It looks like the FCC is rethinking the whole unattended operation thing...
http://www.rwonline.com/pages/s.0049/t.6992.html
http://www.rwonline.com/pages/s.0049/t.6992.html
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FCC and Unattended Operation
- Thread starter radiorob2.0
- Start date
If the Commission were to require 24/7 operation, it would literally kill us little guys in small markets. It just is NOT possible here. We do a better job of serving our community than many clusters in big cities owned by huge corporations. However, we do so without 24/7 operations. All emergency officials, from the Mayor down to the shift supervisor at the fire department, have our home and cell numbers...if they need our stations, they can reach us. Why punish us little guys and put us out of business because of the actions of others?
The Broker is right on this one. Making all stations run bodies in the building 24/7 makes no sense, particularly for small radio operations. All of the EAS boxes allow for any emergency message to air within 15 minutes as long as they are setup correctly. What's needed is better enforcement by the Commish on EAS, not more regulation in this case. Have a properly run FCC with a FUNDED enforcement bureau that corrects meaningful issues and you're on your way to better coverage on issues and events where intervention is needed.
Here's what you'll see if the the staffing rule gets enacted: Small stations and Non-Comms will go off the air during most overnights and even on weekends. You then get a situation that no one wins and nothing gets out over the air to the public.
Here's what you'll see if the the staffing rule gets enacted: Small stations and Non-Comms will go off the air during most overnights and even on weekends. You then get a situation that no one wins and nothing gets out over the air to the public.
It's true! During the "good old days" when radio station owners only had the highest, most civic minded motives in mind, and mortgaged their houses just to give the home town folks a good swap shop show, most small market stations signed off at 10pm (minimum amount of time on the air) or midnight. Great for DXing, but when that severe thunderstorm showed up at 3am, they were no where to be found.
thebroker said:
Just because I'm curious....would it be hard to sell a couple of extra spots, either in the overnights....or an extra spot an hour during the day, and use that money to hire someone for the overnights, that way you can have a live person 24/7?? I'm sure you can find someone trying to break in the biz. to work for next to minimum wage in the overnights, even more so since you are in a small town! Sounds like it would be a good situation for your station. You can promote the fact that your a LOCAL station with LOCAL people 24/7!! You have a chance to give someone some experience at the radio station, an opportunity to get some new clients on the radio....sounds like a good thing to me!!
minordistortion said:
Actually, yes, it would be hard. In small market radio, we have to fight tooth-and-nail for every penny we make. With the outrageous acquisition costs of stations even in the smallest markets these days, it's harder than ever to make a living. Am I whining and saying most of us are barely hanging on by a thread? Absolutely not. Myself and many other small market broadcasters do quite well. However, we do well only because we work hard at it and do radio the right way.
The bottom line is that every extra expense we have equals another cut we'd have to make. In any market, there's a point where you are billing as much money as you can hope to. Good small market operators reach that point, and from there, the top line (i.e. sales) won't increase much except a few percent a year to keep up with inflation. For many of us who are in that situation, adding unnecessary staff will shrink our bottom lines without any hope of increasing the top line. I speak only for myself, but I'm sure many other owners would agree, as much as we love the radio business, we haven't risked our livelihoods and invested in purchasing stations just to break even, and doing something like staffing our stations 24/7 would most definitely put us in a break-even position. I know some people who frequent this board say silly things such as "corporations shouldn't own radio stations", and I realize that many of those folks will call me selfish when they read this post. However, I personally see nothing wrong with broadcasters making a profit with radio stations provided that they continue serving their communities.
I can't answer for other people, but I know that at my stations, we work very hard every day to serve the community. And as I mentioned earlier, if there's an emergency of some sort, local officials know how to get in touch with us. I've gotten out of bed at 2am plenty of times when the weather was getting bad and we needed to make our listeners aware of severe weather warnings. Quite a few times, the local dispatcher has called me at home in the middle of the night because the police department needed to get important info to residents. Having a minimum-wage flunky hanging out at the radio station all night wouldn't change how we react to emergencies. I'm personally incredibly picky about how we cover breaking news and severe weather. I view this as one of the most important things we do, and I wouldn't trust leaving coverage of such important items to "somebody trying to break into the biz". If we were to be required to have somebody "babysit" overnights, that person would just be calling me and our program directors to come in in the middle of the night and cover an emergency if one were to happen, and I see absolutely no point in that. It is only work for the sake of work, rather than work for the sake of serving the common good.
Let's do some simple math to prove what a large burden 24/7 staffing would be for small market operators. At my stations, we generally have staff in the studio from 5am to 7pm. That leaves roughly 10 hours per day when the stations are unattended, or 300 hours per month. Even hiring somebody at minimum wage will cost $15 per hour after factoring in everything else that goes with employing a person (workers comp, taxes, our share of ssi, added liability insurance, all that good stuff). That works out to a whopping $4,500 per month, just to have a rookie babysit the stations overnight each night of the week. Basically, small market stations average between $8 and $10 per spot if they are lucky, so that works out to around 18 extra spots per day I'd have to sell on every station I own, just to "break even" paying somebody to staff a station 24 hours per day. If you've ever worked in radio, you will know that yes, that's hard. In fact, it's nearly impossible for me and many other broadcasters like me, because we are already pulling as many advertising dollars out of our markets are there are to pull. I can tell you that the potential promotional value of being a "LOCAL station with LOCAL people 24/7!!" certainly does not equate to an extra $54,000/year, which is what would be necessary to cover the cost of overnight staffing.
Finally, I personally don't even want to think about the nightmares involved with staffing a station 24/7. Good help ain't easy to find these days. In fact, in places with low unemployment, even mediocre help ain't easy to find. We have more trouble than you might imagine finding intelligent, dependable folks to run the board during high school football, so it would be even harder to find somebody competent enough to run the board AND be on the air. Add in the fact that you'd need at least two or three of these folks to make sure that every night is covered, and the extra administrative hours it would take to schedule, oversee, train and otherwise employ these people, and you are talking about more crap than any small market broadcaster has time to deal with. All of this, mind you, for absolutely no added benefit. Truly, at the end of the day, mandating 24/7 staffing makes absolutely NO sense.
I like the idealistic and optomistic attitude, but it just doesn't work out when you crunch the numbers.
thebroker said:
Most of what you wrote makes perfect sense to me -- but I do have a quibble with one statement that you made, which is quoted above. I'll just note that government policy should not be based on the possibility that some stations may have been purchased at overly inflated prices. And there is no guarantee that those prices will stay high. Nor should there be.
That said, I can't help but note that as far back as I can remember (to the mid-seventies), there were always lots of automated radio stations in small markets. At the beginning of this period, those automated stations were typically FM counterparts of live, local AM radio stations -- and I suspect that the jocks at the AM station were given the task of "monitoring" the FM station in order to meet the FCC's requirement that someone be present. However, in the late seventies I do remember reading about radio stations that would help the desk staff at nearby hotels to earn the required FCC license and would install remote monitoring equipment at that hotel. That way they could pay a nominal amount to the hotel to meet the FCC's requirements without the expense of having to fully man their stations 24 hours a day.
The eighties brought a proliferation of automated radio stations carrying satellite feeds. Some of these stations did an excellent job of integrating the national satellite programming with local content, and did quite well. Others such stations lacked any connection with their local communities, and tended to struggle badly. As new FM signals came on the air in the latter part of the eighties, more stations seemed to fall into the latter category. Somewhere in this time frame, a company came into existence that was able to monitor stations by remote, meeting the letter of the FCC's requirements without actually having someone at the stations they were monitoring (think of it as an early, limited version of "centralcasting").
So, yeah, I do understand that many small market stations really can't afford to be staffed around the clock. I also do understand that these stations can still do a good job of serving their local community even without being staffed around the clock. On many other issues (most especially involving ownership limits) I tend to part with industry insiders. But on this one issue, I have to agree with those insiders: requiring continuous studio staffing is neither necessary nor practical. In fact, I'll go a bit further and state that prohibiting unattended operation would end up hurting the sort of small, independent owners that most of us claim that we want to see more of (as opposed to the big radio chains).
TexasTom said:
Actually, these days, basically any decent station you buy is going to have a substantial pricetag. There are a few good deals to be had, but most of them are situations which won't ever be commercially viable. Even if the bubble pops, as some folks say, and station prices decrease, cost of acquisition will always be a factor in purchasing profitable stations in decent markets. I'm not suggesting that the government subsidize the industry. In fact, that would be a horrible thing on many different levels. However, I would suggest that it is vital that the FCC look carefully at the economic repercussions of any action they take. Many actions would hurt all broadcasters, whether they overpaid for their stations or not. It's just that those folks who have paid too much for their stations will be hurt more than the rest of us who paid "normal" prices. The market will eventually adjust, but I do not expect to ever see "fire sale" prices for radio stations...they are just too valuable a comodity. Even if prices dropped twenty percent, cost of acquisition will always be an issue. Owners will always have to address it in their business models, and FCC policy which does not acknowledge this will be FCC policy destined to put small broadcasters out of business.
thebroker said:
Yep. At least three of our operations staff have the ability to log in from home and put the local TV station's audio up on all stations. If its very bad, a couple of us will go in anyway, but being able to get the TV's coverage audio up 15 mins before we could before is a prime example of how small-market stations use technology to effectively be staffed 24/7. I make as much as a larger-than-this-market talent, but get to live with a much lower cost of living. If we have to start sticking some random Joe in there, it won't matter how many hats we all wear and how we cut costs other ways, it'll hurt us all. As far as the notion of having to hire said Joe leading to developing new talent, we get plenty of that through hiring high schoolers and college kids to board-op, file stuff, answer phones, help with promotions, and eventually become on-air. We have two girls who are now 20 and 21 that have been there for years. And, we have more teenagers coming in behind them. What next, I gotta sit in the xmitter shack once a week on a cot?
P
paul42141
Guest
minordistortion said:
The Broker did a fine job of answering your post already, but I felt compelled to add my $.02 in bullet-point form. I love bullet-points.
- If the stations could sell that extra spot, don't you think they'd already be doing so?
- Keep in mind we're not necessarily JUST talking about overnights. A lot of small town stations lock the doors & go on the bird or automation at 5:00 or 6:00 P.M., and would have to cover evenings as well. Those folks would be looking at adding at least TWO positions. Even at minimum wage, you're looking at adding $25,000+ to the station's payroll in that situation.
- What benefit comes from promoting yourself as a "LOCAL station 24/7" when every other station can also promote themselves as a "LOCAL station 24/7?" It's kind of like promoting the fact that your transmitter is "On"...when all the other stations also have transmitters that are "On."
B
buttonpuncher
Guest
Another question in this, should the station(s) at the top of the chain be responsible for originating the EAS programming (data and voice)? It seems if the government wants to solidify the system it would be better to have a local civil agency originate the alert, voice and data into the station chain.
How about a Civil Defense agency or NOAA Weather Radio? or let’s get NOAA into the emergency broadcast biz beyond weather alerts, then just require us to relay the higher level alerts.
There are already many NOAA radios out there that will sound an alert in an emergency, and there are newer weather radios in the $60 range that can be programmed by the consumer to their specific location.
Most folks don’t have their radios and TVs on in the middle of the night, so if a tree falls no one will hear it anyway. Unless broadcast radio receivers that turn themselves on upon receiving alert data are widely available, it seems a bit ridiculous to put this burdon on stations.
How about a Civil Defense agency or NOAA Weather Radio? or let’s get NOAA into the emergency broadcast biz beyond weather alerts, then just require us to relay the higher level alerts.
There are already many NOAA radios out there that will sound an alert in an emergency, and there are newer weather radios in the $60 range that can be programmed by the consumer to their specific location.
Most folks don’t have their radios and TVs on in the middle of the night, so if a tree falls no one will hear it anyway. Unless broadcast radio receivers that turn themselves on upon receiving alert data are widely available, it seems a bit ridiculous to put this burdon on stations.
One of the big problems is the current EAS system has never worked well from the start. It relies on a well intentioned group of volunteers to run it. The signal delivery method is a daisy chain operation. Recently in Texas, half the state missed a Required Monthly Test because of a problem at one of the two originating stations. That's right, there are just two stations that feed the entire state. If I were up to no good, which two stations do you think would be the first to go?
Until there are paid people in charge of EAS, whose job it is to make it work, this will not be a well executed system. That's despite the best intentions of everyone. It also needs a fail-safe method of delivery. Perhaps satellite along with old fashioned VHF radio would be a good idea. We always get our EAS alerts from NWS who uses VHF. I wish the reliability of the broadcast daisy chain were half as good. It isn't. Sometimes, low tech works.
The big problem seems to be money, As a nation, we are willing to spend millions confiscating toothpaste from air travelers, but we don't seem to be willing to pony up to make EAS work. There is something wrong with that.
Asking small stations to be manned 24/7 will not make the situation better. All the local authorities have my home and cell phone numbers. They can wake me up at 2:30 AM, and I'll be in the control room in a very short time. In fact, I can go on the air from my kitchen or bedroom if I really need to. A couple of local agencies have other means to go on the air using our facilities. That was something we intentionally did, in an efforts to provide information in an emergency. So far, it has not been abused. Putting a minimum wage operator in the control room overnight won't accomplish anything we don't already do, although it will make paying our bills a lot more difficult to do.
As for adding more spots to pay for it, do you know anyone who wants to work 10-12 hours overnight for $20.00? Most small market stations are not rolling in dough.
Until there are paid people in charge of EAS, whose job it is to make it work, this will not be a well executed system. That's despite the best intentions of everyone. It also needs a fail-safe method of delivery. Perhaps satellite along with old fashioned VHF radio would be a good idea. We always get our EAS alerts from NWS who uses VHF. I wish the reliability of the broadcast daisy chain were half as good. It isn't. Sometimes, low tech works.
The big problem seems to be money, As a nation, we are willing to spend millions confiscating toothpaste from air travelers, but we don't seem to be willing to pony up to make EAS work. There is something wrong with that.
Asking small stations to be manned 24/7 will not make the situation better. All the local authorities have my home and cell phone numbers. They can wake me up at 2:30 AM, and I'll be in the control room in a very short time. In fact, I can go on the air from my kitchen or bedroom if I really need to. A couple of local agencies have other means to go on the air using our facilities. That was something we intentionally did, in an efforts to provide information in an emergency. So far, it has not been abused. Putting a minimum wage operator in the control room overnight won't accomplish anything we don't already do, although it will make paying our bills a lot more difficult to do.
As for adding more spots to pay for it, do you know anyone who wants to work 10-12 hours overnight for $20.00? Most small market stations are not rolling in dough.
I am not in the biz so brutilize me if you wish. Is there some middle ground in the sense that a station can have 24/7 coverage at times of the year where the weather is most extreme? For example the Great Plains has a lot of real severe weather in the spring or from late March through June. Why can't a station keep a person on duty until say 11 PM only during those months? Perhaps that person only wants to work part time or wants to get in the ground level and build up a resume and increase listenership for the station.
Maybe that person could come up with some advertising leads as well and help pay for themself.
Maybe listeners and advertisers would appreciate the extra effort of station ownership and build up better ratings and increased buys.
Maybe that person could come up with a creative, presentable program format (to station ownership) that would truly set the station apart from the competition.
Maybe there are people who want to break into the business who might be willing to PAY for the experience.>
(or at least work on an internship basis).
Maybe that person could come up with some advertising leads as well and help pay for themself.
Maybe listeners and advertisers would appreciate the extra effort of station ownership and build up better ratings and increased buys.
Maybe that person could come up with a creative, presentable program format (to station ownership) that would truly set the station apart from the competition.
Maybe there are people who want to break into the business who might be willing to PAY for the experience.>
(or at least work on an internship basis).
vibe said:
That is a lot of "maybes."
I'm all for people having a way to get experience in the radio business. If someone can handle the situation with interns or part time people, that's fine, but it should not be a requirement. With the technology available today, there is no real reason why somebody needs to be sitting in a control room to do what needs to be done. It is not that hard to do from wherever you are, using a laptop computer and a cell phone. That technology is simple, cheap, and it works.
The reality of the matter is every situation is different. If you have a station whose management is involved in their community, then this is more or less a non-issue. They will do whatever it takes, if for no other reason than "They live there too." Most people in radio have a lot of dedication to their jobs and the towns they live in.
The problem is a great majority of stations are absentee owned and managed by someone who is far away. Some stations are nothing more than a transmitter site with a satellite dish mounted outside, and a contract engineer in case there is a problem.
Are the people that run those types of operations "bad people?" Probably not. What they are doing is perfectly legal. Although my preference is for local ownership and management, it isn't fair to change the rules in mid-stream. In fact, I know of quite a few stations that really are involved in their communities that are owned by someone who does not live in their broadcast area. They are still great radio stations because they have a strong local presence. You just can’t make generalizations.
If you want somebody to blame, you might look toward your elected officials. It is Congress that tells the FCC how to act. Frequently they do things without the vaguest concept of the ramifications of their actions. They are simply led by lobbyists and by following their respective “Party Lines.” Sometimes those decisions are good ones, and sometimes they aren't. When it turns out something is wrong, rather than going to the root of the problem, the general approach is to pass more legislation in an attempt to patch up the problem.. It is analogous to putting a patch on a bald tire. After the patch job, you still have a bald tire.
With almost every change, there are always some unintended consequences that you didn’t see coming. I think this is one of those situations. Be careful what you wish for. There are plenty of people who get these things confused and do a “Ready, Fire, Aim!” routine. I think this is one of those occassions.
I live above the radio station. Silent sense alarm, gotomypc,etc.
Do we have the ability to do much with this in weather emergencies? yes.
Do people still rely on radio or are they watching television?
Do we have the ability to do much with this in weather emergencies? yes.
Do people still rely on radio or are they watching television?
Due to the FCC's acceptance of hundreds and hundreds of Petitions for Rulemaking, small markets now often have 2-3 times as many stations as 20 years ago. The only economically feasible way to run these things is by using automation during non-peak hours.
In our state, the minimum wage is over $8.00/hr. Our added direct cost would be on the order of $50,000/year. A major market station grossing millions of dollars may be able to absorb that, but we would not be able to.
The bottom line is that if we go off the air at night there will be no way to alert the public of an emergency.
In our state, the minimum wage is over $8.00/hr. Our added direct cost would be on the order of $50,000/year. A major market station grossing millions of dollars may be able to absorb that, but we would not be able to.
The bottom line is that if we go off the air at night there will be no way to alert the public of an emergency.
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