![]() That includes a morning show featuring Milwaukee’s Earl Ingram, which runs on stations in Milwaukee-Waukesha, Green Bay, Oshkosh and Racine-Kenosha. On his talk stations, “our goal is to have local voices in every market. “We had 14 correspondents across the state,” Crute notes. His first challenge was overseeing coverage of the November 2022 election. Terry Bell, who has worked for years in radio and as a journalism instructor at Madison Area Technical College, was brought on as news director for Civic Media in October 2022. “Our country music stations will air three hours of news a day.” on all stations, including the music stations. There will be a state news broadcast at the top of the hour at 8 a.m., noon and 5 p.m. “We will broadcast state news in every market we serve and regional stuff, too.” Now the stations will run a mix of ABC and CBS news every half hour, with programming that emphasizes local hosts and local programming: “We’re trying to be hometown Wisconsin radio,” Crute notes. Many of those 12 talk radio stations were previously reliant on nationally syndicated conservative shows, with scanty news coverage and no local news coverage. Its map of the state shows circles of coverage by its radio stations for every area of the state, save the little-covered northeastern area of the state bordering Michigan’s upper peninsula. Their most recent purchases includes some $3.65 million to buy two stations in Eau Claire, one in LaCrosse, and one in Racine that has two different signals.Īll told, Civic Media now owns 12 talk radio stations, three country music stations and three with other music formats, like ‘Oldies” hit songs. “The network we’ve built far exceeds our initial plans,” Crute says.Ĭrute’s partner, Sage Weil, is a wealthy tech industry entrepreneur and big time donor to Democratic politicians who has financed the building of Civic Media, as their company is called. Whereas Crute styles himself as the good guy, bringing some liberal talk and mostly a lot of factual news to a state that’s long been dominated by conservative talk radio. Except that the Death Star was run by Darth Vader and the bad guys we movie fans loved to hate. ![]() So says radio owner Mike Crute, using Star Wars terminology to describe the veritable empire of radio stations he has now built.
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