Report: Sale Of KPLU/Tacoma-Seattle Surprised Staff

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A report in SEATTLE's CROSSCUT.ORG on the sale of PACIFIC LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY News-Talk-Jazz KPLU/TACOMA to the UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, announced last week and yet to be filed with the FCC, blindsided KPLU staffers, who CROSSCUT reporter DAVID KROMAN says did not know of the negotiations and plans to sell the station. 

KROMAN notes parallels to a similar deal in COLORADO and the "belief among some at KPLU that, if given the opportunity, the station could have appealed to its listeners and perhaps hung onto its license."

KROMAN reports that KPLU staff was notified of the deal only a half hour before outside media, but that the licensee had been trying to sell the station for over a dozen years.  DONNA GIBBS, VP/Marketing and Communications at PACIFIC LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY, told KROMAN that "We believe this is a natural union between two stations that for many years have shared a common mission and a common region," and, in response to a CHANGE.ORG petition to block the deal, noted that a contract has been signed and "If KPLU wanted to have a community-sponsored license they could have brought a proposal to the university at any time over the past 49 years.”

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