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Sunday, February 29, is the final day for WGN America. It’s set to rebrand as NewsNation, the name of the prime-time news block that debuted in September 2020 as part of a systematic relaunch of the network under Nexstar Media Group ownership.

Its News Director won’t be around to carry out the network’s rechristening.

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Call it a reimagining of the annual mid-May dog-and-pony open bar parade across Midtown Manhattan called the Upfronts.

Or, you can call it, as NBCUniversal is, “a new annual gathering designed to offer a global view of the insights, stories, entertainment, and technology connecting consumers to businesses.”

However you spin it, “ONE21” is set to combine “the magic of the media and entertainment industry with the strategic insights and solutions of a platform developer conference.”

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He’s had a 46-year career in radio that included roles as CBS Radio/San Francisco SVP/Market Manager from 2005 through late 2017. He was also VP/National PD for the former EZ Communications.

In May 2018, he was lured to lead Cumulus Media’s Bay Area stations.

Now, Doug Harvill is ready to conclude his career in radio broadcasting.

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For two hours on Wednesday, with a second two-hour session set for Thursday, the 12-year-old Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) took to Zoom and conducted the first of its two virtual sessions comprising the 10th annual Cross-Platform Video Measurement & Data Summit.

What did Managing Director and CEO Jane Clarke, who hosted the event, have to share? For starters, the four “building blocks” to cross-media measurement were shared.

 

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NEW YORK — An advertising technology business providing media buying and media accounting products via a cloud-based SaaS platform has completed a series D financing initiative.

Led by data and analytics firm Ascential plc, the financial fundraiser provides up to $63.5 million in Hudson MX funding.

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“Radio hosts on FM still matter, but DJs must work harder appealing to younger audiences.”

So concludes NuVoodoo Media Services, citing its survey of people who are likely to wear a Nielsen meter or fill out a ratings diary. The company has a webinar coming up and has released some of the survey results as a teaser.

[Read: Reports Offer Insights on the Podcast Listener]

“With so many changes in audio listening through the COVID-19 pandemic, NuVoodoo took at fresh look at the relationship listeners have with DJs and hosts on FM music stations,” it stated.

The survey had about 3,500 respondents age 14 to 54; they were interviewed in early January

“Overall, it’s more positive than negative,” said NuVoodoo EVP, Research Leigh Jacobs, who was quoted in a press release.

“But there is a sharp generational shift. Gen Xers — raised on radio and now 40-plus — are largely positive, with a 43% plurality giving DJs a thumb’s up. Millennials, though somewhat less enthusiastic, are overall net positive, as well. Meanwhile, nearly three-fourths of Gen Z listeners give radio air talent no better than thumbs sideways,” he said.

EVP, Marketing Mike O’Connor said past studies have highlighted differences between those who’d say “yes” to Nielsen and those who would never participate in radio ratings, with the former group showing greater proportional enthusiasm for the role of air talent.

“But the data about DJs from listeners giving radio its report card was really surprising to us, and it looked quite a bit different than other findings from likely panelists and diary-keepers.”

Its webinar series starts Feb. 11. The company promised “to dive deeper and show the differences in DJ perceptions across demos, ethnic groups and format preferences.”

 

The post Gen Z Says “Meh” to FM DJs appeared first on Radio World.

 

Getty Images/Olivier Le Moal

The author of this commentary is general counsel of the Society of Broadcast Engineers.

I am moved to write about a matter now before the Media Bureau at the FCC. The subject is the ethical obligations of broadcast engineers.

Having served as SBE general counsel for 40 years now, I can count on one hand the number of times that the SBE board of directors has found it necessary to revoke an engineer’s SBE membership, and still have some fingers left over.

This, I think, speaks highly of the overall integrity and dedication to ethical principles of the SBE’s membership, and of broadcast engineers overall.

In that same amount of time, I can honestly say that I have never had occasion to question the ethical integrity of any of the engineers that work at the commission.

Sure, we have disagreed, often actively, on policy matters, but on technical matters, I can always count on the accuracy and truth of technical findings by FCC staff. This speaks very well of the high level of integrity of the commission’s engineers.

The only times during my tenure that an SBE member has had that membership revoked were those few cases when an engineer was found as a matter of fact to have violated the SBE Canons of Ethics.

The SBE puts a lot of stock in the Canons of Ethics, and rightly so. The SBE’s Bylaws, at Section 3(a), say that “(a)ny Member may be suspended for a period or expelled for cause, such as violation of any of the By-Laws or Canons of Ethics of the Society or for conduct prejudicial to the best interests of the Society.”

The Canons of Ethics have not been revised or amended in a very long time, largely because they don’t need to be; they state principles of conduct for engineers that simply don’t change.

The preamble to the SBE Canons of Ethics reads as follows: “Honesty, justice and courtesy form a moral philosophy when associated with mutual interest between human beings. This constitutes the foundation of ethics. Broadcast engineers should recognize such a standard of behavior not in passive observance, but as dynamic principles guiding their conduct and way of life. It is the duty of all broadcast engineers to practice their profession according to this Canon of Ethics.

“The keystone of professional conduct is integrity. Broadcast engineers will discharge their duties with fidelity to the public and to their employers, and with impartiality to all. Broadcast engineers must uphold the dignity of their profession and avoid association with any enterprise of questionable character. Broadcast engineers will strive to be fair, tolerant, and open minded.”

To me, the key element of this is the obligation of impartiality. It is what gives broadcast engineers the reputation for the highest levels of integrity.

Indeed, Section 5 of the SBE Canons of Ethics states: “The Broadcast Engineer will express an opinion when it is founded on adequate knowledge and honest conviction while he or she is serving as a witness before a court, commission or other tribunal.”

Ethical Company

The SBE is not alone in its strong dedication to the highest level of integrity of its engineer members.

Article V, Section 3 of the Bylaws of the Association of Federal Communications Consulting Engineers (AFCCE) establishes as a standing committee the “Professional Ethics and Grievances Committee” whose job it is to “consider and report on all efforts to improve the professional conduct and ethics of engineering practitioners in the communication field, make such investigations of professional conduct and of abuses in connection with engineering practice by members and furnish information and make recommendations on the foregoing subjects to the Board of Directors and the Association.”

Ethics is obviously a principal focus of AFCCE, which is laudable.

So when the integrity and impartiality of a consulting engineer is drawn into question by the FCC, we tend to sit up and take notice.

In a proceeding now ongoing in the Media Bureau, a low-power FM station has been accused by a second adjacent full-power FM station of causing interference to listeners of the full-power FM at various points near the transmitter site of the LPFM. In such cases, the accused LPFM is entitled to show that the alleged interference either does not exist or that the LPFM station is not the cause of the interference.

The licensee of the LPFM therefore retained a well-respected consulting engineer (and SBE-certified CPBE) who is located in a different state from the LPFM, to investigate the interference. The engineer did so using accepted methodologies, at all sites where the interference was claimed to have been experienced, and the engineer submitted a written report to the Audio Division, Media Bureau, concluding that no interference was found at the locations where the listeners of the full power FM station reported interference, or even at the transmitter site of the LPFM, where second-adjacent interference potential would be the worst. There was no rebuttal of the engineer’s showing by the full-power FM station.

There are a lot of other facts involved in the case, but the Audio Division’s response to the interference study submitted by the LPFM as a part of its response was this: “We also decline to consider [the consulting engineer’s] interference test results because [the consulting engineer] was retained by [the LPFM] and thus is not an independent party.”

It is difficult to understand why the Audio Division concluded, as it did, that all consulting engineers are biased in favor of their client to the point that their work is summarily deemed unreliable.

If a licensee is precluded from engaging an independent consulting engineer to conduct a technical analysis and to fairly present the engineer’s technical conclusions, simply because the licensee is paying for the engineering work, how, precisely, is the licensee supposed to address the technical issue presented?

This case is now on administrative appeal. It is hoped that the commission doesn’t really have this low an impression of the ethics, impartiality and integrity of broadcast engineers.

This article originally appeared in SBE’s newsletter “The Signal.” Learn about SBE membership at sbe.org.

The post The Integrity and Ethics of Broadcast Engineers appeared first on Radio World.

Saranac Lake, N.Y., is a small city in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains of far Upstate New York. In recent years, it has gained attention for the acquisition of a failed radio station, silenced by its licensee, by two foreign citizens. It has also received attention for a UHF channel that’s been the subject of a coverage battle with Comcast.

That channel is today owned by Gray Television. And, it serves the Burlington, Vt.-Plattsburgh, N.Y. market. A petition Gray has just submitted to the FCC now brings the company the potential to fully complete, on par, with in-market competitor Hearst Television.

An Engineering Exhibit prepared for Gray by Chesapeake RF Consultants LLC, obtained by RBR+TVBR, confirms that it is submitting for regulatory approval an application that would give it a Construction Permit to operate WYCI-DT as a Distributed Transmission System (DTS) by adding another transmitter site to its current operation.

It’s a major move for Gray, and essentially makes the company a full player in the Burlington-Plattsburgh market. Furthermore, WYCI would enjoy an over-the-air signal as far north as Montréal, which historically has received Burlington-Plattsburgh “Big Four” TV stations on local cable TV systems.

Importantly, it puts Hearst on notice that it has a fight on its hands locally.

And, it’s a battle that is five years in the making.

WYCI, which has a PSIP of 40 and uses digital channel 34, in October 2016 was a property of Cross Hill Communications. The station’s then-owner wanted WYCI placed on Comcast’s Xfinity channel lineup across the Burlington-Plattsburgh DMA. Comcast protested, and fought a “must carry” request by filing a cable special relief petition (CSR) with the FCC. This would have allowed Xfinity to become exempt from a pending market modification of the station to Burlington-Plattsburgh.

At the time, WYCI was a RetroTV affiliate, purchased by Cross Hill in December 2013 from Donald McHone’s Channel 61 Associates LLC. It paid $225,000 for what was WNMN-TV.

Interestingly, Comcast in December 2016 abandoned its fight against Cross Hill and WYCI. Was it privy to a potential sale of the station?

On October 14, 2019, Cross Hill agreed to sell WYCI to Gray for $1.1 million. But, the deal came after Gray in May 2017 paid $29 million for the Burlington-Plattsburgh market’s CBS affiliate WCAX-3.

The 2019 sale of WYCI created a duopoly that passed muster with the FCC’s local ownership rules, and the Commission approved the deal in February 2020.

By that time, WYCI had shifted its programming by placing the Heroes & Icons multicast network on its DT1 signal. It is also a secondary MyNetwork TV station for Burlington-Plattsburgh.

THE COMING DTS BOOST

Now, WYCI is poised to employ a new antenna system to be side-mounted on an existing tower structure associated with FCC Antenna Structure Registration number 1003384.

No change to the overall structure height will result.

WYCI will continue to operate as licensed from “DTS site No. 2.”

The proposed antenna for DTS site No. 1 is an elliptically polarized directional Dielectric model TFU-16DSB-B/VP-R, with 30% vertical polarization.

The proposed antenna height above ground is 738.19 feet; the antenna HAAT is 1,735.6 feet.

With a tower site that’s a 90-minute drive to Rue Crescent in the heart of Montréal, effective radiated power of 200,000 watts would easily reach the city — let alone the entire Burlington-Plattsburgh DMA.

Mutual interference would be mitigated by “considerable terrain blockage,” Chesapeake RF Consultants notes.

For those familiar with the region, DTS site No. 1 will be built on Terry Mountain. It is where Hearst’s NBC affiliate, WPTZ-5, had its tower for some 40 years. It’s just 17 miles southwest of Plattsburgh,

When up and running, the signal will stretch as far into Vermont as Montpelier.

And, thanks to that mountainous terrain, it will enjoy coverage of the most populous areas of Montréal.

With WCAX and WYCI, Gray will compete against Hearst’s WPTZ and The CW Network affiliate in Burlington-Plattsburgh, WNNE-31. 

The two stations currently use a tower atop Mt. Mansfield, the highest peak in Vermont.

Hearst has owned WPTZ and WNNE since July 1998; the stations were previously owned by Heritage Media, and in the span of 12 months starting in 1997 were sold to Sinclair Broadcast Group, and then to Sunrise Television. Sunrise then engaged in an asset swap that brought WPTZ and WNNE into the Hearst family.

At the end of August 2020, Anthony Bucher and his Hitmaker Music Group LLC struck a deal giving it ownership of a pair of AM radio stations and an FM translator in the heart of Florida’s “Gator Country.”

Now, Bucher is officially the licensee of the stations in the Gainesville-Ocala market.

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Cheryl Thompson

NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting want to help stations do local investigative work. To that end NPR has created a “Station Investigations Team” with CPB backing.

Its purpose is to work with public radio regional newsrooms and topic teams. It is led by Cheryl W. Thompson, an investigative reporter who came to NPR in 2019 and worked at the Washington Post for many years. She is also president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, an organization that seeks to improve investigative journalism.

[Read: NPR to Modify “Consider This” to Include Local Content]

“The team, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, will include a producer and a data editor who will advise reporters who’d like technical help with skills such as data collection and analysis and freedom of information requests,” NPR announced.

“The team will also help facilitate stations’ opportunities to localize NPR investigations through webinars and open-source data.”

The announcement was made by Tamar Charney, acting senior director of collaborative journalism, and Kathy Merritt, CPB senior vice president, Radio, Journalism and CSG Services.

Charney said the investigative unit will support station-based reporters with resources to help them cover local issues “from the safety of the water where we live to the ability of our local health systems to respond to the pandemic.”

The initiative is a component of the Collaborative Journalism Network.

 

The post NPR Creates Station Investigation Team appeared first on Radio World.

A war of words has erupted between DirecTV owner AT&T and Apollo Global Management-controlled Cox Media Group in the wake of an impasse over a new retransmission consent agreement — a move that forced AT&T, by law, to block its subscribers from receiving any CMG-owned station.

On Tuesday (2/2), CMG pointed fingers at AT&T. Now, AT&T has fired back at the owner of such stations as KIRO-7 in Seattle, the market’s CBS affiliate and home to Super Bowl LV. 

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On October 2, 2019, Sinclair Telecable officially acquired all of Emmis Communications’ 50.1% controlling stake in six Austin, Tex. radio stations and two FM translators in the Lone Star State’s capital.

The transaction gave Bob and David Sinclair full control of properties now operating as Waterloo Media, leaving its Sinclair Communications arm the licensee of stations in its home market of Norfolk, and in the heart of Northern California’s Wine Country.

Now, the Sinclair family is saying goodbye to the Golden State.

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Ten months into the COVID-19 pandemic, “radio hosts on FM still matter.”

Imagine that.

It simply took NuVoodoo Media Services to confirm it in a recent “Ratings Prospects Study.”

 

RBR+TVBR RELATED READ:

Thirty Years Later, Has Pop Radio Learned Anything? Adam Jacobson

Seeking airchecks from WHTZ “Z100” in New York, our Editor-in-Chief stumbled across an article in The New York Times from July 28, 1991 discussing pop radio’s “midlife crisis.” The story addressed issues that are still pressing for CHR/Pop stations some 30 years later. Why?

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New microphones come on the market thanks to the podcasting boom … Rosemary Harold says the FCC is without funds to enforce the new anti-pirate radio law. …

Bernhard Borghei discusses Vertical Bridge’s tower acquisition strategy … Tom Lawler talks about trends in audio processing …

The founder of AdTonos explains why he’s excited about audio interactivity … Kevin Curran offers an appreciation of the EV 635A.

These stories and more are explored in the Feb. 3 issue.

Read it here.

 

The post Inside the Feb. 3 2021 Issue of Radio World appeared first on Radio World.

In the early part of the 2010s, it was part of Davidson Media Group‘s assets targeting Spanish-language consumers.

Today, this Virginia AM retains its branding from those days. But, it is now under new ownership — an entity formed by two of the station’s veteran air personalities.

SAVE YOUR SEAT AT THE TABLE TODAY! SEPT. 22-23, 2020 — DORAL, FLA. REGISTER NOW!

 

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January 2021 is in the history books, and the road to what many hope will be a major recovery for Radio is underway.

As far as veteran programming consultant Clark Smidt sees it, “It WILL all come together. We deserve it and are working for it.”

But, it may require some fresh thinking.

In this column, Smidt writes about “Smooth transitions, new styles, new challenges, adjustments, attitude, cooperation and teamwork.” It could prove to be a catalyst for positive growth at your radio or TV stations.

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Ronald Reagan presidential inauguration, Jan. 20, 1981. Photo: Ronald Reagan Foundation

A new 60-second feature of Ronald Reagan quotes is available, tied to the 40th anniversary of his inauguration as president.

The “Ronald Reagan Quote of the Day” was announced by the Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which is leading a year-long celebration called “40 at 40.” Reagan was the 40th president and he was inaugurated 40 years ago, on Jan. 20, 1981.

The president — a former actor, movie star, union leader and governor — had numerous connections to radio during his career.

Early on he was a sportscaster for several stations, and he famously recreated Cubs games based on telegraph and wire reports. In the 1970s he used a daily radio commentary to help cement his political profile and his reputation as “The Great Communicator.” Once president, harking back to Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” he started the tradition of Saturday radio addresses from the White House in 1982 that continued until they sputtered out under Donald Trump.

Photo: Ronald Reagan Foundation

The clips are free, with the restriction that they may only be broadcast as part of the “Ronald Reagan Quote of the Day” feature; they aren’t to be used for other commercial or political purposes. And although not required, the foundation asks that each station air the “Quote of the Day” at least twice each weekday during daytime hours.

“We are granting geographic exclusivity, based on a first-come first-serve availability,” said Chief Marketing Officer Melissa Giller. “Stations must let us know they want to use these clips so we can ensure no other station in their market is already using them.”

Each month’s batch of audio clips will be available at least a week prior to the beginning of each new month at a Dropbox.

For information email mgiller@reaganfoundation.org.

 

The post Daily Clip Features Ronald Reagan Quotes appeared first on Radio World.