Radio One (company)

Radio One (company)

Radio One, Inc is a U.S. company which owns and operates 69 radio stations in 22 American cities. The company is headed by Cathy Hughes, Chairman and her son Alfred Liggins, CEO. The company's target listeners are African Americans in urban areas. Radio One also owns a 51% interest in TV One, a cable and satellite TV network begun in early 2004 in partnership with Comcast and a handful of investors (including DirecTV, which added the network to its lineup and became a minority shareholder in January 2005). It also acquired BlackPlanet, the African American social networking site as part of Community Connect in 2008. As with other large radio broadcasting companies, Radio One has a strategy of acquiring stations in a given market and making sudden format changes they believe will be profitable. Radio One tends to favor urban-based formats targeting African American listeners, and makes format changes to target their demographic. One example of this occurred when Radio One acquired country radio station WCAV, near Boston, Massachusetts, in 1999, and transformed the station into WBOT, "Hot 97.7," with an Urban format. The station was subsequently resold a short time later and transformed to a hard rock format, much to the ridicule of the local African American community.