Post-Dispatch: Roberts Broadcasting might sell WAZE, other TV stations

Steven & Michael Roberts

In an effort to raise the cash needed to pay back its creditors, St. Louis-based Roberts Broadcasting may sell one or more of its TV stations, the company's attorney tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Roberts owns what remains of WAZE-CW19 in Evansville, along with WRBU in St. Louis, WZRB inColumbia, S.C. and WRBJ in Jackson, Miss.

In Evansville, WAZE no longer has a full-power operation, no local staff, and no local office. All that remains are three low-power analog "ghost ships" (translators WAZE-LP ch. 17, WIKY-LP and WJPS-LP) which will be forced off the air in three years if they're not converted to digital, and the FCC has no applications for conversion on file.

But that's not stopping the station's owners ...

"We discovered a month or two ago that the stations would beworth much more than we had anticipated," said Roberts attorney A. Thomas DeWoskin. "It's notinconceivable that selling one or two would take care of all of thecreditors' claims."

That may be true of the St. Louis, South Carolina and Mississippi operations, but even a cursory analysis of WAZE indicates that it's not worth much, given the station's current position.

The P-D reports that Roberts Broadcasting's assets totaled $639,623, dwarfed by liabilities of $3.19 million; those amounts were revealed in an amended operations summary filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri thismonth.

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