Radio Survivor

The Federal Communications Commission is commissioning nine economic studies on the state of the media industry, and numbers five and six couldn’t come too soon as far as I’m concerned. Here they are:

• Study 5: Quantity of radio news and public affairs programming provided and audience for radio news programming as a function of local market structure. This study will examine provision of radio news and public affairs programming and will examine the impact of local market structure on presence of news formats.  The study may also examine station websites to determine how much news these stations provide.
• Study 6:  Local content on the Internet. The study will examine the availability and usage of local content on the Internet and analyze the impact of local market structure on the availability and usage of local Internet content.  The study shall analyze, at a minimum, the extent to which websites offering local Internet content are affiliated with local radio stations, television stations, newspapers, or other media entities and whether the degree of such affiliation varies across markets with different local market structures.

All the proposed studies are listed at the end of this post. This is part of the agency’s quadrennial review of its media ownership rules.

In all my years of covering the FCC and the Great Media Ownership Debate, one of the things I’ve noted is the lack of up-to-date data on questions like localism. Pro and anti-regulatory groups have been at each other’s throats for years on whether to require more local coverage from radio stations.

Example: this Youtube clip (see above)  of Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) tense confrontation with then FCC Chair Kevin Martin in 2007 over his handling of a study on local TV ownership patterns. But much of this discussion takes place without any concrete and vetted research on the degree to which radio stations and their Internet portals really serve the public, local coverage-wise. (more…)

Mark Lloyd

The Federal Communications Commission’s Diversity Officer defended himself this morning from the veritable avalanche of attacks he has sustained since he took his job. Speaking at a Washington, D.C. conference, Mark Lloyd asked to be allowed to “clear away some mud:”

“I am not a Czar appointed by President Obama. I am not at the FCC to restore the Fairness Doctrine through the front door or the back door, or to carry out a secret plot funded by George Soros to get rid of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or any other conservative talk show host. I am not at the FCC to remove anybody, whatever their color, from power. I am not a supporter of Hugo Chavez. The right wing smear campaign has been, in a word – incredible, generating hate mail and death threats. It is the price we pay for freedom of speech. And I do support free speech.”

We’ve been following this story here for a while. The sheer level of hysteria that has followed Lloyd’s tenure has made it all but impossible to have a reasonable debate about his ideas, some of which I agree with, particularly rules encouraging more local media—although I don’t want them in order to ensure more “balance” in programming. (more…)

The Texas Association of Broadcasters opposes the FCC’s proposed localism rules. Why not? Everybody else does.

Two years ago this December the Federal Communications Commission proposed a quartet of new regulations to nudge radio stations to provide more local news, music, and public affairs programming.

These included rules requiring a certain amount of local programming from each station, requiring licensees to staff their stations with an actual human being 24/7, mandating that license owners set up local station advisory boards, and a requirement that a signals’ main studio be situated in its signal area.

Since then these proposals have received nothing but cat calls and boos. The public interest groups that clamored for them in the first half of this decade rarely come to their defense. Instead, just about every regional or national broadcast association writes to the FCC denouncing them on a semi-regular basis. The religious groups say the local board rule will drive their stations in the hands of heathens, atheists, and Family Guy fans. The Fox TV lovers say it’s all a plot to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. Even advocates for minorities question the proposals, among them Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), father of now FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.

So no surprise Texas wants them nixed too. Here’s the what the association told the FCC this month: (more…)

Sometimes you have to hand it to the financial press, there’s nothing like a little money to make them believe in old fashioned values, like localism, again.

Any keen observer of the commercial radio landscape knows that right now the nation’s largest radio station owners are certainly not making money. But, as the Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column points out, smaller owners focused on smaller markets ain’t doing so bad.

As the Journal’s Martin Peers reports,

Average revenue at stations in markets below the top 50 fell 6.6% last year compared with around 9% for bigger stations, BIA [Financial Network] estimates. It projects smaller stations will continue outperforming through 2013.

Peers chalks up the disparity to the suffocating debt that the likes of Clear Channel and Citadel Broadcasting took on to go on their post-1996 buying spree party; he even calls the current fall in fortunes a “hangover.” By comparison smaller market stations were less costly to vacuum up.

Peers points to Grosse Pointe Farms, MI based Saga Communications as one of these small market broadcasters, with 89 stations mostly in places like Des Moines, IA, Columbus, OH and Champaign, IL. Because I lived down in Champaign, home to the University of Illinois, for fourteen years, I’m quite familiar with Saga. In the six years or so following the 1996 Telecommunications Act the company acquired four FM stations in the market of roughly 150,000 metro. While stations in the number 220 market in the country (according to Arbitron) are cheaper than in Chicago, New York or LA, I was stunned when back in 2000 Saga paid a hefty $7 million for one of the top rated FMs in Champaign.

Five years ago Saga’s first quarter results of a 17.7% reduction in net operating revenue wouldn’t be such good news. But compared to Clear Channel, which became a penny stock before going private equity, it sounds like the party might be on again.
(more…)

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission, by a bare majority, voted to lift its over three decade old prohibition against an entity owning a newspaper and a television station in the same market. Most FCC watchers will now shift their visors to Congress and the circuit courts, where media reform activists will doubtless turn in a bid to reverse this ruling.

But the agency also made four important decisions this month and last that deserve a second glance, not only because they could have an impact on broadcasting, but because they illustrate the extent to which the Commission can promote measures that clearly serve the public interest—when it wants to.

Low Power FM

When the FCC created its Low Power FM (LPFM) service in the 1990s, it ruled that these new, locally based non-profit frequencies did not have to protect so-called “third adjacent” full power FM stations. The National Association of Broadcasters moved almost instantly to quash the provision, using its enormous influence to get Congress to pass the “Radio Broadcast Projection Act,” which restored the third adjacent rule. (more…)