KXNT Las Vegas, a 50 KW powerhouse, news-talk station on 840 kHz, is going off the air starting September 1st of this year. KXNT 840 has a fairly powerful signal that covers most of the Southern end of Nevada during the day, and much of the Western US at night. They run news and conservative news-talk programs, and have been on the air in the growing Las Vegas metro area (2.4 million people, roughly) since 1986 (when they were KVEG).
Their signals also reach the growing sections of Southern Utah, where the cities of St. George and Cedar City are located.
Here is a Wiki about KXNT.:
I first heard KXNT in the 2010's early one morning while tuning my Realistic TRF-656 AM radio, and they were playing the morning newscast for Las Vegas.
Since then, I usually hear them once or twice a week. Overnights they play the popular Coast To Coast AM program, hosted by George Noory.
KXNT has been doing well in the ratings, for a conservative leaning news station in a city that is not known for being particularly conservative, or particularly news-talk friendly. KXNT got a 2.3 rating share in the most recent rating period, which is pretty good for News-Talk. The NPR station in Las Vegas, KNPR-FM, on the other hand, only got a 1.4.
Most metros in the US with an NPR station generally see the NPR station get high ratings. Not so in fun and freewheeling, LA influenced Las Vegas.
So why is KXNT going off the air? It's because the owners of the real estate where KXNT's transmitter and towers are located are selling the property, and the lease is up. Audacy, the radio company that owns KXNT, is also going through a bankruptcy, and the talk in radio circles is that the auditors involved in the bankruptcy proceedings probably have written the radio station off.
Some of the shows will move to another, non-rated news talker, "K-Dawn FM", an FM translator at 101.5 on the dial, and another FM station's HD3 (KXBB-FM-HD3, 93.1 MHz).
The HD3 gets a 0.8 rating in the Las Vegas Nielsen listing, about one third of the audience that KXNT receives.
You can look at the most recent Las Vegas radio ratings here to see how KXNT stacks up.:
A lot of the companies that own a significant number of US Radio stations are concentrating on their 'digital strategy', which means they are hoping that their streaming will succeed in taking over from Over-The-Air radio. The problem with this idea is that streaming radio simply isn't keeping up with Spotify, Pandora, Apple, and YouTube. Even Amazon has a music service. Young people have already given up on Radio streaming for the most part.
The biggest Radio based streaming service, IHeartRadio, only has 8% of the younger listeners, compared to over 50% for Spotify and over 30% for Pandora and a few other services for listeners in the under 35 age demographic. YouTube alone has over 50% of young listeners.
The Radio companies, which over the past 35 years seemed to have made bad decision after bad decision, including constant consolidation, buyouts, and the like -- and bad programming decisions, like laying off popular airstaff and having commercial breaks with up to 15 commercials in a row -- seem to be in between a rock and a hard place.
The big radio corporations ruined Radio, and now they're stuck with what they did to ruin it. I'm certain that in 2050 there will be at least a few "Radio" streaming channels out there on the internet, but the present day ones we know probably won't be included. They may be still on the internet, but that doesn't mean they will get a lot of visits.
Anyone remember MySpace? MP3.com? Excite? AOL? Or even the high popularity of Yahoo's eGroups? Just because you have an internet presence doesn't mean you'll have a lot of visitors, or longevity.
This video is about AOL, once a massive Internet social media site which had over 26 million users in 2000. They still exist, but aren't anywhere near as massive as they were in the late 1990's, when everyone seemed to be on AOL or CompuServe.
There is a lesson here for any industry that wants to bank heavily on Internet-only business.
Not all internet sites and portals have longevity.
The competition is nearly INFINITE.
PS: Inside this video, about 11 minutes in, you can see the splash screen for AskJeeves, a once popular site for asking questions and getting search-generated answers. It was like a progenitor of the present day method of getting AI-generated search results.
Here is the Wiki article on CompuServe, another massive internet portal that was exceedingly popular in the 1990's. Even conservative radio talk host Rush Limbaugh was on CompuServe and talked about them frequently on his show. They were finally shut down in 2009.
The Radio companies are banking on the internet to save them.
I have my doubts about that.
Remember what happened to Radio Disney. They got rid of all their radio stations, and then went to HD2's and promoted their Radio Disney stream. When that strategy didn't work, they went all streaming. That lasted about a year and a half. Now Radio Disney's stream is a 404.
Streaming Radio isn't everything it's cracked up to be.
After all, if a company can't do better with a media that is already proven to have been popular and commercially viable -- with devices (Radios) in every car and house -- what's to say they'll do any better with their ability to succeed online?
I mean, 10-15 commercials in a row? What are they thinking?
How the future of Radio plays out, of course, remains to be seen. But in KXNT's case, they'll be on the air until September 1st, after which the plug will be pulled on yet another station that served the public with news and talk, and covered much of the Western US at night.
So I have maybe one month to hear Las Vegas on my radios at night. The other AM station I hear out of Las Vegas, 670 KMZQ, often isn't very readable at my location. And there is a Latino music station on 870 (KLSQ) that I've only heard once in my life, and that was in the 2010's when the ionosphere was a lot better for MW/AM.
I've never been to Las Vegas. Probably will never visit the place. The only way I have 'visited' Las Vegas is by radio, at night.
I've been to Reno when I was a kid, but not the rest of Nevada. Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing metros in the country. Now they will be short at least one News-Talk, AM radio station. I suppose the millions of visitors who go there to gamble and see expensive stage shows, and engage in other activity ('what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas') probably won't notice. But I will.
And with that, here's hoping you all are having a good Summer (in the Northern hemisphere), and a good Winter elsewhere.
Peace.
C.C. July 31st, 2026.
