Atlantic, Iowa is around 6,000 people and still has a daily paper. They don’t have a TV station, but their radio stations, KJAN and KSOM, cover local board meetings of county commissioners, etc.
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My 2 cents on the Ownership Caps...
- Thread starter exdjted
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Manistee and Ludington in Michigan are less than 30 miles apart, with a population of under 10,000 each, and both still have daily newspapers. When it comes to radio, they share a few stations, but the most listened to radio station in both cities is from Traverse City
Let's see how many more examples like that there are. Does the paper circulate outside the city of Atlantic? Few such small towns can support traditional local media any longer.
I imagine people in surrounding towns and maybe people who have moved away also subscribe to it, but Atlantic is the county seat, so it’s the biggest city in the county and probably where the majority of the paper’s circulation is.
Well, the county has about 14,000 people. Where is the nearest town with another daily paper? Reported circulation is under 1,600 copies and it prints only 5 days a week.
I don’t know if these are daily or not:
Anita has The Tribune. Griswold has The American, but I think it may just be digital. I don’t think Wiota, Lewis or Marne have newspapers at all.
Where did you find the circulation figures for the Atlantic News Telegraph?
There is, possibly, the point I am trying to make. Those smaller markets that could handle a newspaper 40 or 50 years ago don't have enough local business to sustain them. They lost the real estate, want ads and personals, and auto sales advertisers to the internet decades ago and that was their bread and butter.
Radio lost local business due to small stores closing due to the big box outlets. They can't make up for it with tax accountants and lawyers and other non-retail accounts. Many such towns got new stations after Docket 80-90 dropped them in or facilitated upgrades.
Of all places, Wikipedia. But it is sourced.
The rules already allow one individual to control "all media" in most small markets. Keep in mind that "all media" is often an AM/FM combo and a weekly or twice weekly newspaper when it comes to truly local coverage. If you consider many of the small towns in mid-America, much of the media consumption is from adjacent larger markets. But those large markets have only occasional coverage of the smaller towns in their area.
The issue is that in over 50 years of being around Radio, I have yet to meet anyone like this 'you'. I have met all kinds of owners, and I have never met anyone who looked at it as anything other than a way to make a living, to scratch an itch to own a station, or to buy and move signals around because they love the technical aspect of engineering a move. I know some real scumbags, but I swear I have never met anyone who looked at any of their stations as a way to be the sole source of information and control what people hear and believe.
Radio today is such a minute part of the average person's life. A lot of young people have never listened to terrestrial Radio. A lot of people are so distrustful of any media that they don't even use Radio or TV.
To show you just how much social media has dumbed down the listening public, a friend of mine was telling me about reading a story on his local morning news segment that came directly from the county sheriff's office. The official source. Later that night, while he was setting up to do a High School basketball game, a teacher (yes, a mid-50s teacher in the local school district), told him she heard the story and that he was wrong, because she read what really happened on Facebook.. At that point, I'm sure he was not only worried about how pervasive Facebook has become as a source of news, but also that a teacher who has access to young minds believes what she read on social media over an official police report. I wish I was kidding.
If you had said that 1 person cornering the market and deciding the programming and failing to serve a significant demographic within the community is detrimental, I would have said that you may have a point, but, with an explanation. As I'm in the Mid-South, I know that the African-American population in my area has no Radio outlet. It's not because the station owners don't want to program Urban music. It's because, even in 2026, it's a tough slog to get a lot of business owners to advertise on an Urban-formatted station. Same for Hispanics in my area. Only the larger cities are able to serve those demos. No matter how much I'd love to serve those groups, without advertisers to pay the bills, I can't do it. But, just like me being able to buy the stations in the first place, nothing is stopping a Black or Hispanic group from buying those same stations before I do and programming the stations themselves. I'm sure that they've looked at the advertising base and have determined that these markets may never be progressive enough to support Urban or Hispanic programming.
I know there are people who would love to control every source of information that people in a certain region consume, but they will never do it by using Radio. Besides a newspaper, Radio might be the most inefficient way to reach a majority of any population. Most of the owners I know would prefer to own 1 Radio station that reached a majority of the population. Each extra signal they own costs more to acquire, more to operate, and most don't add in new sources of income. No, they mostly shift the existing ad dollars from one signal to the other. You don't get a multi-station discount on fees, property taxes or electricity.
Where I live in Kazoo/Portage it's Midwest & TownSquare a that are the major players which 103.3 WKFR is the blowtorch in town and is number 1 for many decades which Cumuslus owned before they sold it to Townsquare in the fall of 2013. IHeart doesn't own any radio station in Kazoo/Portage can get Star 105.7 loud in clear in Kazoo/Portage out in GR. B93 is pretty big since it's country music no one can compete with them I thin IHeart owns it but I could be wrong there out in GR I remember when they did B93 Birthday Bash was always big in June of every year but that ended about 8 or 9 years ago was sometime 2010s.
I don't care if IHeart wants to own everything if they want to which they aren't going to do I say get rid of the cap for smaller markets which is outdated in my opinion.
I don't care if IHeart wants to own everything if they want to which they aren't going to do I say get rid of the cap for smaller markets which is outdated in my opinion.