(Beaver Dam) Good Karma Brands CEO Craig Karmazin talked about his company’s pending acquisition of a pair of Milwaukee radio stations when he was our guest Wednesday on WBEV’s Community Comment. It was announced last month that Good Karma, the parent company of WBEV and WXRO, would be purchasing WTMJ and WKTI for $16-million dollars. Karmazin recounted for us his earliest days as a businessman in 1997, acquiring Beaver Dam radio stations WBEV and WXRO at the age of 22. He noted that his first two radio stations were news-talk and country formats and now here he is, at another milestone in his career, purchasing another pair of news-talk and country music stations.
“To think that we were able to start here in Beaver Dam 21 years ago,” Karmazin says, “and all the sudden 21 years later – after modeling ourselves after WTMJ for the last 70 years – that we’re the ones that are actually going to be able to go there and buy those radio stations is, you know, you couldn’t really imagine that kind of thing could happen.”
Karmazin highlighted the importance of a Wisconsin-based company owning media assets in the Badger State.
“There aren’t really many Wisconsin-based companies that own any of our media anymore,” he says, “and so the fact that we who have a passion for Wisconsin, who know this state, are able to buy the biggest radio stations in the state of Wisconsin to me is fitting because those are entities that are best being owned locally. So we can take that same attitude that we had 21 years ago with WBEV and WXRO now with WTMJ and WKTI here in 2018.”
You can hear our entire conversation with Craig Karmazin here: