“Their infusion of foreign capital into BIBI, combined with their expertise, will allow BIBI to continue operations of WLYK and facilitate its provision of local news programming and music to the listeners in the Cape Vincent, NY market,” they tell the FCC.

LOL, yes...local news programming and music for the 2,777 residents of Cape Vincent, New York.
 

paterson1 wrote:

Will Kingston advertisers use them?

They've hired a longtime Corus Kingston sales manager to make that happen.

It's not the first time a US station would be owned entirely by non-US citizens. Ricki Lee (UK citizen) and his wife (Polish) received FCC and State Department permission to buy several stations north of Albany in the last few years.

fybush wrote:

It's not the first time a US station would be owned entirely by non-US citizens. Ricki Lee (UK citizen) and his wife (Polish) received FCC and State Department permission to buy several stations north of Albany in the last few years.

Interesting. Thanks for the update. The article called what Jon Pole and company are doing a "first." So does that mean it would be a first for Canada and not a first overall in the U.S? I honestly thought it was illegal for a foreign owned entity to buy a station south of the border.  Are those stations you cite still on the air and still owned by the foreign group? 

Besides the Kingston connection, I believe there once was a station broadcasting to B.C. that used towers located in Washington state to reach the province's Punjabi and Indian community, which raised all kinds of CRTC concerns. 

Wikipedia has this to say about KVRI, which supposedly stood for K Radio Vancouver India:

"The station was operating under a LMA (Local Marketing Agreement) with Radio India, Ltd., and was broadcasting from its studios in Surrey, British Columbia until November 13, 2014, when the CRTC forced Radio India to end the LMA due to rules that prohibit a Canadian company from operating, leasing, or owning, a radio or television property in the United States solely for broadcasting to Canadians, and for operating without a license within Canada."

Yet, another radio station, KRPA, is still around and while it's located in Washington State, not only does it broadcast solely to B.C, its phone numbers are all area code 604, and all the news on its website is about British Columbia. How is that allowed and does the CRTC have any say in that?

And then there's one closer to home. Birach Broadcasting's WTOR 770 AM in Youngstown, N.Y., is a daytime-only station that gets all of its programming from Toronto and is aimed solely at an ethnic GTA audience. I believe it's also part of a local marketing agreement and may actually be operated by a Canadian, with studios based in Mississauga but blasted over the border from a transmitter in New York state. Even the TOR in its call letters stand for "Toronto."

I'm not sure the CRTC is fond of this idea, either, but it's been around a long time. Have they ever tried to stop this? Can they legally do so? Is what WTOR is doing actually legal? Seems there are some big loopholes in the rules, but I admit to being somewhat fuzzy on the law surrounding all this. 

RadioActive wrote:

I'm not sure the CRTC is fond of this idea, either, but it's been around a long time. Have they ever tried to stop this? Can they legally do so?. 

Not directly.

WLYK (We Love You Kingston) has targeted the market for its entire ~35 years. The tower was built a close to Kingston as possible, and also carries an NPR repeater that identifies as Kingston. In the 2000s, K-ROCK applied for a second FM and Corus objected arguing that they basically already had one. Their objection even included images of business and rate cards with Kingston addresses and phone numbers. CRTC gave them the license.

In Vancouver, the CRTC threatened to deny local licenses unless the applicant gave up the border blasters. That's about the extent of what they can do.