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Another local radio station closes

By | Published on Friday 1 May 2009

Why anyone would want to fight so much to own a share of the local radio business is anyone’s guess. A terrestrial radio licence was once seen as, well, a licence to print money, but, as much previously reported, a number of smaller terrestrial stations have gone off air in the last year. The latest is Valleys Radio, the South Wales station owned by UTV Radio. It went off air yesterday morning.

UTV had asked OfCom for permission to relocate the station’s operations to Swansea so it could share facilities with other Welsh stations in the group, but the media regulator refused. A similar refusal regarding the co-location of UTV’s stations in the North West led to the firm selling off one of it’s stations there – Stockport’s Imagine FM – for a time it looked like that might also close down.

It is the second local UTV station to close in the last year – their Edinburgh speech station Talk 107 closed last year. Other local stations to close in the last year or so include Fen Radio in Cambridge, Abbey FM in Barrow-in-Furness, New Pennine FM in Huddersfield, Time 106.8 and South 107.3 in South East London and Zee Radio in central London. Mersey 106.7 also went off air, though that was as much to the outfit’s new owners dodging OfCom rules as anything else.



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