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November 18, 2002
WSEE Staff Gutted in WICU JOA Deal
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*The sale of the CBS affiliate in Erie, PENNSYLVANIA
has some citizens worried that their city will soon be served
by only two TV news operations - and it appears their concerns
aren't far off the mark.
WSEE-TV (Channel 35) recently changed hands, becoming the
first property of Initial Broadcasting of Pennsylvania, a company
controlled by Kevin Lilly, whose father, George, controls SJL
Communications, which owns Erie's NBC affiliate, WICU (Channel
12).
And later this week, Initial will lay off 18 of WSEE's 66
staffers, including weekend sports guy Red Hughes and weekend
weathercaster Tina Zboch. (Weekend news anchor Kara Calabrese
is leaving of her own volition.) Also leaving is 28-year WSEE
veteran Carol Pella, who tells the Erie Times-News that
she was offered a management position but turned it down.
WSEE wants to enter into a joint operating agreement with
WICU, which will handle some of the station's back-office and
master-control duties. Under the JOA, the stations' news operations
would remain separate, with about 25 to 30 employees remaining
at WSEE to handle those duties.
WSEE is also applying to replace its current STL tower at
its Peach Street studios with a taller tower which would also
carry microwave links to the WICU studio building.
 *On the other side of the Keystone
State, the ever-impatient Citadel cluster in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton
has struck again, this time cancelling all local talk at WARM
(590 Scranton), which just returned from oldies to news-talk
this past April.
WARM's local morning show employed host Rob Neyhard, newscaster
Paula Deignan and reporter Bobby Day; producer Sam Liguori was
also out the door when the show was cancelled last Friday.
WARM remains with the talk format, albeit all off the satellite;
we note as well that the 590warm.com domain, which is still linked
even from Citadel's corporate Web site, apparently expired and
was registered by someone with no connection with the station.
It's a sad story for a station that once owned the market...
Moving down the road, WSBG (93.5 Stroudsburg) PD/middayer
Ang Mason has parted ways with the station; you can find Mason
at moobabe@usa.net.
Down in Philadelphia, Todd Shannon gets a big promotion: the
WIOQ (102.1) PD is now operations manager for Q102 and all its
Clear Channel sisters: WDAS, WUSL, WSNI, WDAS-FM and WJJZ.
Jerry "Geator" Blavat has a new weekend home on
the Philly airwaves: he'll be doing 3-5 Sunday afternoons on
WPEN (950); meanwhile, his former colleague Hy Lit has filed
an age discrimination complaint against Viacom's WOGL (98.1),
alleging that the oldies station cut his pay, then cut his schedule
back severely.
 Over in Pittsburgh, WAMO-FM (106.7
Beaver Falls) is drawing some complaints from neighbors of its
new tower near Wexford; the Tribune-Review says the station's
signal, while more powerful in Pittsburgh, is showing up on phones
and such in the neighborhood of the new site.
WKST-FM (Kiss 96.1) in the Burgh has a new PD; he's Dino Robitaille,
who comes to the Steel City from sister Clear Channel "Kiss"
outlet WDKF (94.5 Englewood OH) in Dayton.
And up near the state line - in the Youngstown, Ohio market,
in fact - D&E Broadcasting is selling WPAO (1470 Farrell)
to Holy Family Communications, the Buffalo-based group that runs
Catholic-formatted WLOF (101.7 Attica NY). Meanwhile, Stop 26
Riverbend has filed with the FCC for its $48,125 purchase of
the license of WASN (1330 Campbell OH) out of bankruptcy.
*We'll start our NEW YORK news down
in the big city, where your intrepid editor spent most of last
week (which is why there was no issue last Monday) visiting transmitter
sites and working on an upcoming history of New York City FM
radio. What's in the headlines down there? We'll start with a
new transmitter site for public radio WNYC-FM (93.9), which will
be on the air from the Empire State Building any day now (if
it hasn't happened already), now that the work has been done
to inject its signal into the combiner that feeds the ERI master
antenna high on the Empire mast. WNYC had been using the Four
Times Square tower as an interim site after losing its transmission
facilities at the World Trade Center; additional work yet to
come at Empire will add WPAT-FM (93.1) to the ERI master, as
well as building a second combiner that can be used to keep the
ERI antenna on the air while work is done on the main combiner.
What's next for poor bedraggled talker WNEW (102.7), which
did at least get a bit of publicity when it added a simulcast
of David Letterman's TV show last week? Owner Infinity brought
Eric Logan in from Chicago, where he was operations manager of
country WUSN (99.5), to be VP/programming for its New York stations,
which immediately prompted a new round of speculation that 102.7
will be playing country soon.
On the AM dial, there's a new morning show on WWRL (1600 New
York), with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (author of Kosher Sex and
advisor to Michael Jackson - we couldn't make this stuff up if
we tried) and former Village Voice writer Peter Noel.
Yes, we airchecked it; we'll aircheck anything, you know...
We heard digital AM radio for the first time, thanks to Tom
Ray at WOR (710); while the circumstances weren't the best (a
little speaker in a noisy control room), we can say that it does
sound pretty good on the one existing receiver in New York City
(WOR expects to get more in the next few months), and that the
sideband hash, while certainly present, wasn't quite as odious
as we'd expected (we could still hear WADS on 690 from Connecticut
while driving in Rockland County, 60 or so miles away, and a
trip down to Trenton found WPHE on 690 from Phoenixville, PA
quite audible without WOR interference.)
Don't get us wrong; we still have some big concerns...which
is why we're reprinting last issue's IBOC Rant for the benefit
of those who missed it. (It's at the
bottom of this week's column, and we'll run some of your
responses next week...)
Moving upstate, the Woody and Jim show that originated at
WRVW in Nashville and was picked up by WKKF (102.3 Ballston Spa)
in Albany went on suspension last week after a misguided stunt;
the "Kiss" folks in Albany told the local media that
they had decided to "cancel" the show to return to
more music in morning drive, and nobody seemed to question them
very much. Meanwhile on the AM dial, WVKZ (1240 Schenectady)
dropped its "Sun Country" classic country format to
go satellite talk, with the Dolans, Mike Gallagher and Sean Hannity
on the schedule. And there's a new PD/middayer at WQBK (103.9
Rensselaer)/WQBJ (103.5 St. Johnsville); he's Chili Walker, inbound
from WWDX in the Lansing, Michigan market.
Utica's "Lite 98.7," WLZW, has a new morning guy,
as Mark Richards arrives from WBHV (103.1) in the State College
PA market to replace Randy Jay.
 Over in Syracuse, WTVH (Channel
5) has a new logo, and a redesigned Web site to match. The honor
of "first digital TV signal in Syracuse," meanwhile,
goes to Fox affiliate WSYT (Channel 68), which signed on with
its DTV signal as we were passing through on Wednesday, Nov.
6. WSYT is using just 4 kW from its tower in Otisco for now;
it hopes to move the channel 19 DTV signal to the new WSTM tower
at Sentinel Heights eventually (though we hear that tower's completion
has been delayed by a problem with the ice bridge, which apparently
didn't go in straight...)
On the radio dial in Syracuse, the last of Syracuse Community
Radio's translator CPs has expired unbuilt. W213BB (90.5 Skaneateles)
joins other dead CPs in Marcellus, Fenner and Truxton - while
SCR remains unable to be heard in most of Syracuse over its only
operating transmitter, WXXE (90.5 Fenner), which at least has
a decent audio line from the studios these days.
Up in Watertown, correspondent Mike Roach checks in to let
us know that indie WLOT-LP (Channel 66) won't be renewing its
lease of cable channel 97, so the station returns to "antenna-only"
mode. Meanwhile, WWNY (Channel 7) has a new set and graphics;
the CBS affiliate's old set came to Watertown from Boston's WBZ-TV,
where your editor remembers it fondly...
Binghamton's WMXW (103.3 Vestal) will go all-Christmas next
week; expect several more such temporary flips around the region
as the holidays approach. (You can keep track of the flips all
over the country if you visit your editor's other site, www.100000watts.com!)
 Here in Rochester, WHAM (1180)
celebrated its 80th anniversary in style (if a few months late;
the actual anniversary was July 1, when WHAM held an outdoor
party) by bringing the legendary voice of Paul Harvey to town
this past Thursday (Nov. 14).
That's WHAM PD Jeff Howlett welcoming Harvey to town; after
greeting his admirers at a reception, Harvey spoke to an audience
of more than 1,000 at the Eastman Theatre (a most appropriate
locale, since that's where WHAM began back in '22.)
A word from your editor: if you ever have the chance to hear
Paul Harvey in person, don't pass up the opportunity: at 84,
he's still a commanding presence on stage, with a voice that
shows no signs of the illness he suffered last year and a mind
that's as sharp as ever, going more than 45 minutes without glancing
at his notes more than a few times and even working in a reference
to his last local appearance - in 1966! (And it was all for a
good cause, too; proceeds from the event benefitted WHAM's Heart
of Gold Children's Foundation...)
(Oh, and keep reading to the end
of the column to find out how we left Paul Harvey speechless,
too!)
Rochester's "Big TV," UPN affiliate WBGT-CA (Channel
40) and W26BZ (Channel 26) in Victor, is being sold; founders
David and Molly Grant are selling the LPTV outlet to Corning's
Vision Communications. (If we're not mistaken, this is the same
group that bought Corning's "Big TV," Fox affiliate
WYDC Channel 48, from the Grants a couple of years ago.)
The new religious LPFM in Arcade, WNAR-LP (100.3), is on the
air - but we're getting some interesting reports that suggest
it's being heard much better in Williamsville, just northeast
of Buffalo, than in its licensed spot in Arcade, 20 miles or
so southeast of the Queen City...
Some sad news from Buffalo: Larry Anderson, who did middays
at WGR (550) in the seventies, programmed the station, then served
as its GM in the mid-eighties, died November 4 in Wheeling, West
Virginia. Anderson had been the GM of Clear Channel's Wheeling
cluster, including WWVA (1170) and the Capitol Music Hall, at
the time of his death.
*In CONNECTICUT, veteran news director
Deborah Johnson is leaving WFSB (Channel 3); no replacement has
been announced.
*A new program director is on the way to
MASSACHUSETTS; NERW hears Gordon Smith from WILI-FM (98.3)
down in Willimantic, Connecticut, is heading north to fill Pete
Falconi's shoes at WXLO (104.5 Fitchburg) in the Worcester market.
In Boston, WRKO (680) shuffled its schedule last week, moving
Michael Savage's show to a live slot from 7-10 weeknights, replacing
the taped Sean Hannity show. "VB's Pleasure Pit," featuring
Howie Carr producer "Virgin Boy," now runs from 10-1
following Savage.
 We don't usually spend a lot of
time reporting on college stations' studios, but we'll make an
exception for WBRS (100.1 Waltham) at Brandeis University, seeing
as how it's where your editor got his start in this crazy business.
And alas, the very studios where so many crimes against good
radio were committed (we're not proud...) are no more; the station
moved last week into its new home in the school's new Shapiro
Campus Center, where the walls are nice and clean, the equipment
is (mostly) new, and there are no unidentifiable smells lingering
around the sofa in the jock lounge. (Yet.)
We've somehow neglected to note that WGAW (1340 Gardner) is
now simulcasting WOTW (900 Nashua NH), at least part of the time;
also out that way, alert NERW readers have been hearing some
Spanish programming on WCAT (700 Orange).
Out in the western part of the state, WCDC-DT (Channel 26)
has signed on from Mount Greylock, one of the last Massachusetts
DTVs to take air. (Fellow ABC affiliate WGGB-DT, channel 55 in
Springfield, beat WCDC to the air by a couple of weeks; historians
will note that channel 55 was also where WGGB's analog predecessor,
WHYN-TV, was located when it signed on in 1953, though it later
moved to channel 40.)
And we're sorry to report the passing of John Lynker, whose
obituaries in Washington, D.C. rightly recount his many years
doing news for WTOP but somehow omitted his stint at all-news
WEEI (590) in Boston. Lynker, who died November 12, was 75.
*One NEW HAMPSHIRE note: NBC's purchase
of WPXB (Channel 60) in Merrimack comes with a call change; the
station will soon be running Telemundo programming under new
calls WNEU.
*In VERMONT, Peter Speciale is the
new news director at Burlington ABC affiliate WVNY (Channel 22);
he comes to the station from KWTV in Oklahoma City, where he
was assistant news director.
*MAINE's Pax affiliate is being sold;
Lowell Paxson will be $10 million richer after the deal closes
transferring WMPX (Channel 23) in Waterville and WPXO in St.
Croix, USVI to Corporate Media Consultants Group. No word on
whether WMPX keeps the Pax affiliation after the sale goes through.
And WMTW-DT (Channel 46) signed on last week from the new
WMTW tower in Baldwin, Maine.
*Digital radio broadcasting is coming to
CANADA's capital, but with one station missing; while
the CRTC approved DAB signals in Ottawa for stations owned by
the CBC, CHUM, Rogers, Standard and Astral, one station was missing:
Rogers' CIOX (101.1 Smiths Falls) won't get an Ottawa DAB signal,
thanks to interventions by competitors who argued that the station
should only be heard digitally in Smiths Falls, some 45 miles
from Ottawa, and not on the DAB transmissions from the main Ottawa
transmitter site at Camp Fortune, Quebec.
Aboriginal Voices Radio still isn't on the air at 106.5 in
Toronto, but when it does, it'll be allowed to use 350 watts
instead of the originally-approved 250 watts. The CRTC also granted
a power increase to CFCO-1-FM (92.9) in Chatham; the relay of
AM 630 can jump from 50 watts to 250.
*That's it for the new material this week, but we realize
some of you haven't yet seen our thoughts on digital radio broadcasting...so
here's an encore presentation of our DAB Rant:
"Let's
Kick the Transition Up a Notch"
I've always had a fascination with the early days of any given
broadcast technology, wondering what it must have been like to
listen to (AM) radio in 1921-22, FM and TV in the late forties
or UHF around 1953-54. But I came along too late, and all those
technologies were fairly mature long before I learned how to
use them. Until now, the best I've been able to do is to boast
about having been on the Internet since 1990, and that's not
quite the same thing.
Now we're on the verge of something truly new: the move of
our entire broadcast spectrum from analog to digital. And if
you're in the right frame of mind about it, the whole thing just
might be as exciting as those early days of analog broadcasting.
Up here in backwater Rochester, digital TV has just arrived
on the scene within the last few weeks, and in fact it was just
tonight that I had my first chance to see the local DTV signal.
(Make that "signals" - the second DTV in town signed
on just last week, it seems. See, I told you this was exciting!)
Yeah, the tuners are expensive. Are you ready to plunk down
$450 for a box that gets just a couple of channels, none of which
sign on before 8 at night? You'll find yourself in the same boat
as the TV pioneers of 1948 or 1949, for whom even the test patterns
were thrillingly exciting. But you know what? It works. Even
on a little 14-inch NTSC set, there's a distinct difference with
the DTV receiver: no ghosting, no multipath, no sparklies - you
either have a perfect signal or you don't, which is downright
remarkable when you're tuned to the NBC or CBS affiliates 70
miles away in Buffalo.
Add into that the multicast capabilities (Buffalo's CBS affiliate,
for instance, runs weather radar and its co-owned independent,
WNLO channel 23, on its sub-channels) and the electronic program
guide and all that, and this is something distinctly better than
the NTSC analog we've been living with all these years - even
before saying a word about HDTV. $450 better? Maybe not. $50
or $100 better? Show me the receiver and I'll buy one yesterday
(and then two more for the other TVs in the house!)
Then there's digital radio. We've discussed XM and Sirius
before, and there's not really much for me to add: they're neat
for niche markets (truckers; fans of obscure formats, especially
in small markets; buyers of luxury cars) and some of the programming
sounds interesting, but we're not looking at a huge threat to
broadcast radio as we know it. Now we add to that mix "HD
Radio," the marketing name for the technology we in the
industry have been calling "In-Band, On-Channel" (IBOC)
digital. While DTV's been on the air in some big cities for four
years now, the FCC just gave IBOC the go-ahead last month, and
most people - even in the industry - have only heard it in trade-show
demonstrations, if even that. (One of the reasons I'm headed
to New York this week is to hear WOR 710 in digital, and yes,
you can expect a full report here when I return!)
The benefits of IBOC are a bit harder to quantify: FM stations
say they'll sound "as good as CDs," but there are a
lot of lousy CDs out there, and even more lousy FM radios and
less-than-ideal listening environments (any automobile, just
for starters) where the slight benefit in sound quality offered
by IBOC digital will be tough to notice. On the AM side of the
equation, the improvement in sound quality ought to be more dramatic
- at least while the sun is shining. There are still good reasons
to believe that the technology as it now exists simply will not
work under nighttime medium wave propagation conditions - at
least as long as simultaneous analog and digital operation continues.
And that's my thesis today: that if the industry is serious
about a digital conversion, it needs to figure out how to get
receivers - hundreds of millions of them - into consumers' hands
quickly and cheaply enough to allow for a full-fledged conversion
from analog to digital without spending decades in transition,
because it's that transition period that could doom these technologies
to failure.
Back to DTV for a minute: the TV spectrum was already getting
crowded before digital came along. In most communities, the table
of allocations for full-power stations that was put in place
in the early sixties was finally filled out by the mid-nineties.
Take away channels 70-83, as the FCC did in the seventies, add
to that the flood of LPTVs that began in the mid-eighties, and
add to that the UHF channels from 14-20 that found double
use for public safety two-way communication, and there wasn't
a ton of open space on the UHF dial by the time DTV came along.
So the need to allocate a second channel to every full-power
station for DTV use brought with it some technical compromises:
interference standards had to be rewritten to allow for previously-forbidden
uses such as first-adjacent TV channels in the same location.
And - call it politics if you will - the FCC had to cut some
corners to squeeze in channels for everyone. That's how WBOC-TV
in Salisbury, Maryland and WHRO-DT in Norfolk, Virginia ended
up uncomfortably sharing channel 16, and how WCVB-DT in Boston
and the police in South Jersey ended up together on channel 20.
The situation on the radio dials has the potential to be even
uglier, because "IBOC" signals aren't really entirely
"on" channel. On the FM dial, the subcarriers that
hold the digital data occupy spectrum beyond the +/- 100 kHz
mark that separates one FM channel from the next one up and down
the dial. On the AM dial, the digital data spreads well into
- and beyond - the first-adjacent channels on each side.
("HD Radio" proponents point out, quite correctly,
that the "IBOC-AM" signal is still well within the
NRSC mask that governs the bandwidth of signals in the medium-wave
band, and that's true. But I'd contend that the mask's designers
assumed the use of analog signals throughout the band, and that
the effect of digital "hash" heard against an analog
signal is far more destructive to enjoyable listening than interference
from a neighboring analog signal would be.)
Here in Rochester, we have no locals below 950 kHz. For eighty
years, that's been a boon to radio listeners here: at night,
we can tune across a broad spectrum of distant skywave AM signals.
For instance, at 650 we can easily tune in WSM from Nashville,
followed at 660 by WFAN in New York and at 670 by WSCR in Chicago.
Put IBOC on all three, add typical skywave fading, and the analog
signals of each of the three will become unlistenable because
of the digital hash from the others. Switch to a digital radio,
and it's reasonable to expect that the strong analog signals
on the adjacent channels will wipe out the desired digital sidebands
- and in digital, there's no such thing as graceful signal degradation.
It's either there or it's not, and it won't be there in that
case - and this is why the FCC still hasn't approved IBOC for
nighttime AM use. (And let's not forget that up here, sunset
won't come later than 5 PM again until February, so that knocks
out IBOC on PM drive, too!)
The industry - at least, the proponents of IBOC - want to
believe that these problems are limited to long-distance AM reception,
and that stations will eventually be able to broadcast with IBOC
24 hours a day to local listeners. Ironically, if this were 1960,
it just might work - but the radio industry dug its own grave
in the decades that followed by massively overpacking the AM
dial.
That story - all about the breakdown of the clear channels,
the power increases on the regional and local channels, the granting
of tiny night powers to former daytimers and the near-abdication
of enforcement duties by an overburdened FCC, exacerbated by
the sprawl of metropolitan areas far beyond the service areas
envisioned when so many stations were built in the forties and
fifties - is one that has been told elsewhere and is outside
the scope of this discussion. But its lessons are obvious any
time you turn on the AM dial at night. Interference on medium-wave
frequencies in AM broadcasting is cumulative; just listen to
any of the "graveyard" channels (1230, 1240, 1340,
1400, 1450 and 1490) to hear what it sounds like when 300 stations
are each throwing a kilowatt into the ether.
What this all means in real life is that far too many AM stations
reach just a few miles from their towers before their signals
are overcome by all the other noise on the band. Adding IBOC
to that mess won't help, and at night has the potential to make
things even worse.
But the AM operators who look to digital as the last savior
of a medium in its death throes aren't completely delusional:
their dreams of having signals that can compete with FM in audio
quality and signal reach have some chance of coming true, when
and if they're able to broadcast digital-only, moving the digital
signal to the core of their spectrum and eliminating the sidebands
that slop over to the adjacent channels and end up hurting everybody
(except the biggest stations, which are generally the only ones
making money these days, anyway.)
And while TV at least has a vague plan for reaching that transition,
perhaps as early as the scheduled date of 2006 (after which much
of the overcrowding of the TV dial goes away as many stations
move DTV to their original analog allocations and take their
"interim" DTV channels dark again), nobody in radio
is even discussing a method or a deadline for replacing all those
hundreds of millions (billions, even?) of analog radios that
date back to the twenties.
Nobody's disputing that the challenge is even bigger for radio
than for TV; after all, a TV is a fairly big purchase, it's stationary
(making a set-top digital-to-analog converter feasible to keep
older sets usable), and the advantages to the consumer of DTV
should become sufficiently obvious in the next few years. Add
that to an FCC/industry agreement to make DTV tuners a standard
feature of even smaller TV sets, and it's a safe bet that most
homes will be able to see DTV in time to make the analog shutoff
at least by the end of this decade, if not sooner.
Now let's look at the radio transition. So far, IBOC is in
its infancy, and the attention of the industry has been on simply
getting it up and running at a few stations. But this column
believes it's never too early to look a few chess moves ahead
and figure out how this "HD Radio" thing has a chance
to get consumers' acceptance in a world that's overcrowded with
new toys all labeled "digital." So here's NERW's modest
plan for a transition that might work:
- Mandatory IBOC conversion for FM broadcasters, with a
short target date. Adding IBOC digital to FM signals looks
to be a fairly straightforward process; many recent transmitters
and antenna systems can go digital simply by swapping out exciters,
while lower-powered facilities (college stations, for instance)
may find it simpler to add a second transmitter and antenna for
the digital portion of the signal. The idea here, just as with
DTV, is to solve at least half of the "chicken and egg"
problem by making sure there are plenty of digital signals out
there for digital receivers to tune in. Add to that a mandate
that stations utilize the broadcast data features (IBOC's version
of the sadly neglected RDS for analog FM), and by 2006 or 2007
we could hear digital on most of the nation's FMs. (It's reasonable
to expect that translators and small noncomms would get a longer
grace period to save up for the new equipment.)
- An "All-Channel" receiver act for radio manufacturers.
It was discussed for FM in the fifties and early sixties,
and for AM stereo in the eighties, but the FCC has consistently
declined to mandate that receivers be able to pick up specific
frequency bands or modulation types. The "NERW Plan"
would change that: by 2007, we'd mandate that any radio retailing
for $50 or more be capable of receiving analog and IBOC signals,
on AM and FM. (If the cost of IBOC reception can't be brought
down that low in five years, we don't have much hope for the
system's success, frankly.) And by the way, we'd get right in
line to buy the first radio under $100 that can tune analog,
IBOC and whichever of the satellite radio services survives...and
I doubt we're alone.
- An incentive to begin providing separate programming on
"digital FM." FM was around as early as 1939, and
its technical advantages were obvious from the beginning. (We'd
argue, in fact, that the difference in quality between AM and
FM, even in 1939, was far more evident to the average listener
than the difference between analog FM and digital in 2002.) FM
radios were on the market, for not that much more than the cost
of a good AM table radio, in the years just after World War Two.
But the medium didn't take off for another twenty years - and
it took the passage of a rule banning AM-FM simulcasts, which
forced FM radio to develop its own programming, which finally
gave the audience a reason to seek out FM radios. If it takes
digital that long, it's dead - so here's the "NERW Plan":
allow separate programming on the digital side within three years
(once there's enough of a receiver base out there to provide
some listeners!), but with some conditions and incentives. Commercial
load would be limited, say to 10 minutes an hour - and stations
that broadcast separate digital programming would get some benefit
in addition to the extra ad inventory. (We're thinking tax credits
on the purchase of additional equipment for the digital signal,
or extended license renewals, perhaps.) Yes, separate digital
programming would sacrifice the "blend-to-analog" feature
of digital FM - but it's a sacrifice that will have to be made
eventually, if consumers will ever have a reason to buy the new
radios. And the reduced commercial load is a self-disciplinary
measure the industry will have to take one of these days, if
it expects anyone to be listening to the radio 20 years
from now.
One more note here: consumers will spend plenty
of money on a technology if they view it as either essential
or just too cool to live without. DVDs overtook VHS tape in the
rental stores in just a couple of years with no conversion mandate,
simply because the costs came down quickly and the advantages
over tape were so obvious. UHF may not have been a national success
until the seventies - but if you lived in Yakima or Fort Wayne
or Scranton in 1955, you spent the extra money for a UHF-capable
set because it was the only way to get local TV. There's no reason
to think consumers will behave any differently where digital
radio is concerned.
- So what about AM? Let the market decide. It sounds
counter-intuitive, I know. After all, that was the very policy
that doomed AM stereo two decades ago, right? But the "NERW
Plan" has something the AM stereo transition didn't, in
the form of that "All-Channel Receiver Act," which
would ensure that receivers are out there that will be able to
pick up digital AM if stations choose to transmit it. Our plan
has something else AM stereo didn't: much more market flexibility
for AM operators to decide their own fate. We can imagine big-city,
big-signal AMs wanting to go digital quickly, while small-town
stations find it hard to justify the costs of converting. And
of course we foresee a transition period when just about everyone
is suffering more interference than they've ever suffered before.
So the "NERW Plan" would be even more aggressive than
current FCC practice in letting stations buy and sell their interference
rights. Under the plan, stations would be allowed to broadcast
digitally at night - but would be responsible for any additional
interference they cause. So if some of the newer stations on
1200 are cutting into the signal of San Antonio's WOAI, for instance,
they'd have to reduce their digital signal levels...or reach
an agreement (with appropriate compensation, of course) to remain
analog-only or to go digital-only, which will become a viable
solution once the "All-Channel Act" has put enough
receivers in the marketplace. For some failing stations, the
solution might be to go silent (after being bought out by more
successful stations on the same or adjacent frequencies); for
others, programming might move to one of the new, separate digital
FM services - at the expense, of course, of the stations that
would benefit from the move. We can even imagine some big AM
signals deciding to stay analog to benefit from nighttime skywave
- and paying handsomely to keep their channels free of digital
noise from other stations nearby. In the end, what could result
is an AM dial of perhaps 2500 or 3000 stations, with a noise
floor considerably lower than today: a perfect environment to
then make the permanent switch to all-digital transmission.
- Better enforcement. Under the "NERW Plan,"
a small percentage of the prices paid in these interference-reduction
transactions would become an FCC fee, with the money raised being
dedicated to a more active Enforcement Bureau to police interference
on the AM dial. Just cutting down on all the "daytimers
after dark" would go a long way towards cleaning up the
mess that is medium wave today and make digital more viable.
It all sounds pretty complicated, doesn't it? But I'm not
convinced the alternatives are really that much better. I spent
some time in the U.K. this past spring, where digital radio using
the global Eureka-147 standard has been in place for several
years - and I can report that consumer awareness of digital radio
is nonexistent. Even in the high-end electronics shops, there
were no radios for sale and no apparent interest in them. And
I'm a frequent visitor to Canada, where Eureka-147 has been on
the air for a couple of years in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver
and Windsor, and there too the rollout of radios has been slow
and consumer interest very weak.
And if my plan still sounds too complicated to work, then
perhaps there's another reality to consider: it just may be that
good old analog radio isn't as broken as the industry wants to
believe. That's one reason my plan lacks a mandate to go all-digital
on the AM band; simply reducing the interference level and eliminating
some of the facilities that are no longer viable might revive
analog AM without the added complications of going digital.
So are we looking at VHF TV in 1948, on the edge of explosive
growth that would put it in almost every home in America within
five years? Or are we looking at FM in 1948 or UHF in 1953 -
technologies that lacked a "must-have" factor and lingered
for decades before becoming standard? Or, worse yet, are we looking
at AM stereo or the Elcaset, technologies that might have worked
just fine but weren't in tune with what the market needed?
Your opinions are welcome; we'll share a sampling in an upcoming
NERW.
 *Have you
ordered your Tower Site Calendar 2003 yet? (Yes, the very
calendar that we had the honor of presenting to Paul Harvey himself
during his Rochester visit - and the delightful surprise of hearing
him praise on Monday's broadcast!)
Hear
what Paul Harvey had to say about his visit to Rochester...and
the 2003 Tower Site Calendar! (MP3,
3 min.)
It's no Oreck vacuum, or even Bose Wave radio, but if you
liked last year's calendar, you'll love this one: higher-quality
images (including Providence's WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont;
Buffalo's WBEN; KOMA in Oklahoma City; the legendary WSM, Nashville;
Harvey's flagship WGN, Chicago and many more), more dates in
radio history, a convenient hole for hanging - and we'll even
make sure all the dates fall on the right days!
This year's calendar will go to press in just a week or so,
and if you order now, you'll have yours in hand in plenty of
time for the holidays. And this year, you can order with your
Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American Express by using the handy
link below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW subscription
pledge a little early: support NERW/fybush.com at the $60 level
or higher, and you'll get this lovely calendar for free!
How can you go wrong? (Click here
to visit our Support page, where you can make your NERW contribution
with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
International orders: Calendars are US$18 to Canada,
US$20 to the rest of the world, postage included. Send checks/international
money orders (in US dollars) to the address above, or e-mail
for credit-card ordering information.
*And we're also happy to announce that
our good friends at M Street have released the 11th edition of
the M Street Radio Directory. With the disappearance
of the old Vane Jones log and the declining accuracy of the Broadcasting
Yearbook, the M Street directory is widely regarded as the most
accurate, most comprehensive source of information on the US
and Canadian radio scene - and we're thrilled to be able to offer
it to you at a substantial discount!
The directory includes power, frequency, ownership, key personnel,
formats, ratings and much more information for every radio station
in the U.S. and Canada, and now runs almost 900 pages in an 8.5"
x 11" softcover book. List price is $79 (plus $7 shipping/handling),
but if you order through fybush.com/NorthEast Radio Watch, you
can get this invaluable resource on your shelf for $69 (plus
$7 s/h) - a $10 savings! And your purchase benefits the continued
publication of NERW and Tower Site of the Week, so everybody
wins!
You can order in either of two ways: to order by major credit
card, call 1-800-248-4242, ask for Irene, and tell her
you want the "NorthEast Radio Watch" discount. Or,
send check or money order for $76 ($69 + $7 s/h) to Scott Fybush,
92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester NY 14618. Either way, you'll put
the most trusted, accurate information about the radio industry
in print today on your bookshelf.
*We're back to our regular schedule for a while, now that
we're done with a fantastic visit to Dallas-Fort Worth (thanks
to Wally Wawro, John Callarman, et al!) You'll see some
of those pictures very soon on Tower
Site of the Week...stay tuned and we'll see you back here
next Monday!
NorthEast Radio Watch is made possible by the generous
contributions of our regular readers. If you enjoy NERW, please
click here to
learn how you can help make continued publication possible. NERW
is copyright
2002 by Scott Fybush. |