Re: [IRCA] IBOC battle begins

[Scott Fybush <scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Craig Healy wrote:

> Because of a little matter called Public Service which is supposedly
> at the heart of broadcasting.  If WBZ pays someone off, who pays the
> residents of the area that loses radio service?  Will WBZ step up and
> provide school closings and traffic reports for the station they
> killed off?  I think not.

I admire your idealism, but you know as well as I do that the vast 
majority of the stations that would be silenced (or have their 
interference complaints bought out) aren't doing school closings and 
traffic reports, and haven't done so for years.

Even WYSL, much as I admire Bob and his hard work, is mostly syndicated 
fare with little or no local content outside of drive time. The big 
issue for Bob is the revenue he stands to lose from leasing time at 
night for college sports broadcasts...and if WYSL weren't available to 
carry those broadcasts, there are three other stations in town that 
would pick them up.

> I look at it as Walmart barging into a town and driving the locals
> out of business.  That's why we have zoning at the local level.  Too
> bad the zoning boards don't have some say in radio.

Thank god they don't! There would never be another radio tower built 
anywhere in the country if most local zoning boards had their say!
> 
>> This is nothing really new - look at the AM signals that were 
>> bought out and taken off the air so WWRL 1600 New York could 
>> upgrade a decade or so ago, for instance. Or look at WOWO/WLIB.
> 
> That's exactly my point.  Think how many small towns have lost their
> only service, or a powerful local presence so a big city station can
> gain another point in the Arbitron ratings. Is New York City truly a
> better place because WLIB has night service?  Was Air America
> *really* worth killing off most of WOWO's night signal?  That same
> mindset is trying to eliminate the Electoral College in Presidential
> elections.  It will severely diminish the smaller areas in favor of
> the metropolitan regions, and therefore the rich and powerful.
> Suddenly people aren't quite so equal anymore.

One could argue that a system that gives the vote of a Montana resident 
something like 25 times the impact of my New York vote was never that 
equal to begin with, but I digress...

The WOWO of 1991 was worth saving - a live human being playing music and 
taking phone calls all night long. But even before the big downgrade, 
that WOWO was dead. You know what's on WOWO all night now? The same 
syndicated dreck that's on WHAM and WPHT and a dozen other signals up 
and down the dial. There is NO - zero, zip, nada - local news presence 
on WOWO after 6 PM local time. Nobody in the newsroom if something 
happens. Nobody in the control room to break in with national news, 
even. Just a bunch of Starguides and Prophet automation. Call me cynical 
- but why again is that worth saving?

(And the WLIB upgrade preceded Air America by more than a decade, anyway.)

I hate to be this negative, but it seems to me that something's happened 
to AM radio in just the last decade or so. With the exception of a very 
small number of stations (WBZ is one of them, actually; WGN, WSM, KGO 
are a few others), just about nobody on the AM dial is offering anything 
truly local in the overnight hours, or even late evenings.

(The state of AM listenership has become so dire, at least in my own 
medium market, that we're scrambling at my own station to find *any* 
solution that will get our programming over to the FM dial, simply 
because an increasing portion of the potential audience can't or won't 
bother finding us on the AM dial. It's a painful reality to deal with.)

Do any of us, as DXers, spend any significant time actually LISTENING to 
distant programming these days for entertainment? I'm quite curious to 
hear answers to this question. I know that I can summarize my 
entertainment-based skywave listening pretty succinctly lately: WTIC for 
Red Sox games, WCBS, WBBM and KYW for news, WGN and WBT on occasion for 
talk (when I can pick them out of the sea o' hash), and sometimes WSM 
and CHWO (which is actually groundwave for me, anyway) for music.

These, needless to say, are not the stations that would be bought into 
silence by any sort of interference-reduction scheme.

>> For every WSNJ, which is indeed a great local station, there are 
>> probably a dozen AMs just barely limping along with minimal 
>> listenership, whose owners might welcome a chance to cash out and
>> to clean up some of the interference on the dial in the process.
> 
> And just why does iBiquity or Clear Channel get to shut these down?
> either by acquiring them, or jamming them off the dial?  If a station
> owner wants to sell out, it's not that hard to do.  Brokers happen..

Indeed - and if a station owner wants to sell out, why shouldn't a CBS 
or Citadel or Tribune have just as much right to buy the station into 
silence as any other buyer would have to keep the station "alive," for 
whatever that might be worth.

Let me put the question another way: we can each, no doubt, cite 
stations in our areas that are limping along so badly that they're 
probably not salvageable any longer. In Craig's market, I'm thinking of 
WALE on 990, which has a toxic-waste-contaminated transmitter site, a 
sea of unpaid power bills, and on and on.

Where were the protests from the "unserved" public in greater 
Greenville, Rhode Island when WALE just spent ten months off the air? 
How much better is the public interest served now that the signal is 
back on the air, probably not at full power, playing who knows what? If 
it were to be worth it to Crawford to pay off the value of the WALE 
license in order to improve the signal at WLGZ in Rochester (which does 
have an audience, despite its local signal issues), why wouldn't that 
move be in the public interest, too?

And while I'm being very careful not to insult Craig's own client 
stations (he's got to put food on the table, too, after all!), one 
wonders how many other satellite-fed AM signals could disappear from the 
airwaves tomorrow with hardly anyone noticing.

> These are all questions that should have been on the table and
> thought out before the first IBOC sideband bludgeoned itself onto the
> radio dials.  Why did they have to use the world as a beta test for
> something that anyone with common sense and open eyes could have
> seen?
> 
> I hope Bob cleans their clock..

On this point, of course, we're in complete agreement!

There was a tremendous amount of wishful thinking that went into this 
whole process.

s
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