Which is exactly why it won't be eliminated.
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FCC calling for comments on rule changes and simplification
- Thread starter davideduardo
- Start date
Which is exactly why it won't be eliminated.
how my phone got lorse out of of my attempt to type load, i dunno
Radio and television were a lot better and a lot more profitable when they had a lot more regulation. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press may have seemed like a good idea when free speech took place on a soap box in a public square and freedom of the press was some guy who would now be considered a blogger setting type by hand on a manually operated press. Canada does better without either one - especially given they innate greed and irresponsibility of the media industry. First step: Roll back or eliminate any regulations created or amended in the last 60 years.
They were also more profitable when they had less competition. The minute the FCC allowed more stations, radio became less profitable, and all the legacy companies got out. That left radio to investment companies and vulture capitalists. The FCC created this mess, and then had to deregulate it because they couldn't afford to enforce the old rules. Ronald Reagan cut their budget, so they couldn't deal with all the new paperwork the old regulations created for all the new stations.
In the meantime, companies like Spotify exist with no regulations. They can start as many stations as they want with no ownership limits. They're a Swedish company, but they don't do any physical importing of products. So they aren't even liable for tariffs. They make billions of American dollars and ship all the money to Sweden.
The Urban Dictionary has some definitions for “lorse”. 😳😵 Doughnuts, anyone?🤣
Yeah, no on radio and tv being better with more regulation. Nope
Have you ever worked in radio or tv? If so, current or past? When?
Most of the eliminated rules are technical requirements, and those were killed because equipment became more reliable and required less maintenance. Everything from hourly transmitter log readings to requiring a "First Phone" to new ways of calculating directional systems have changed all of that.
The worst era was the time when station had to do ascertainment of community leaders and provide "programming" to address the market's issues. Nothing of value was achieved and the community leaders developed a hatred for the process.
The "Fairness Doctrine" was killed because it imposed what might be unconstitutional. In the decision it was said, "The intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the fairness doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters ... [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists."
Even then, the feeling that radio and TV were bridled by Fairness and could not openly express views such as print media.
Other regulations about programming are basically about obscenity and profanity, and nobody is sure what they mean. They still stand. As do the political rate rules that come from Congress.
And if you look at radio in Canada, you can see that nearly everyone is barely profitable or not making money at all. The excess of regulations, ranging from CanCon to ownership, made stations a bad business.
The "media industry" is no more greedy than any other. We invest money with the hopes of making ongoing profits. Otherwise, we'd buy government bonds. When I built my first station, I had no clients for 7 months and almost lost everything; I quickly learned that unless I had a good income, I could not pay salaries, rent, utilities and all the other expenses of a radio station. And emergency repairs... like when one of the 4 "final tubes" in the transmitter cost more than a whole day's gross revenue.
My first General Manager job in the U.S. was at age 24 in the 12th largest market. We had nearly 30 full signal competitors, and half of them were not profitable. I eventually made our station profitable, but if I had not wasted a lot of my time on compliance, I could have done that task much more rapidly. For example, in my first two months on the job, I visited two different ad agencies a day; I could have visited three or four were it not for administrative tasks... and I could have gone back to the most important agencies (there were 120 local shops) more often. Or helped with our spot news coverage, or worked more with the PD on promotions and features or contests or helped the Chief Engineer on "after midnight" projects .
In other words, were there less regulation back then, I could have built a better station that more listeners enjoyed much faster... and much better.
Back about 1982 I'm a jock at KINL in Eagle Pass, Texas at a Top 40 FM. Being on the border, getting $2 a spot was really a great rate. And we got $2. We also had 6 spots between songs and my boss made us have an 'island' in the stop set to break it up. That meant time and temperature, a community event, short weather forecast or talk a contest or contest winner to get a few seconds before the next three commercials. We had 7 or 8 songs an hour depending on newscasts.
With so many commercials, some repeated and back then you had to separate competitors. So during Texas State Network News at :55, I'd start pulling the next hour's commercials putting a check by those I pulled. I usually had two stacks of carts. Now those checks were on the program log, an official document the FCC reviews when they visit and the earlier 5 years you had to retain.
The FCC Field Rep walks in the studio and asks for the program log. I hand it to him and he looks at the clock (9:03) and says have you played all of these this hour. I explain how I am keeping track of things and ask him to look at the prior sheet. He immediately understands but tells me he could write up the station for my system of notation. He didn't cite us.
I'll say this the playing of the spots was like a puzzle. If you had to play 2 soft drinks, it had to be he same bottler if in the same break. McDonalds and a Steakhouse were okay to play in the same break. Walmart and a Department store were okay. Two women's clothing stores is a big fat NO but a men's shop and a lady's boutique were fine. Dairy Queen and Pizza Inn were not okay in the same break. They had to be same company or be targeting a totally different customer. You had to do some thinking. A few spots played 2, 3 or 4 times an hour.
Then came the EBS test. On came WOAI in San Angelo. He looks at me and asks what station we are to monitor. I answer KGKL in San Angelo and add it cannot be received here. He makes me try to tune it in. I add it won't trigger the EBS unit. The General Manager concurs. The FCC Field Rep is flustered saying we have to monitor KGKL and he will talk to his superior and see what can be done. He asked why we tuned the radio to WOAI and both my boss and I answered because we had rather receive an EBS activation that not to receive one. That seemed to be the right thing to say. I never heard but we tuned the radio back to WOAI once he left. Luckily we weren't fined. He looked through things about 2 hours.
By the way, we were #1 by a longshot. At 6 commercials per song we weren't as bad as the stations across in Mexico that might play 10 to 12 spots.
Things were good then. An AM & FM serving a town of 30,000. The FM easily, inflation adjusted, was doing about $45,000 to $50,000 a month. The AM was easily neck and neck with the FM in billing. By the early 1990s with the FCC allowing so many stations, the AM and FM were simulcast and we struggled to bill an inflation adjusted $24,000 a month. So, if we want to pinpoint when radio as we want to remember it was destroyed, it was 1986 and the following few years when all these new stations came on the air. And spot rates there are still very low. As one furniture store owner said in 1992: No offense Bill but I can go across and buy ads on the ranchera station and Star FM for what you want me to pay per spot. I knew the two stations he mentioned were the top Spanish language stations. Inflation adjusted I was asking $5.
With so many commercials, some repeated and back then you had to separate competitors. So during Texas State Network News at :55, I'd start pulling the next hour's commercials putting a check by those I pulled. I usually had two stacks of carts. Now those checks were on the program log, an official document the FCC reviews when they visit and the earlier 5 years you had to retain.
The FCC Field Rep walks in the studio and asks for the program log. I hand it to him and he looks at the clock (9:03) and says have you played all of these this hour. I explain how I am keeping track of things and ask him to look at the prior sheet. He immediately understands but tells me he could write up the station for my system of notation. He didn't cite us.
I'll say this the playing of the spots was like a puzzle. If you had to play 2 soft drinks, it had to be he same bottler if in the same break. McDonalds and a Steakhouse were okay to play in the same break. Walmart and a Department store were okay. Two women's clothing stores is a big fat NO but a men's shop and a lady's boutique were fine. Dairy Queen and Pizza Inn were not okay in the same break. They had to be same company or be targeting a totally different customer. You had to do some thinking. A few spots played 2, 3 or 4 times an hour.
Then came the EBS test. On came WOAI in San Angelo. He looks at me and asks what station we are to monitor. I answer KGKL in San Angelo and add it cannot be received here. He makes me try to tune it in. I add it won't trigger the EBS unit. The General Manager concurs. The FCC Field Rep is flustered saying we have to monitor KGKL and he will talk to his superior and see what can be done. He asked why we tuned the radio to WOAI and both my boss and I answered because we had rather receive an EBS activation that not to receive one. That seemed to be the right thing to say. I never heard but we tuned the radio back to WOAI once he left. Luckily we weren't fined. He looked through things about 2 hours.
By the way, we were #1 by a longshot. At 6 commercials per song we weren't as bad as the stations across in Mexico that might play 10 to 12 spots.
Things were good then. An AM & FM serving a town of 30,000. The FM easily, inflation adjusted, was doing about $45,000 to $50,000 a month. The AM was easily neck and neck with the FM in billing. By the early 1990s with the FCC allowing so many stations, the AM and FM were simulcast and we struggled to bill an inflation adjusted $24,000 a month. So, if we want to pinpoint when radio as we want to remember it was destroyed, it was 1986 and the following few years when all these new stations came on the air. And spot rates there are still very low. As one furniture store owner said in 1992: No offense Bill but I can go across and buy ads on the ranchera station and Star FM for what you want me to pay per spot. I knew the two stations he mentioned were the top Spanish language stations. Inflation adjusted I was asking $5.
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While I would agree with that statement to an extent, I don't agree with the conclusion that you draw from it.
Simply put, correlation does not indicate cause. As others have noted, there were far fewer radio stations back then and the proliferation of stations seems to have hurt the quality of individual stations -- simply put, a market that could support live & local programming on three radio stations was not able to support that same level of programming when the audience and advertising revenue were spread across ten stations instead of three.
But that's only the start of the problems facing radio. Next is the loss of local advertisers -- when a Super Walmart (or Target) opens on the edge of town and a couple dozen local businesses end up closing due to the competition, that translates into less advertising revenue. And, of course, there's the Internet and streaming audio.
The net result is that even if we could revert radio regulations to what they were 40 or 50 years ago, it would not cause radio to go back to being like it was back then.
Update: Conservative groups tell the FCC to cut ownership caps.
www.insideradio.com
Historically, conservatives have advocated for fewer ownership limits, while liberals want more limits.
Conservative Groups Rally Behind FCC Ownership Reform Effort.
A coalition of more than 20 conservative organizations, spearheaded by Heritage Action for America, is urging the Federal Communications Commission to overhaul what they call “antiquated and harmful” media ownership
Historically, conservatives have advocated for fewer ownership limits, while liberals want more limits.
I've heard of this and I agree with you.
There are large stations licensed to small towns no one has ever heard of.
Theres two in SE PA licensed to trailer parks
What's the other one besides Starview?
I was mis remembering my email from "DJ"..... theres only one. We ended up talking about several interesting COL's.
The other two we talked about were Plattsburgh West, NY and West Laramie, WY
I bet it didn't cost a "lot"....
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