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The radio landscape in Lincoln County continues to evolve and change. Oldies Radio, KOOQ 1410-AM, announced Thursday that it was changing formats from rock and roll oldies to ESPN Radio sports talk. The station will cease broadcasting oldies music on Halloween night and begin transmitting 24-hours of sports talk from one of the most recognizable and respected networks in the world on Nov. 1, according to David Fudge, operations manager. KOOQ has long been a leader in sports programming in Lincoln County. Sports director Chuck Schwartz has been the voice of the North Platte High School Bulldogs for about 30 years. The station also broadcasts North Platte Community College, North Platte Legion Baseball and Chadron State College Football. “When we looked at our station as a whole, we recognized that we were already doing a good job with local sports, so we decided to take it to the next level and add the nation's best sports talk format,” Fudge said. “We'll still have all of our local favorites, but we'll also have the NBA, Major League Baseball and the Bowl Championship Series.” ESPN took the entertainment world by storm when it launched a 24-hour sports television network in 1979. Since then, it's spun off ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPN News and ESPN Radio, not to mention the Spanish speaking products and a huge presence on the World Wide Web. The ESPN Radio Network was launched in 1992 and features such lively talk show hosts as Mike and Mike in the morning and Colin Cowherd. ESPN’s radio personalities often discuss much more than sports and venture into other areas of life in an entertaining and often provocative ways. “Our advertisers will be well served with the move, and we think listeners will enjoy the change,” Fudge said. KOOQ, an employee owned Eagle Radio Station, is the most powerful AM station in Lincoln County at 5000 watts daytime, 500 nighttime. Originally known as “Super Q Country” the station broadcast country music until it converted to Oldies in 1988. KELN and KOOQ are part of employee owned Eagle Communications. Eagle owns and operates 21 radio stations in Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska. “As excited as we are about this, we're not done yet,” said Fudge. “We're still building 107.3 FM, which will be a brand new FM radio station for Hershey and North Platte. We hope to have it done before the end of the year.”
Ch..ch..changes … Just last week Rob Mandeville, general manger of radio stations KODY, 1240-AM, and KXNP, KX104-FM, announced that they would be launching a new radio station in December. You can read the Bulletin story by clicking HERE. For fans of classic rock and roll, it will be a treat. Called The Hawk, the station will broadcast 100,000 watts on the 98.5 frequency. Mandeville said the format would feature classic rock music from such artists such as The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd as well as Van Halen, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty and Eric Clapton to name just a few. The station will also feature the popular morning show duo of Bob and Tom.
And if that weren’t enough for radio fans, two new stations are set to debut next Monday, Oct. 22. Both of the new stations are FM stations located at 100.7 FM and 93.5 FM on your radio. The stations will be operated by the Hometown Family Radio company. The owner is Jay Vavricek, former Grand Island mayor and unsuccessful candidate for the House of Representatives. The formats of the stations are a closely guarded secret. Both stations plan to go on the air at 5 p.m. Oct. 22 and it’s only then that listeners will know what formats they will broadcast. By our count, that could be four new radio stations broadcasting locally and another with a completely different format. Local radio listeners will double the number of choices of stations they can choose by the end of the year.
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