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On the north shore of pristine Lake Tahoe is Incline Village, Nev.

It’s a part of the Reno, Nev., DMA. That’s key to understanding why Gray Television just agreed to purchase a couple of low-powered TV stations serving a town along Route 28 known for a nearby ski resort.

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SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIF. — Drive past Paso Robles from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on U.S. 101, and you’ll reach the agricultural hub of King City.

Here, a big Class B FM with a signal covering northern San Luis Obispo County and southern Monterey County has offered Hot Adult Contemporary music along with Classic Hits as “KC102” since owner Bill Gittler and his wife, Marianne, purchased the station in 1982.

Now, nearly three years after Marianne’s passing, Gittler is selling the station. The buyer has a big group of radio stations in San Luis Obispo.

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GOLDEN VALLEY, MINN. — After 32 years at the now-Entercom Communications-owned News/Talk station serving the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, the man behind the mic for the Morning News at WCCO-AM is hanging it up.

An April 30 retirement date was revealed Friday morning (1/8) by Dave Lee.

“In this business there are legends, there are icons, and then there is Dave Lee,” said Shannon Knoepke, Entercom/Minneapolis’ SVP/Market Manager. “It’s hard to imagine radio without him.”

While younger audiences may be more familiar with The Dave Ryan Show on Top 40 KDWB-FM, it is Dave Lee who has been an award-winning morning personality for WCCO-M since 1989.

Lee’s career in radio began in Fargo, N.D., where he served as PD/afternoon hot for big Talker KFGO-AM “The Mighty 790.”

“His credibility and sincere approach are unsurpassed,” Knoepke said.

His charitable side includes getting national recognition from The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, among other organizations.

Knoepke concluded, “We’re going to miss Dave Lee. He has had the responsibility of picking up for legends he’s replaced. Now we have to replace the legend of Dave Lee which feels impossible as we today celebrate his years of entertaining and informing us on WCCO.”

WCCO is the market’s highest-rated AM radio station.

Broadcasters are telling the Supreme Court that a lower court’s rejection of the FCC’s broadcast deregulation decision was a recipe for “judicial intervention run riot” and that diversity alone cannot be invoked to block deregulation of rules that marketplace changes have rendered unsupportable and no longer necessary in the public interest.

In a reply brief in advance of Jan. 19 oral argument, the National Association of Broadcasters told the High Court that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit “required the commission to treat a policy never mentioned in Section 202(h) as a mandatory and dispositive factor, fly-specked the commission’s analysis, ordered the Commission to collect additional data, entered a triply overbroad remedy, and finished up by reasserting perpetual jurisdiction,” it told the court.

NAB wants the Supremes to clear the way for the FCC finally to achieve the “regulatory reform” Congress set in motion 25 years ago. That is when it called on the FCC in the 1996 Telecommunications Act to eliminate regulations no longer necessary in light of competitive changes in the marketplace.

Broadcasters are appealing a Third Circuit Court of Appeals stay of FCC media ownership deregulation. That was the FCC’s November 2017 decision to eliminate the newspaper-broadcast and the radio-TV cross-ownership rules; allow dual station ownership in markets with fewer than eight independent voices after the duopoly, creating an opportunity for ownership of two of the top four stations in a market on a case-by-case basis (the FCC is not calling it a waiver); eliminate attribution of joint sales agreements as ownership; and create an incubator program.

The court said the FCC had not sufficiently gauged the impact of those changes on minority and female ownership, as the court had told the FCC it must do the last time the circuit weighed in on the FCC’s long-standing attempts to loosen regulations on broadcasters.

But NAB, in its brief filed Friday (Jan. 8) reiterated that the assertion by those defending the Third Circuit decision that the FCC can keep its ownership limits “for the sole purpose of promoting minority and female ownership finds no support in the statute’s text …”

In fact, NAB said, the statute needs to be read in a proderegulatory context, not one in which the FCC can retain or even toughen ownership restrictions “based on any factor under the sun.”

The post NAB to Supreme Court: Deregulation Is Statutory Prime Directive in Ownership Rule Review appeared first on Radio World.

In the Oct. 14 KDKA feature “Constructing the First ‘Real’ Radio Station,” the question is twice asked — including in a page 21 photo caption — “Did engineer Donald Little invent and fabricate the world’s first transducer for turning record groove modulations into a varying voltage?”

The answer is: Decidedly not.

The honor for that advance goes to Gianni Bettini, an Italian army lieutenant who made his fortune in the USA but died and remains back in Italy, having patented electrical recording in 1902.

Bettini took a Berliner microphone, manufactured by Bell’s Western Electric Co. and of the type that went into all the world’s telephones for 100 years (which includes KDKA’s in 1920), pushed a needle through the center of its diaphragm and turned it into a phonograph pickup. Bell, Edison and even disc record “revolutionizer” (no pun intended) Emile Berliner missed it.

Had any one of them paid attention we’d have had electrical recording two decades before Western Electric introduced it when they created motion picture sound in 1926 (or was it ’25?).

For Radio World readers it should be noted that the broadcasting business quickly adopted WECo’s 33-1/3 rpm 16-inch disc, which inaugurated the quarter-century era of recorded-program dissemination on discs.

Interestingly, the four networks — NBC (Red), NBC-Blue, CBS and Mutual, the least heralded yet with the most affiliated stations of all — engaged my friend Harry Bryant’s Radio Recorders in Hollywood to create what came to be called transcriptions for delayed broadcast on the “coast” of shows coming in “live” from New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

The author is grandson of Emile Berliner, inventor of the microphone, gramophone (disc records player) and the method of mass-producing unlimited copies of a single master disc recording.

The post Letter: Gianni Bettini vs. Donald Little appeared first on Radio World.

In October, a partisan furor erupted in Washington, D.C., as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he would initiate a “Section 230” rulemaking process, in the wake of a censorship vs. “fake news” firestorm involving Twitter, Facebook and the New York Post.

Frank Pallone Jr., the House Energy and Commerce Chairman, and Mike Doyle, the Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman, blasted Pai, calling it “a blatant attempt to help a flailing President Trump.”

Much has changed since then. The president’s days are numbered — and his ouster ahead of Inauguration Day is being discussed by many on Capitol Hill, the scene of a January 6 insurrection by Trump supporters.

As such, Pai is standing down. But, he believes a rule rewrite is needed, and is the job of Congress.

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The quest to get the nation’s highest court to reverse a remand of the FCC’s cross-ownership rule rewrite by the Third Circuit Federal Appeals Court in Philadelphia has continued with the submission on Friday (1/8) of a reply brief to the Supreme Court by the NAB.

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In just days, Ajit Pai will become a former Chairman of the FCC, as Joe Biden is sworn in as the next President of the United States.

On Friday, he addressed the Free State Foundation — a group he last addressed one month before ascending to the top spot at the Commission. His focus was on how reforms made since 2017 bettered the FCC for good.

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One of Nathan Simington’s first public actions as an FCC commissioner is to issue a statement about the violence at the Capitol this week.

He condemned that violence and “urged all Americans to work together towards a peaceful transfer of administrative power on Jan. 20, 2021, to President-elect Joe Biden.”

Simington himself grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada. He became a United States citizen and now lives in Virginia.

He is a Republican who was nominated by President Trump and succeeded Michael O’Rielly; he was sworn in on Dec. 14 by Chairman Ajit Pai in a virtual ceremony.

In his statement Simington said he “embraced the gift of U.S. citizenship — a choice made in appreciation for the traditions of vigorous, peaceful engagement that have characterized the nation’s 230 years of constitutional governance.”

“I look forward to working in the public interest with my colleagues Commissioners Carr, Rosenworcel, and Starks as well as the President-elect’s new nominee,” he wrote.

“Our mandate at the commission is to work for the benefit of all Americans. Should we disagree on some issues, we would do well to remember Thomas Jefferson’s words at the time of another presidential transition, the first in which the administration changed parties: ‘…every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle.’”

Simington formerly was senior advisor at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. He also served as the senior counsel to wireless company Brightstar.

The post Newest Commissioner Urges Cooperation, Peaceful Transfer appeared first on Radio World.

In late August, RBR+TVBR first reported on the reemergence of a Hispanic media company founder who lost control of the entity that wound up in bankruptcy protection, only to reemerge under a new name under CEO Peter Markham.

LBI Media founder Lenard Liberman, for a song, was snagging required divestitures tied to the arrangement that gave majority ownership of Univision Communications to private investment firm SearchLight Capital Partners and ForgeLight, an operating and investment company focused on media and consumer technology.

That spinoff deal, brokered by Kalil & Co., has now closed.

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LOS ANGELES — The National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE), the association representing content producers, distributors, streamers and buyers that stages the annual NATPE Miami conference and expo, has selected its opening keynoter.

It’s the NBCUniversal Television and Streaming Chairman, and he’ll be joined by a popular TODAY anchor.

Mark Lazarus will be joined on the virtual stage by Hoda Kotb, co-anchor of NBC News’ TODAY and co-host of TODAY with Hoda & Jenna.

Kotb will moderate the “fireside conversation” as the all-online NATPE Virtual Miami 2021 event begins on January 19. Sessions conclude Jan. 22; the marketplace is open through Jan. 29.

Attendees to the conference can expect four days of programming channels each with a different theme (Business, Audience, Content, Production). On each of those days, there will be programming blocks with different tracks. Every day will commence with The Big Opening, which includes the conversation with Lazarus, followed by Station Groups, Streaming, and Series.

The line-up includes top content industry executives from AMC, A+E, Avalon, Canal+, CW, DirecTV, DMR, Eccho Rights, Endemol Shine, Entertainment Studios, FilmRise, FOX, Hearst Television Group, ITV Studios, LiveLike, Neilsen, Netflix, Premiere Digital, PBS, StudioCanal, Telemundo, Tubi, RMVISTAR, Starz, Universal Television, Univision, ViacomCBS, Vrio, The Walt Disney Company, and Whip Media.

For more details on the executives speaking and for a look at the programming agenda, please visit www.natpe.com/miami/agenda.

Hearst Television’s Senior Director of Digital Content has been promoted to VP of Digital News.

He’ll continue to lead the digital strategy for the station group while also leading Hearst Television’s central news team, which publishes national and feature news content, produces original video for company franchises including “Stitch” and “Dispatches from the Middle,” and manages the company’s digital copy desk.

Taking the role is Ernesto Mourelo, who has led the digital strategy and social media efforts for Hearst Television’s local TV news websites.

“Ernie is an outstanding journalist who has elevated our digital news product in every assignment he has had with Hearst Television,” said Hearst Television President Jordan Wertlieb. “In addition to his unwavering advocacy of local journalism, Ernie has been an exceptional mentor to many within the company and the industry. His commitment and leadership have contributed to the development of many multi-platform journalists, and will continue to do so.”

Mourelo moved to Hearst Television’s New York headquarters in 2012 as Executive Digital Media Manager of Editorial Operations, tasked with coordinating the efforts of the digital media resources at the company’s TV stations; he was shortly thereafter promoted to Director of Digital Content.

Before that, he was Director of Digital Media at Hearst Television’s WLWT-5, the NBC affiliate serving the Cincinnati market.

Before joining Hearst at WLWT, Mourelo was assistant news director at KVEA-52 and KWHY-22, at the time NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises siblings serving Los Angeles. There, he ran all TV and digital content production. Previously, he was a producer and, later, executive producer at San Diego’s KNSD-39/7, the NBC affiliate.

Mourelo is an active member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Online News Association, and currently serves as president of the New York chapter of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists.

The author is executive director of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. NFCB commentaries are featured regularly at www.radioworld.com.

This week’s violent clashes in Washington have put the focus on one of community radio’s great challenges: what does a community media organization do when an evolving story grips the nation?

Since Election Day, the United States has spiraled into fractiousness among those who deny Donald Trump lost the White House. The movement this conspiracy theory has inspired reached its possible nadir when at least four people died during a riot at the Capitol Jan. 6. Property was destroyed, explosives were confiscated, and more than 50 arrests were made. News attention was naturally on the scenes of looting, Confederate flag-waving Trump supporters and attempts by law enforcement to regain control of the situation.

[Read: Community Broadcaster: Diversity Was Radio’s Story of the Year]

As audiences were hungry for information about this horrendous moment, community media naturally sought out ways to bring coverage. For many outlets, there were few choices.

A range of community radio stations utilize award-winning reporting from NPR or the BBC to supplement their journalism. It is reliable, of a consistent quality, and gives a station the freedom to cut away from regular programming literally at any moment to bring listeners the news as it happens. For stations where such investments are not feasible, however, the options are incredibly limited.

Some community radio stations have relied on resources like the syndicated program “Democracy Now,” which regularly produces election and other coverage for carriage, or Pacifica for special event broadcasts. Public News Service, Feature Story News and even RT (formerly Russia Today) have filled still others’ news gaps. Yet none of these seem to have the capacity to provide breaking news coverage on location or with a reach or quality anywhere approaching the aforementioned leaders in this space. Many attempts to launch breaking news services have been made over the years. None have lasted.

It is hard for a lightly resourced media outlet where news is not the primary service to pivot quickly to emergency coverage. So, what could you do?

A station could curate reporting from elsewhere. A good start might be for a station to collect a list of its go-to news sources and create a process for reviewing them during breaking news, sharing coverage on social media, and how and what your station covers and attributes when news is happening. Having 5–10 trusted sources gives a community broadcaster a baseline. Don’t forget to try a drill to see where your process needs refinement.

A station could do call-in programming, providing an outlet for the community’s reaction to the news. Call-in programming is popular, but you need the right moderator to steer conversations productively and briskly, especially when emotions run high. If your station decides to wade into this kind of content, consider having an analyst as a guest to supplement the discussion.

If daily news coverage is not your station’s brand, maybe times like these are when you lean into what you already do best. One DJ I heard the night after the riot put it this way, “We know that things are bad and assume, if you’re listening to me right now, you’re looking for shelter from it, so I’ll do my best to give that to you.”

And lastly, if news is what your station desires to be known for, it may be time to have development conversations with your board and donors about what it will take to get the journalism you want. A few may find such a discussion as uncomfortable as being out of the news loop entirely. Nevertheless, stations that want to deliver breaking news should talk openly about their needs to achieve such a goal.

As of this writing, there are few options for stations without news capacity to switch to breaking news coverage. Choosing to do so will require investments of various levels from your station in journalism. Your listeners will appreciate it. In the meantime, creative problem solving may be your best approach.

The post Community Broadcaster: Making Sense of Chaos appeared first on Radio World.