Tucson Radio: KVOI 1030 AM Goes Local Talk

Amador Bustos, owner of Bustos Media, bought KVOI 1030 AM recently and on Nov. 1 turned it into an all-local-talk, all-day format. Previously, the station had local talk for certain periods of the day, interspersed with nationally syndicated hosts such as Dennis Prager and Michael Medved.

“KVOI has been a news-talk station for many years,” Bustos told Tom Steller at TucsonLocal.com this week. “It had a certain amount of established following. I didn’t want to change the format from news talk, but I wanted to make it a lot more local instead.”

The station will feature local hosts from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., but not just the conservative political hosts that dominate most talk radio. Then, Bloomberg radio will play overnight.

Bustos, who has been in the radio business for decades in California and Oregon, is making a broader play in Tucson-area radio. He also bought KTGV 106.3-FM when Scripps sold its local stations to Lotus Communications but Lotus needed to spin off two stations to stay within regulatory limits. And he is considering an additional radio-station purchase.

The KVOI purchase was one of five sales made this summer by Doug and Mary Martin and their business, Good News Communications, as they got out of the radio business and pivoted to marketing and public relations.

Bustos was born in Michoacan, Mexico, and moved with his family to California when he was 12. He got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in the sociology of education. He was working on a doctorate when he veered off into the radio business.

He built a Spanish-language radio network, Z Spanish Radio Media, and sold it to Entravision for $350 million in 2000. Then he started a new radio business that crashed in the 2008 recession. Then he started again with Bustos Media in 2011.

KVOI 1030 AM (10 Kw-D, 1 Kw-N, DA2) Daytime 2 mV/m contour

Now, Bustos has bought a home in Tucson and plans to spend much of the winter here while living much of the rest of the year in Portland. Ironically, his stations in the Pacific Northwest tend to be Spanish-language broadcasters, while the Tucson stations will be in English. Some of the stations in Oregon even broadcast Russian-language programming to the emigre population there.