Russ Johnson wrote:
Hi Scott, Maybe I am naive (not in the business). But how in the world can a station fail / not remember to renew their license.?? I am guessing the license has a term and you know years in advance when it will expire... Seems incomprehensible to me. Seems like I have read about several of these in recent years.
This is what happens when you have people who aren't "radio people" running a radio station. Yes, licenses have fixed terms, and yes, the managers SHOULD know when the expiration dates are coming up, but it's easy to "let the lawyers worry about that," and the next thing you know you're in a pickle like WOOW's.
This happens particularly often in cases where you have absentee owners - the license paperwork goes to the owners or their lawyers in some distant city, and the people actually running the radio station day to day don't ever see it, so they may not know anything's gone wrong until it's too late.
Another factor here is the elimination of the old FCC rules that required would-be station owners to demonstrate financial viability. It used to be that you had to show that there was enough money in the bank to run the station for three full years (including paying the lawyers and all the other detail work). Those rules went by the wayside some years ago, and now there are almost no qualifications to hold a license beyond having US citizenship and a criminal record free of felony convictions.
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