Infomercial on 91.5

[kevinkelly]

Would you guys feel better if he ran a telethon once a month begging for money like some npr stations do?? AEP requires payment on a monthly basis (unless he runs off solar power) and I would expect there are quite a few other bills to pay once you put a full-power fm on the air in a market this size. Any other ideas out there on how to raise money? Just asking... I'd like to have my own radio station too, and if someone knows where the money tree is, I'm willing to go shake it a time or two...

 

[CatFM]

Please don't misunderstand me. I am a regular listener of WHKC and I find it a breath of fresh air in an otherwise very stale radio market that has very little to offer to most listeners. As a former employee of Rob, I wish him well and I would like WHKC to continue offering the music it has been programming. My purpose is only to question what seems like a very gray area in the operation of a non-commercial station. He has owned several commercial stations, so he knows very well what it takes to operate them. With that in mind, you know he couldn't possibly hope to operate a non-comm in the same fashion for any length of time. If that was possible, you would see many non-comms around the country being operated in the same style as WHKC.

 

[Snat]

The call to action part is also a joke. You can't tell people to stop by your showroom, but you can tell them to call an 800 number?

Again, a non-commercial announcement cannot compel the listener to take any kind of action, including calling a phone number.

An announcement that specifically directs a listener to call an 800 number is, to my understanding, against the rules. But if that announcement just happens to state that more information is available at an 800 number, it isn't telling anyone to do anything but simply stating a fact. I hear this all the time in traditional underwriting announcements on NPR, etc.

 

[CatFM]

This is really splitting hairs. It's the old case of doing something that really isn't all that legal, but just call it something else and it will be all right. Given the lenient attitude of the FCC on this, I would fully support Rob continuing with an 80s based Top 40 format, hiring a full air staff, as well as a full sales staff. The station could be programmed like any traditional Top 40 station with live jocks and four breaks per hour with :30 and :60 "non-commercials" to pay the bills. They could run "non-commercials" for every car dealer in town, as well as every other business, providing they watch the wording in the "non-commercials." With an election year just around the corner, he could clean up by selling political "information" spots that don't exactly ask anyone to vote for their candidate (wink, wink...nudge, nudge) because they are only offering "information" about them to the public so they can make an informed choice. Wouldn't ole Clear Channel come unglued over that!!!

 

[Nu_Roo_2]

With an election year just around the corner, he could clean up by selling political "information" spots that don't exactly ask anyone to vote for their candidate (wink, wink...nudge, nudge) because they are only offering "information" about them to the public so they can make an informed choice.

Actually, replace "he could clean up" with "broadcasters could clean up," and you've inadvertently paraphrased a recent Supreme Court ruling and its potential revenue benefit to broadcasters.  (Or was that your intention?)

Apparently the now-majority conservatives on the Supreme Court are all for the kind of hair-splitting you refer to, although I'm not talking specifically about non-comm radio.  The court killed enforcement of a campaign-reform provision intended to prevent the airing of issue ads that cast candidates in a positive or negative light while stopping short of explicitly calling for their election or defeat.  So it was OK in 2004 for Wisconsin Right to Life to ask voters to contact the state's two Democrat senators and urge them not to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees.  One of those senators, pro-choice Russ Feingold, just "happened" to be up for re-election at the time.  Oh, but this was not an anti-Feingold ad (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), it was just a candidate-neutral informational ad with no "call to action" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). 

Taking this back to the radio discussion, call me a hypocrite, but I'm all for HKC supporting itself through "not really commercials" infomercials even though I didn't like the campaign-law ruling, which was obviously politically-motivated.

For the record:  Some of my wording re the Supreme court ruling was taken from AP reports.

 

[Snat]

The station could be programmed like any traditional Top 40 station with live jocks and four breaks per hour with :30 and :60 "non-commercials" to pay the bills.

WZIP, the University of Akron's student-run station, already sounds very similar to this. Their imaging, jock talk, music programming and promotions sound like a CHR-Urban station. I think their underwriting announcements are all TOH, but that might be out of traffic convenience more than any ethical/procedural restriction placed on them by a managing authority.

Why not program more non-comms to sound that way? Probably because there's more money to be made in actual commercial radio, and very few operators are in the industry out of sheer love for broadcasting (or as an educational training ground, as is the case for WZIP).