Salem Media Group began in 1974 as a business decision, not a religious calling in the sense that founded the ministries around it. Edward Atsinger III and Stuart Epperson Sr, brothers-in-law who had each been separately acquiring small radio stations, combined their holdings into a single company with a specific commercial thesis: buy struggling stations in major markets and convert them to a Christian teaching and talk format nobody else was fully exploiting at the time.
The company started with stations in North Carolina and California and expanded from there into Boston, San Antonio, New York City, San Francisco, Portland and Los Angeles, converting each new acquisition to the Christian talk format as it came under Salem's ownership. The commitment was serious enough that in 1977 Atsinger and Epperson mortgaged their own homes and sold off their remaining secular stations to fund further Christian-format purchases, a bet that only paid off fully with the 1985 acquisition of KKLA, a powerful Los Angeles market station whose transmitter output dwarfed the small Oxnard station the company had started that market with.
What Atsinger and Epperson were building was never a nonprofit ministry. It was, from its first combined stations in 1974, a company designed to make Christian format radio commercially viable at a scale no denomination-run network had attempted, and the pattern they set, buying stations, converting formats, expanding into new markets, became the template for everything Salem built over the following five decades.