Radio's space race has ended.

The two warring satellite subscription services, XM Satellite Radio and No. 2 Sirius Satellite Radio, announced Monday they are joining forces to form a tax-free, all-stock merger of equals with a combined enterprise value of around $13 billion, including net debt of roughly $1.6 billion.

For consumers, who have had to choose one service and its exclusive talk, sports, music and news programming, the merger brings together Sirius' Howard Stern and XM's Oprah Winfrey and Sirius' National Football League broadcasts and XM's Major League Baseball.

Giant, launched in 2004 as an entertainment magazine for 20-something men, was re-launched under new editor Smokey Fontaine last year as a lifestyle and music magazine targeting urban readers. Recent covers have included Beyonce, Janet Jackson and Sean Combs. Fontaine will now be chief executive of Giant and gets an undisclosed financial stake in the magazine.

"For a limited amount of capital, we have now established a presence in the print media world and should be able to leverage our other media assets in various ways to increase the likelihood of success in what is unquestionably a challenging, but important business," says Radio One CEO Alfred Liggins.

Steinem said the network, which is run by women, aims to provide an alternative to current radio talk, which she describes as "very argumentative, quite hostile, and very much male-dominated." This network "has a different spirit. It has more community. It's more about information, about humor, about respect for different points of view and not constant arguing," Steinem told Reuters in an interview. But Greenstone also hopes to attract male listeners. "We do have male voices on the network. It's much better to have a mixture of voices," said Susan Ness, chief executive officer of Greenstone, which got its name from a children's book by Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple".

Shock jock Howard Stern is still three days away from his satellite debut, but the controversial radio host has already raked in some US$218 million worth of stock in Sirius Satellite Radio. Yesterday, Stern was awarded 34.4 million shares after Sirius "exceeded agreed-upon subscriber targets," the company disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Stern will share the windfall with his agent Don Buchwald, according to the filing. The stock grant was part of the original $500 million five-year deal that enticed Stern to leave traditional radio for satellite -- but at the time the deal was announced in October 2004 the stock was worth about half what it is today.

In other words, the value of Stern's blockbuster deal has now ballooned to more than $600 million. But not all of that goes to Stern's pocket: the proceeds also go to pay his staff, to fund programming and towards the cost of building a new Midtown studio.