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The 20% Rule

D

dfaulkner

Guest
Not sure if that was it's proper name or not, but the old rule that required 20% of a station's air time to be something in the public interest. Many stations met this requirement by having news (usually at the top of or 55 past) each hour & several hours or public service type shows on Sunday. So many good comments on the Fairness Doctrine thread, thought I'd throw this out for comment. Harold Baker (My boss at KTNS) used to tell me about how thousands of radio news people lost their jobs (seemingly overnight) when the 20% rule went away near the end of Jimmy Carter's Presidency.
 
dfaulkner said:
Not sure if that was it's proper name or not, but the old rule that required 20% of a station's air time to be something in the public interest. Many stations met this requirement by having news (usually at the top of or 55 past) each hour & several hours or public service type shows on Sunday. So many good comments on the Fairness Doctrine thread, thought I'd throw this out for comment. Harold Baker (My boss at KTNS) used to tell me about how thousands of radio news people lost their jobs (seemingly overnight) when the 20% rule went away near the end of Jimmy Carter's Presidency.
Click to expand...

There never was such a rule.

There was, in the 60's and 70's, a "rule of thumb" that gave a station an expectation of renewal. And it was not 20%.

IIRC (and it has been a long time since I calculated the numbers for renewal preparation) it was something around 3% of hours for FM and 5% for an AM at the time.

For an AM, 5% would be around 8 hours of news, public affairs and "other" programming. So a couple of minutes an hour of news and three or four hours of PA and such on SUnday would take care of it.

Many stations did 10-minute newscasts several times in overnights, and thus did little or no news outside of perhaps morning drive. And the PA stuff might run 4 AM to 7 AM on Sunday.

Having a newsperson on the staff was not essential, as many stations, particularly automated FMs (and a huge percentage were automated in the 70's) used network news to fulfil the news requirement. I even recall a CHR station that used National Enquirer stories done dramatically, and prerecorded by another jock, once an hour to cover the news quota; others subscribed to News of the Weird or somesuch and delivered them as entertainment, often with a "good stuff, man" attitude.

Of course, Gordon McLendon and others used loud, often sensationalistic "20-20" news at twenty after and twenty before the hour and delivered "his wife found him hanging like a ham..." stories in the "if it bleeds, it leads" fashion.

When license terms were extended and the hoops the Commission asked stations to go through (I recall the renewal for an AM and FM I managed in San Juan, PR totalled over 600 pages) was reduced, the "expectancy" percentages seemed to disappear.

And, let's not forget the "composite week" made up of 7 random days in the license period. If you had over 18 minutes of spots, you had to have a reason ready to provide... and that was because most stations in the 60's ran very high commercial loads and the FCC tried to keep the spot loads somewhat under control.

And I don't think thousands lost their jobs, either.
 
Thanks ! That sounds like what I was thinking of. I got the name "20% Rule" stuck in my head somewhere along the way. (That's what I recall Harold calling it. He was my source on the many jobs lost when that requiremment went away.) What you describe is what I was remembering. I remember some of the Rock/AOR type stations around here would have more off the wall or at least less mainstream fair for their newscasts. (One of the ABC Radio News offerings was geared to that type of station.) A good many stations in Texas used TSN to meet their news requirement.
 
dfaulkner said:
I got the name "20% Rule" stuck in my head somewhere along the way.
Click to expand...
Maybe you were drinking beer at the time. Because there's a marketing 'rule' that 20% of the population consumes 80% of your product. As in, beer: 20% of the population drinks 80% of the beer sold in the USA. 20% of the population eats 80% of the meals sold at fast food resturants....etc...
See this for more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
 
little1 said:
dfaulkner said:
I got the name "20% Rule" stuck in my head somewhere along the way.
Click to expand...
Maybe you were drinking beer at the time. Because there's a marketing 'rule' that 20% of the population consumes 80% of your product. As in, beer: 20% of the population drinks 80% of the beer sold in the USA. 20% of the population eats 80% of the meals sold at fast food resturants....etc...
See this for more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Click to expand...

Maybe that's where I was getting the name from. The FCC regs that David Eduardo wrote about in his response were what I was thinking of.
 
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