Salem Media Group, Inc.
SALMDISTRESS WATCHDISTRESS LEANSalem Media Group, Inc. reads as Distress Watch (composite 70/100); pressure / disclosure signals dominate the posture this cycle · primary market Media & Education.
Lens
Disclosed M&A capital (2023–2025)
N/A
vs N/A in 2020–2022
Disclosed transactions
N/A
0/3 active fiscal years in window
Buyer archetype
Consistent Strategic Buyer
Meaningful spend appears across repeat years.
Composite score
70
Distress Watch dominates · Distress Lean
Behavioral posture, nine reads.
Each index scores the issuer 0–100 against an EDGAR-anchored definition. Scores ≥ threshold elevate the issuer into the index's constituent set; the dominant index drives the masthead label.
Active Acquirer
Companies actively deploying disclosed capital into M&A
- $1.4B disclosed buyer spend
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
- 251 8-Ks
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
- 23 activism filings
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
- 23 activism filings
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
- 23 activism filings
- Latest activism 6.2y ago; heavily discounted
Distress Watch
DominantIssuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
- 10-Q 925d stale
- 10-K 1170d stale
- 23 activism filings
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
Issuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
- 251 8-Ks
- 5 form types
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $65M
- 10-Q 925d ago
- 2 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($MM); ticks show recorded transaction count. Disclosure tier annotated where v6 audited corpus carries an entry.
Disclosed spend $MM Disclosed transactions (right axis)Peak spend year: $1,250M · Peak count: 27
| FY | Disclosed buys | Disclosed spend | Avg ticket | Audited tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2024 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2023 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2022 | 5 | $5M | $1M | N/A |
| 2021 | 5 | $5M | $1M | N/A |
| 2020 | N/A | $1.3B | N/A | N/A |
Strategy posture.
The buyer's playbook in terms of strategic archetype: what each disclosed move says about how they're deploying capital.
Archetype mix
- Geographic Expansion20%
- Horizontal Consolidation20%
- Bolt On20%
- Platform20%
- Tuck In20%
Strategy keywords
Terms recurring across recent 10-K acquisition disclosures.
- geographic_expansion
- horizontal_consolidation
- bolt_on
- platform
- tuck_in
Filing language.
Direct excerpts from acquisition disclosures and strategy sections: the verbs the buyer chose, in the filings they signed.
“We realize cost and operating efficiencies by consolidating sales, technical and administrative support, promotional functions, and other shared overhead costs, such as facilities and rent, when possible.”
“We assemble market clusters, or multiple radio stations operating within the same geographic market, to achieve operational efficiencies.”
“we realize cost and operating efficiencies by consolidating sales, technical and administrative support”
“operational efficiencies. Several benefits are achievable when operating market clusters.”
Market context.
Where this issuer sits inside its SE-Cluster rollup wedge, with disclosed-spend rank plus trading comparables against the public peer set.
Primary market
Media & Education
- Market spend (2023–2025)
- $31.8B
- Market spend (2020–2022)
- $74.8B
- Recent vs prior
- −57%
- Issuer rank in market
- N/A
- Share of market capital
- 0.0%
Valuation positioning
SALM trades at a -14.5-turn discount to the Media & Education peer median of 12.1×.
- EV / Revenue
- 0.3×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- N/A
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 12.1×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21.6× | 2.0× | -0.2× | $8.8B | $55M | |
| 19.2× | 1.5× | -3.6× | $25.6B | $196M | |
| 4.9× | 1.8× | 2.2× | $37.2B | $100M | |
| 3.0× | 0.2× | 14.1× | $2.1B | $14M |
Trading multiples from FMP market data; disclosed M&A spend from the SE-Cluster EDGAR 10-K corpus. Peer set = top disclosed buyers in Media & Education. Bars scaled to the highest EV/EBITDA in the set.
Buyer landscape.
Public buyers whose stated archetypes, target categories, and recent cadence align with this issuer as a plausible acquisition target. Scores cross EDGAR signal and disclosure overlap.
Likely buyers
No public buyers surface as a strong target-side fit on current signal.
Likely sellers / divestiture partners
No reciprocal divestiture / strategic-alternatives matches identified.
Filing activity & signal stream.
Filing cadence and event-driven signals visible on EDGAR. The signal stream below is curated from restatement / spin-carve / activism categories, providing context for any near-term call.
Filing cadence
- 10-K (annual)272023-03-13
- 10-Q (quarterly)782023-11-13
- 8-K (event)2512024-01-25
- Proxy / DEF 14A392023-04-03
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)232020-03-24
Signals on file
- elevated
Activism on file
2020-03-2423 activist filings on file (13D, DFAN14A, PREC14A series).
- info
Signal
Serial acquisition history
- info
Signal
10-K strategy themes
Audited corpus.
No audited record on file for this CIK in the current v6 corpus.
This issuer has not been extracted into the v6 audited acquirer corpus yet. The brief above pulls from ranking-level aggregates and issuer-index signal only.