - and then you hit the listing for Emmis, which lost a nickel to close at $1.97. That’s 43 cents below CEO Jeff Smulyan’s offering price to take the company private, and it may be a continuing marker of skepticism about the deal. The only other radio-connected stock to drop on Friday (Dow up 102 points) was Entravision, which also lost 5 cents to finish at $2.30. Everybody else in the sector was up.

Over the weekend, Secret Squirrel sent this:

Things are really tough at Emmis because the bid to take the company private have hit a snag. The company needs CASH and will likely sell KFTK to one of the groups looking to put classical music on the air. It will be a bargain for the group and a much needed cash infusion for Emmis as they dump their worst signal and lowest rated station.

Anderson concludes:

With all its shortcomings in ratings and revenue, KFTK is John Beck's favorite station of the local Emmis group. While the decision to sell any of the group's properties would come from way above Beck's pay grade, I find it difficult to believe that they'd let KFTK go to become a classical station, simply based on any acquiring group's abilty to raise sufficient cash.

Classical stations just do not make a lot of money. Potential buyers are driven more by the art than cash flow.

Emmis has a bunch of properties worth a lot more in other markets that would raise more cash. Smulyan's been trying to go private for a long time. Their STL group is pretty small potatoes.  KSHE and KIHT are the McMansions, the rest are 2500-square foot tract homes.

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