Radio World

iHeartMedia named Jordan Fasbender executive vice president, general counsel and secretary, a year and a half after she joined the company. She had been deputy general counsel.

She succeeds Paul McNicol, who will retire at the end of next year and meantime will remain as EVP and help with the transition.

She will oversee legal functions for iHeartMedia’s divisions and multiplatform assets, including its 860 radio stations, iHeart Podcast, the iHeartRadio App and other digital assets and the company’s “tentpole” live events like the iHeartRadio Music Festival.

Also she will continue to oversee government affairs, business affairs, compliance, regulatory and governance functions, and be responsible for operations and transactions, securities, intellectual property, litigation and privacy.

Fasbender came to the company in 2019 from Twenty-First Century Fox where she held several leadership legal positions. She was a lead team member on The Walt Disney Company acquisition of the company and the spinoff of Fox Corp. Before that she worked at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.

She will report to Chairman/CEO Bob Pittman and President/COO/CFO Rich Bressler.

The post iHeart Names Fasbender to Top Legal Spot appeared first on Radio World.

The recipient of the Radio World Excellence in Engineering Award for 2020–21 is Jason Ornellas, regional director of engineering for Bonneville International.

Recipients of the award represent the highest ideals of the radio broadcast engineering profession and reflect those ideals through contributions to the industry.

We selected Ornellas as the 17th recipient of this award because of his years of outstanding current and past work for four major broadcast companies; his project expertise, exemplified in recent large studio projects in California including one completed during early weeks of the pandemic; and for his role in streamlining and reimagining workflows at Bonneville.

We also salute the way Jason celebrates the successes of fellow engineers; for his work as part of the NAB Radio Technology Committee’s Next Gen Radio Architecture group and its PPM subgroup; and for his growing national profile including multiple terms on the board of the Society of Broadcast Engineers.

Jason Ornellas is 33, but he already has 15 years of solid engineering work and accomplishments to his credit. And we’re not the only ones who have noticed. Just this fall he was promoted to oversee Bonneville’s chief engineers and IT specialists in its West Coast markets of Seattle, San Francisco and Sacramento, a position in which he works more closely with senior leadership.

Quick learner

Born and raised in San Francisco, Ornellas was not looking for a radio technology career when he went to college. While attending the University of Indianapolis on a baseball scholarship, he took communication courses.

“One of the options was PR, radio, TV or journalism,” he told me. “And who doesn’t like music? So I ended up going for radio and got into it. [But] I realized really early on: I’m a terrible jock. I needed to not be on the air.”

He worked as a broadcast technician at the university’s FM station WICR, where he tinkered with IT, did remotes and maintenance, worked with audio consoles and automation, learned from the chief engineer and helped build his first AoIP studio.

“I really just got fascinated with signal flows and all of the under-the-hood stuff.”

He also had an internship with Clear Channel Radio in San Francisco during that time; and though it was a promotions internship rather than a technical one, it allowed him a foot in the door.

He stayed in touch with the staff in the Bay Area and told them of his interest; and at graduation time, when Clear Channel had an opening for a staff engineer there, Ornellas was ready.

During that two-year stint he managed 10 studios for the San Jose cluster and was responsible for the San Jose Sharks Radio Network.

He learned more about automation systems, facility and studio wiring, and networking. He gained experience with satellite feeds, on-call support, remote vans, webcasting, EAS and other meat-and-potatoes aspects of radio technology.

After two years, he was offered a job across the country as chief engineer of Greater Media’s New Jersey operations, including WDHA(FM) and WMTR(AM) and regional duties at several other stations.

“I’ve been very fortunate that the companies that I’ve worked for are all very well-respected and have always had great leadership from an engineering side,” he said.

He and his wife Ashley wanted to be back in California though, to be closer to family; so in 2014 they headed west again, and he became director of engineering for CBS Radio in Sacramento, overseeing technical aspects of a cluster of four FMs and one AM. During that time he also led the integration and worked on the design for the Jim Rome Studio in Costa Mesa, Calif.

Later, when Entercom merged with CBS Radio, four of the stations were sold to Bonneville — and Ornellas went along with them. He now reports to Scott Jones, Bonneville’s senior vice president for engineering and technology.

Along the way, people who have been particularly helpful in his career so far include Scott Uecker, general manager of WICR in Indianapolis and one of his college professors. “I owe him a lot for the opportunity, to have that kind of program at the University of Indianapolis that allowed this kind of hands-on experience.”

Also influential are David Williams at Clear Channel San Francisco (now iHeart); Milford Smith and Keith Smeal at Greater Media; and “all the legendary engineers at CBS, including Erik Disen and Sam Cappas … And here I am with Bonneville, and hopefully one day, I’m that mentor to someone else.”

Persistence

He’s had a super experience working for the company since he joined it.

“I’ve got a great team of engineers in all the markets. I love what I do. I’m a big believer in pushing the limits, trying to be innovative, and really thinking outside the box,” he said.

“I don’t like the answer, ‘It can’t be done.’ Well, let’s figure that out. Everything can be done. Someone has done something before, so let’s start peeling back the layers of what’s stopping it, and let’s move forward.”

To that end he has led two notable studio projects in the past two years.

The first came about when Entercom sold those Sacramento stations to Bonneville. As a result, studios and some operations of former CBS outlets KHTK(AM) and KNCI(FM) needed to move quickly to a location that was already serving KZZO(FM) and KYMX(FM).

“We left the facility in immaculate shape and successfully made the transition to all under one roof with zero downtime and under budget,” he recalls proudly.

Steve Cottingim, senior vice president and market manager for Bonneville Sacramento, told me, “When Bonneville began operating the Sacramento stations for the Entercom Trust, we had to move all of the stations to one building. Jason spearheaded the entire move and worked with Scott Jones to build out the studios and move all the equipment to get us back up and running with no interruption.

“Jason always rises to the occasion and delivers outstanding results. He is respected and loved by everyone in Sacramento. Jason is an individual who will go through walls to get things done. The engineering team that works with him all work together as a cohesive team because of his leadership.”

With Bonneville colleagues on a helo pad on Farnsworth Peak in Salt Lake City. From left: Shawn Calloway, Aaron Farnham, Jason Ornellas and Brad Russell.

The second project was construction of a new studio location for Bonneville’s four FM stations in the Bay Area, KOIT, KMVQ, KBLX and KUFX .

Scott Jones said, “Jason was our project manager for our move out of San Francisco to our new, state-of-the-art facility in Daly City. Integrating a new AoIP plant built on the WheatNet architecture, our new studios are the crown jewel of Bonneville. His leadership kept us on schedule, even during the shelter-in-place orders in effect due to the global pandemic.”

That project came with another complication, a personal one. Jason and his wife Ashley have three kids under the age of 2; when their twin boys arrived in January this year, the babies needed to spend time in neonatal intensive care.

“The NICU, visiting them every day, as well as making sure San Francisco’s project stayed on task — it was definitely balancing life and work,” he recalled.

“But family’s first. My wife — bless her, because radio engineers’ wives don’t get enough credit. I’ve had to leave her at the table when I’m taking calls on a vacation. But she understands the role of the job. And I love being a dad.”

Consistency

So what’s ahead?

Part of his job is to implement standards that Bonneville wants to roll out for its air chains, systems and workflows. Seeking consistency across its markets, the company is standardizing on important components like Wheatstone AoIP networks, consoles and routing; RCS Zetta Automation; Telos VX studio phone systems; and Mitel Office phone systems.

“Our next big project is taking a step back, looking at our infrastructure. What is critical and high-risk that we need to get our eyes on? We’ve got some older transmitters that we need to get up to par with the solid-state, as well as finishing our rollout of our automation system to markets that we haven’t finished yet. … We’ve got to make sure our transmitters, our tower sites are up to par with how nice our studios look. We also will be transitioning to standardizing our HD transport with GatesAir and the FMXi4g Importer/Exporter unit.”

He expresses excitement about Bonneville’s efforts at streamlining systems and workflows, and how the technology team supports one another — driving to help a colleague in another market, raising a hand to help out or logging into a GUI remotely to help with a problem.

Managing a remote workforce for a radio organization, he points out, multiplies the usual number of technical problems that must be investigated.

“What are their resources like at home, with their network? Is it their network having issues? Is it the VPN having issues? It’s very time-consuming. But with this regional engineering technical infrastructure, we now have engineering teams that [can say], ‘Hey, I can take this one; I’ll deal with this issue; I’ll work on this ticket. Hey, I’m on a transmitter site today.’

Embracing change Installing a Gates Air FAX20 at KZZO(FM)

Beyond his immediate projects, I asked him about important trends in our industry. Ornellas describes himself as “all in” on the connected car.

“The more information, the more data, the more content that we can put in that dashboard,” he said, the better. He also has been a key part of Bonneville stations becoming active with the RadioDNS hybrid radio initiative.

Radio, he notes, remains the most popular source for people in their cars. “Now it’s up to broadcasters and manufacturers to make sure we don’t lose our place there. We have competition; there’s no doubt about it. But we still have that connection that will be hard to beat, as long as we provide the content that our consumers and clients are looking for.”

Meanwhile, within broadcast companies, he expects functions will increasingly become “virtualized” and that more hardware will become obsolete.

He has first-hand experience with this. Ornellas is a member of the NAB Radio Technology Committee’s Next-Generation Radio Architecture working group, and he chairs the PPM subgroup that has been working with manufacturers to get Nielsen Audio PPM encoding built into on-air processors.

As part of that work, he participated in a beta test of PPM encoding inside an Orban AM audio processor; and the working group plans a similar effort for FM and streaming, he said. Perhaps someday processing can even move to the cloud.

In general, he said, “We’re eliminating hardware and we’re integrating more software, to the point where we’re going to have be taking care of a lot more software than hardware. And we can fix a lot more with software than fixing it with a hardware box. … It’s exciting to see.”

The pandemic seems to have accelerated a change in thinking around the industry.

“I think a lot of manufacturers hit that reset button, and it gave everyone that little jolt that we needed as an industry, to really start thinking of the cloud architecture, about WANcasting, using your automation systems to its full capabilities and beyond, not just scratching the surface.”

He’s eager to see how workflows change over three to five years. “Everything will have an IP [connection] by then — if not already, we’re very close to that — but just being able to do one click and let it do multiple steps in multiple markets for us.”

I asked if this trend means big facility jobs like the one he recently completed will be the last of their kind.

“I don’t think the San Francisco project is the last one. However, I do think that they will be designed a lot differently.” The pandemic forced the idea of “broadcasting from home” into the mainstream, and its lessons won’t be forgotten.

“Studios are still going to be studios. I do think the common areas, the performance studios, large break rooms,—those are where you’re going to start seeing square footage not needed. Does every AE and sales manager need an office? Maybe have four or five community desks, not a dedicated seat for everyone.

“There’s going to be a lot of questions. Until we get to the next build, I don’t know the answer. But the facilities aren’t going to get bigger; they’re continuing to get smaller.”

Service

One of the things that impresses about Jason is how active he is at the national level. He is already on his third term as a member of the board of the Society of Broadcast Engineers.

“SBE has done a great job with creating new programs within memberships to really educate and get people more resources to learn and grow, within a reasonable budget and membership cost,” he said.

“We’re trying to stay really relevant and get a younger core to embrace the SBE — and not forget the history of it as well.”

To that point, I reminded him that people have been asking where the next generation of engineers will come from for decades. At 33 years old he is, unfortunately, atypical — a relatively fresh face with potentially decades of career in front of him, a young man who radiates ardent enthusiasm for radio engineering and technology.

Is he, in fact, a unicorn?

“I think I’m definitely one of the few. But they are out there,” he replied. To encourage more, he hopes the industry will expand the way it defines radio engineering. “It’s not just radio. It’s audio. It’s streaming. It’s metadata. It’s IP packets. It’s algorithms of the processors and encoding,” he said.

“There’s so much more to it, and we probably do ourselves a disservice by just thinking of RF. The RF side has gotten a lot easier, with computer monitoring and remote controls and whatnot; the RF isn’t as daunting anymore, especially with solid-state transmitters and not having to worry about tubes and retuning the grid or the cavity.”

Ornellas is heavily involved in his company’s streaming and podcast systems. “Everything I touch has an IP on it. It doesn’t need to be physically touched anymore like in the old days.”

He feels the industry has hurt itself by pushing many engineers out instead of helping them grow into these areas. And he expects the need for this expertise will only grow, given the trend toward virtualization and software.

“We might have an influx of new type of broadcast engineers. They might be very IT-driven, yet understand the signal flow of radio — the microphone, the console to STL, to processor, to transmitter. Everything’s going to be a lot more simple. The job is getting easier because it’s become more streamlined and because of how companies are looking at doing things.”

Positive force

I should add that anyone who has seen Jason’s posts on social media knows that he’ll be the first to cheer on colleagues and to spread positive feelings.

His boss Scott Jones calls Jason Ornellas “a born leader, with a keen technical mind and an innovative approach to broadcasting. He’s a positive force with his encouragement and passion. I am very proud of his leadership in driving excellence for Bonneville.”

Radio World couldn’t agree more.

Jason reminds us that radio is supposed to be fun. “It’s something new every day. You might have a plan, but that plan might get derailed,” he said.

“I like that. I like the unknown. I like fixing things and repairing things, playing with new equipment, installing it, testing, doing the R&D. There’s just so much that falls into engineering that it’s never a dull moment.

“And I love what I do.”

Comment on this or any article. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

HONOR ROLL

Recipients of the Radio World Excellence in Engineering Award represent the highest ideals of the U.S. radio broadcast engineering profession and reflect those ideals through contributions to the industry. (Read profiles of other recent recipients.)

2020-21 Jason Ornellas

2019-20 Dave Kolesar

2018-19 Russ Mundschenk

2017-18 Larry Wilkins

2016-17 Michael Cooney

2015 David H. Layer

2014 Wayne Pecena

2013 Marty Garrison

2012 Paul Brenner

2011 Barry Thomas

2010 Milford Smith

2009 Gary Kline

2008 Jeff Littlejohn

2007 Clay Freinwald

2006 John Lyons

2005 Mike Starling

2004 Andy Andreson

 

The post Jason Ornellas Makes His Mark appeared first on Radio World.

The National Association of Broadcasters is highlighting a new study about the challenges and opportunities for media as they cover the story of vaccines being deployed to fight COVID-19.

NAB and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute commissioned the survey, which was conducted by SmithGeiger.

They found that “a strong majority of Americans are eager for a COVID-19 vaccine and interested in news coverage that provides expert testimony on the safety and efficacy of vaccination.”

They said a desire to get back to normal is the biggest motivator for getting vaccinated and that “media organizations could encourage vaccinations by focusing on messages regarding reducing loss of life and helping others.”

Respondents said local news, via TV, radio and print, are their most reliable source of information.

“The information respondents want most centers on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. The most important voices to these respondents are those of their own doctors and nurses (88%) followed by experts at federal, state and local health agencies (87%), their own pharmacist (82%) and friends and family (78%),” the NAB and RJI said in a summary of the research.

“The survey finds the most impactful local news reporting would be an investigation into the safety/effectiveness of a vaccine or recommendations focused on wearing masks, with 58% of respondents saying this type of coverage would lead them to trust that news organization more.”

They said respondents want stories that “make recommendations based on detailed reporting,” to facilitate personal health decisions, rather than stories that offer information without recommendations or personal stories from journalists about the pandemic.

“They express a preference for coverage that focuses on ‘just the facts,’” according to the press release.

“Respondents prefer messaging that highlights concern for others, such as, ‘Don’t put your family through the pain of losing you…’ and, ‘Protect yourself, protect your neighbors’. In both cases, roughly half of all respondents say they are more likely to get vaccinated as a result of seeing that message, versus just 16% who are less likely.”

Six out of 10 respondents intend to get a vaccine once it is available to them, with 13% of respondents saying they “definitely will not” get vaccinated.

Among other findings, African Americans are “significantly more worried” than the broader public about the vaccine making people sick, and “significantly less confident” that it has been adequately tested. (Read the full press release including other findings.)

NAB and RJI will put together a “messaging toolkit” to be available early next year to help with local and regional vaccine education communications. It will be in English and Spanish and shared with local radio and television stations, journalists and partner groups.

 

The post People Want “Just the Facts” in Vaccine Coverage appeared first on Radio World.

The author of this commentary is director, business development for CommScope.

As the auction for the much-coveted C-Band spectrum kicks off, we are another step into the complicated process to relocate or repack C-Band FSS earth stations.

While the process has been very well explained, it’s worth taking a little more time to discuss some more background and some of the impacts.

Let’s start off by highlighting the new band plan illustrated below in Fig.1.

Fig. 1: 3.7 GHz Service Band Plan

The Federal Communications Commission has reallocated the lower 280 MHz of the band to be auctioned for new 5G uses and renamed it the 3.7 GHz Service.

This means that all the earth stations in the 3.7–4.0 GHz portion of the band will have to be repacked, or relocated, into the upper 200 MHz (4.0–4.2 GHz). The FCC also allowed for a 20 MHz guard band between the new 5G entrants and the relocated earth stations.

Repacking will be accomplished in two phases:

• Phase I – Earth stations in the lower 100 MHz of the band (3.7–3.8 GHz) must be repacked by December 5, 2021.
• Phase II – Remaining earth stations must be repacked by December 5, 2023.

Based on the FCC’s latest list of incumbent earth stations, there are close to 16,000 as shown in Fig. 2 seen farther below. Intel has put these into the following categories:

Broadcast, Religious, Radio, Data: 9% Cable: 9% LDS: 19% Other: 63%

The majority of these earth stations are capable of receiving across the entire 3.7–4.2 GHz band. In addition, since these earth stations typically receive from several satellites, they are configured to operate across the full satellite arc. Thus, the challenge is compressing earth stations into 200 MHz from 500 MHz, possibly configuring to receive from fewer satellites and in some cases, actual physical relocation.

The effect of this moving or compression on the earth stations will be mostly related to modification of existing equipment including:

• Limiting their receive band to the 4.0–4.2 GHz range
• Re-orientation of antennas to different satellites as needed
• Possible filtering required to mitigate interference
• Possible physical relocation if new siting is required or desired

The main challenge for earth station licensees will be managing the logistics and timing required to make the changes needed to their respective systems.

Fortunately, earth station operators don’t necessarily have to foot the bill for this on their own.

The FCC proceeding for this band clearing / repurposing / auctioning is complex, but it affords earth station operators the opportunity to have repacking or relocation costs covered by the new 3.7 GHz Service entrants.

Fig. 2: Earth Stations and Phase 1/2 Market Areas

In late July, the FCC issued a Public Notice (DA 20-802) announcing publication of its “3.7 GHz Transition Final Cost Category Schedule Of Potential Expenses And Estimated Costs.” This catalog describes the potential expenses and estimated costs that incumbent earth station operators may incur as a result of the repacking or relocation.

The FCC worked with RKF Engineering Solutions LLC to develop the catalog. It includes any necessary changes that will allow the earth stations to receive C-Band services throughout the transition — and after the applicable relocation deadline once satellite operators have relocated their services into the upper portion of the band.

The FCC has noted that it is likely most earth stations that are repacking will require filtering to prevent interference from new 5G users operating below 3980 MHz. It is important to note that this conclusion is supported by a multi-stakeholder group representing a diverse collection of many different interested companies and organizations who assembled to study terrestrial-satellite coexistence during and after the transition.

The group (called Technical Working Group 1, “TWG-1”) created a best practices report concluding that: “3.7 GHz Service operators and earth station operators should work cooperatively to avoid interference problems during the network design stage and continue to work cooperatively to resolve interference problems that may arise.”

Members of the TWG discussed possible coordination between new 3.7 GHz Service operators and incumbent earth station operators — yet could not come to a conclusion on how to establish and manage a coordination process. Earth station operators may wish to keep track of the 3.7 GHz Service auction results and possibly contact auction winners in your area, particularly those operating in the 3.9–3.98 GHz portion of the band.

As mentioned, this is one of the most complex proceedings the FCC has undertaken, similar to the TV station repacking where all the TV stations above channel 38 were repacked into channels 2-31 to make way for new wireless operators.

The good news is that this completed with few major issues, other than taking a little longer than expected. So, as we continue stepping through this process, it’s helpful knowing this isn’t the first time. As well, there is plenty of information and help available to smooth the transition.

The post Repacking C-Band Earth Stations appeared first on Radio World.

Here’s your 2021 Radio World Source Book & Directory, a cross-indexed guide to the manufacturers and suppliers of technology products and services for the global radio broadcast industry and digital audio marketplace.

This free reference includes an alphabetical list of industry companies with their contact information, as well as a cross-index that tells you which companies offer which kinds of products. Also learn about spotlighted new products from our sponsors who make this directory possible.

Read it here.

 

The post Radio World’s 2021 Source Book & Directory appeared first on Radio World.

I read the article “Community Stations Share COVID Stories” and thought you might like our perspective from New Zealand.

When the COVID virus struck here in New Zealand, the government and health authorities were very quick to act.

Everyone in New Zealand was put in Level 4 lockdown immediately within 24 hours of the first cases being identified. Stay at home, work at home, no visits, no travel.

Studio at Radio Woodville

Everyone had to stay in their bubble except for essential services. Only supermarkets, hospitals and radio and TV were allowed to operate under very strict rules. Community stations like our Radio Woodville were allowed only two people on station.

Hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes were abundant. The outside door was closed and locked. Anyone who was sick with no matter what stayed away. “Alph,” our automation computer, played on 24/7.

The community council had emailed me and asked we broadcast public health and safety messages if needed and requested by them. We were to stay positive and stay in touch with the community.

That’s how it was for four weeks of Level 4 and three weeks of Level 3. Staying isolated in bubbles was how it was. No going out to work and no school. Those who were nonessential workers were only allowed off their properties to shop for food and walk for exercise but maintaining a strict 2 meter social distancing.

Supermarkets were a nightmare because only 10 people were allowed in at a time, queues were long and delays were longer. Once in Level 2 social distancing was still required. The public had to keep a contact register whereever they went. We did this in our station logbook. Under this level the commercial world was starting to get back to normal.

We are not free of COVID yet, however all the cases are in managed isolation. This bug is sneaky. We got cases from people working in a cool stores unpacking imported meat. Again by quick action and tracing the source was identified and isolated.

We have a very resilient audio and transmitter chain and had no technical issues. The power supply also carried on without any outages.

Eric Bodell, QSM, is station manager of Radio Woodville.

The post Letter: Broadcasting From in the Bubble appeared first on Radio World.

Christopher Tobin. Courtesy “This Week in Radio Tech”

Colleagues are mourning the sudden death this weekend of radio engineer Chris Tobin.

He suffered a heart attack during HVAC project work for his employer WBGO in Newark, N.J., on Saturday, according to the station’s Interim President/CEO Robert Ottenhoff.

Tobin had been chief engineer of WBGO and this year was promoted to chief technology officer.

Ottenhoff described Tobin as not only a “spectacular engineer” with “amazing technical and engineering expertise, creative and innovative,” but also as a positive presence in the workplace.

“Optimistic and friendly. Everyone loved Chris, he did so much for so many people,” Otenhoff said.

Tobin also was known in the engineering community for his work as co-host for 11 years of the online program “This Week in Radio Tech,” or TWiRT. Show host Kirk Harnack posted a note on social media calling it “devastating news.”

Tobin was also former president of Content Creator Solutions, according to his LinkedIn page.

 

The post Chris Tobin Dies, Was WBGO Engineer appeared first on Radio World.

Dec. 21 is a big day for digital radio in Europe. All radios in new cars and other passenger vehicles must be capable of receiving digital terrestrial radio.

That stipulation is part of the European Electronic Communications Code, and digital radio proponents have been looking forward to it.

WorldDAB, which has said that DAB is “firmly established as the core future platform for radio in Europe,” welcomed the milestone date.

“Despite the impact of Covid-19, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Denmark have already introduced laws mandating digital terrestrial radio in cars and other countries are expected to follow shortly,” the organization stated.

“In the first half of 2020, over 50% of new cars sold in Europe included DAB+ as standard — a number that is expected to reach 100% by the end of 2021 as DAB+ adoption continues to grow across Europe.” It has a factsheet about the EECC rule.

Meanwhile the proponents of the Digital Radio Mondiale platform have said they too welcomed the EECC initiative because it “serves as a good example to all the countries and administrations around the world adopting or considering the rollout of DRM technology.”

 

The post WorldDAB Welcomes EECC Milestone Date appeared first on Radio World.

The tools of radio newsgathering have evolved constantly. Shown in 1989, British Conservative politician Chris Patten does a radio interview in London. Two portable recorders are visible. (Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Digging through a cabinet one day at my first radio news job at WOSH in Oshkosh, Wis., I discovered a Uher portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. News Director Bud McBain told me the German-made recorder had been standard gear for an earlier generation of radio news reporters.

That exotic Uher stayed in the back of my mind for years. I was curious to know more about how it fit into the history of radio news.

When my radio news career began in the early 1970s reporters were already depending on cassette machines for field reporting. The Sony TC-110 was ideal for broadcast news and used widely.

In those days, just about every commercial radio station had its own news department. At WOSH, and the other stations where I worked for the next decade, we covered the legislature, city council, school board, county board, courts and every local news conference we could get to.

We used alligator clip leads to tap our recorders into telephone handsets for feeding our live and recorded reports from the field to the newsroom. Usually our reports included actualities from newsmakers, sometimes they were ROSRs — radio on-scene reports — that used ambient sound in the background.

Back at the station the news anchor could go live at any time and speak to a reporter or newsmaker anywhere in the world, as long as they were near a telephone.

One day I heard a report on the police scanner that snow had caved in the roof of a local grocery story. With just minutes to my next newscast I consulted the city directory and called the barber shop across the street to record an eyewitness report.

Our tape-recorded audio cuts conveyed a sense of immediacy about news events every time we played them on the air.

Eventually FCC deregulation and radio consolidation removed the incentive for every station to do news, and a large percentage of stations freed themselves from that obligation.

I left my last full-time radio news job a decade and a half ago but I couldn’t forget that snazzy Uher recorder in the WOSH news cabinet. How did local radio news become the powerful medium that I discovered when I graduated from college and became a reporter?

Gathering stories

The stories of how news figured in radio’s beginnings in the 1920s, and how radio networks were created so that the world could be informed of the momentous events of the late 1930s and the 1940s, are well told in authoritative sources such as Erik Barnouw’s “A History of Broadcasting in the United States” trilogy and Ed Bliss’s “Now the News.”

But these sources typically shift focus to television when they get to the 1950s. They fail to tell the story of what I would call The Golden Era of Local Radio News.

My search for books on the history of radio news after the development of television was fruitless. I had to go to other sources: former supervisors and their colleagues who were all a decade or two older than me and who had lived through this transitional period.

Radio news in the first half of the twentieth century was almost always live, for two basic reasons. The networks had policies against using recorded audio, and the available recording technology was bulky and unreliable. The news of that day was reported through wire copy and occasional live special event coverage. Wire recorders existed but they were not user-friendly.

The first major innovation that reshaped radio news was the magnetic tape recorder, which made recorded events sound as if they were live. German engineers played an important role it its development, and the technology helped trick the Allies during World War II. Captured models were spirited back to the U.S. right after the war ended. Magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorders began to be used in radio stations in the 1950s.

Wayne Corey was with WBCH in Hastings, Mich., when the station acquired two state-of-the-art, portable Ampex recorders in the early 1960s. They were in two big suitcases and were used primarily in the main control room. They could also be deployed for special events.

“I took one of them out to tape football games and occasionally set one up at a city council meeting,” he said. “The things we taped were rebroadcast in long segments.”

At about the same time Jim Orr was at KCRG radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He remembered noticing news sound bites, or actualities, starting to appear in ABC network newscasts in the early 1960s.

“Portable tape recorders were never used by newsmen at that station through 1964, possibly because the equipment wasn’t out there to any degree; it just wasn’t being done,” he said.

It took two more major technical innovations to complete the recorded audio revolution in radio news. The audio tape cartridge was introduced in 1959, and the tape cassette was introduced in 1963.

The tape cartridge used a tape loop of varying standard lengths to record commercials, news actualities, and other programming elements. After each play the cart would loop back to the beginning and stop. To be able to pop a cart in a player and press the start button was a great advancement.

“Even when properly cued on a rack-mounted reel-to-reel machine with remote start/stop switch right next to the mike button, there was always a risk of a wow sound as the reel to reel machine achieved full playback speed,” Orr said.

“The cart machine changed all that. Plus, you could have three or four cuts in the same newscast which would have otherwise required cueing and using four different reel-to-reel decks.”

Bill Vancil, a veteran programmer of radio stations in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, said stations in the early 1960s typically used small reels (3 to 5 inches in diameter). “They had a wall of pegs with these little tapes that they would quickly play, rewind, and replace just as they used cart machines later.”

Putting news stories on the air with actualities using tape cartridges was becoming common in 1966, when Orr arrived at KSTT in Davenport, Iowa, to be a field reporter and news anchor. Cassette recorders were available at this time, but the audio quality was deemed not yet equal to the larger tape format. Orr and other news reporters still preferred using portable reel-to-reel recorders, that by this time had shrunk to the size of a dictionary.

That’s when the Uher entered the story. Dick Record, a former news reporter at WISM in Madison, Wis., and then general manager of WIZM in La Crosse, remembers his Uher well.

“It was smaller and easier to carry and operate. It used a 5-inch reel but had several speeds including, I believe, 15/16ths inches per second. That meant I could tape a whole county board or city council meeting and get audio cuts for air use.”

Music and news

The technology of the 1960s allowed for more aggressive radio news coverage at the local level. Record believes it was actually the competitive radio environment that drove the change.

In earlier decades, when network entertainment ruled radio, listeners tuned in to hear their favorite shows rather than a particular radio station. After network entertainment jumped to television, innovative radio programmers seized on the idea of jukebox-style music programming. The Top 40 format arrived to revive radio in the mid-1950s.

When another decade had gone by, there were a lot of Top 40 radio stations. Many were searching for programming distinctions to help them attract larger audiences. They discovered that a station that had reporters on the street, covering local news events, had a promotional advantage. Unlike the early days of radio, newscasts were now heard hourly, even more frequently during rush hour.

Vancil recalled that this was a time when powerhouse Top 40 stations successfully combined fast-paced hourly newscasts with rock and roll music and personality announcers. They promoted news heavily, and in many markets they became a more popular news source than the traditional full-service stations.

He cited examples such as WISM vs. WIBA in Madison; KSTT vs. WOC in Davenport; KIOA vs. WHO in Des Moines; WLS vs. WGN in Chicago and WMCA vs. WNBC in New York City.

The 1960s and ’70s was an exciting time to be a radio news reporter. Society was going through major changes and there was lots of news to report. There were hundreds of radio news jobs across the country, with many stations in each market competing to have the best news coverage.

Since then the technology has evolved in other directions thanks to digital platforms, smartphones and the internet. Today there’s still radio news but it’s primarily confined to a much smaller number of all-news, news/talk and public radio stations.

However, there are thousands of men and women who share the memories of reporting news on the radio during the highly competitive Golden Era of Local Radio News.

Gordon Govier reported on news in Wisconsin, Ill., and Nebraska during his 30-year radio career. He produces a self-syndicated weekly radio program/podcast called “The Book & The Spade,” which covers biblical archaeology and can be heard at radioscribe.com.

 

The post The Golden Era of Local Radio News appeared first on Radio World.

Gary Fisher

The author is president/partner at Equity Communications, a radio ownership group in southern New Jersey.

It was a brisk chilly April 15 morning on the Black Horse Pike in West Atlantic City.

It should have been the start of another bustling summer season at the Jersey shore; but we had just finished chatting with the mailman, who’d left without delivering any checks for the fifth straight day. (He did leave everyone else’s mail with Equity, since no other businesses in our five-story office building were open.)

This was exactly one month into what would become the depths of the pandemic.

No emails, no voice mails and 50% of Equity’s second quarter bookings had been cancelled in the previous 30 days.

Sales visits and phone calls were out of the question. No salespeople to make them, no clients to accept them. No local businesses planning their start-of-season promotions.

Phillies baseball, usually a $250,000+ revenue contributor for Equity, had been postponed indefinitely. The WZXL Beer Fest and Music Festival, a $100,000 event marketing revenue generator, was cancelled.

It was nuclear winter in April.

Biblical

My partner Steve Gormley and I formed Equity Communications in 1996 to hold nine radio stations and, more recently, a digital advertising and streaming business.

We’d been through 9/11, the 2006 financial crisis, Hurricane Sandy, the collapse of the local casino industry and the digital disruption of traditional media. But the pandemic and the plunge it created in revenues were like nothing we had ever seen. We’d spent 24 years building this company; almost half of it disappeared overnight. Earlier disruptions were rounding errors by comparison.

In March everything suddenly stopped. No cars on the road to listen to radio. No car dealers or casinos open to buy ads. No one at work to write checks for the ads we had already run.

The standstill was downright biblical. And Equity of course was not alone in that.

We had to take stock of everything we’d been doing for 24 years and put it through a COVID lens. Our company was forced to cut expenses, downsize staff, reduce salaries, reduce employee benefits, sell off assets and re-engineer its sales, programming and administrative departments.

Veteran AEs and DJs left, new digital salespeople emerged, hard personnel decisions had to be made. Legacy operations strategies and practices with diminishing effect were scrapped, new ones instituted. We listened harder to our clients and audiences to set our direction.

We were forced to get slimmer and faster. For Equity it was a complete reset.

Compressed changes

In a weird way we’d been prepared for this new economic reality. Our company had been growing its streaming audiences via websites and mobile apps, and had increased revenues five-fold by staffing up our highly successful in-house digital sales division.

The pandemic accelerated forces that had already been in play in advertising, delivering years of change in just a few short months.

From a sales point of view, everyone was thrust out of their comfort zones. From an expense control viewpoint, we stopped doing stupid, silly and fun stuff. From an operations point of view things, we looked at practices we’d deemed mission-critical and said, “Why in the world are we doing this?” From a content point of view, streaming music and digital programming, once thought of as an existential threat to over-the-air radio media, became our saviors.

We felt we had reinvent the company or we might not have one left. It was an opportunity to fast-forward modernization.

We took the approach that the pandemic didn’t happen to us, it may have happened for us. The worst crisis we had ever seen presented innumerable opportunities. We became the epitome of a modern media company.

We were at a bit of a disadvantage compared to local competitors like Comcast, Townsquare and the Atlantic City Press; we did not have the backing or liquidity of a larger corporation. On the other hand we had no debt or debt service to worry about.

We were also fortunate that Equity had an amazing core of a dozen or so employees who have showed up every day to keep the doors open. Staggered hours, skeleton staffing, physical distancing, separation, sanitation, ventilation, mitigation, lots of cleaning and masking kept us going.

An image from the Equity Communications media kit

These staff members, most of whom have been with us for well over 15 years, are the real architects of our reset — our essential workers.

Along the way Equity learned valuable lessons about dealing with adversity and with COVID. As cases start spiking again, our pivot may offer useful lessons to local businesses that have made it this far but may struggle to get through a tough winter.

Coming back

We’ve been telling our clients: We’re still here, we’re still big and popular, and now we’re more affordable than ever. Staying big, digital, friendly, local and cheap is our way through this.

We’re getting to the other side and are now seeing sequential improvement month after month. Our third quarter revenues improved by 66% over our second quarter, mirroring the recovery seen in other media companies. Actual forward pacing has returned for the fourth quarter as I write.

I’m encouraged that many banks, law firms, health care providers, car dealers, restaurants and casinos are calling staffs back to work. That should be a precursor to advertising and spending eventually coming back.

I’m sure most of the clients we’re Zooming with are still in their sweat pants and underwear; but it seems like more and more staffs are drifting back to work each week.

We don’t know what the coming quarters hold but we’re doing OK and our doors are open. We’re still here and we’ll be here.

I’m worried about projections that say one out of five small businesses will close this winter. But I hope after all our “eLectile dysfunction” calms down, there will be another round of stimulus for our clients. The real recovery will begin later in 2021 when everyone feels safe and people can eat in restaurants, hang out in bars and shop in stores without a concern.

When the exciting new vaccines and therapeutics are served up, combined with a side order of herd immunity, I think our local radio and digital will really take off. And with our new lean-mean-machine expense structure we should see actual profit and cash flow again.

We’re not bulletproof; but I feel we’ve toughened ourselves against second and third waves and associated shutdowns. Likewise I feel we’ll be ready to pounce on any real recovery the minute it starts. We’re like that Timex watch from those John Cameron Swayze TV commercials from 50 years ago. We took a licking but we’re still ticking.

Comment on this or any article. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post How We Took on the Pandemic, and Won appeared first on Radio World.

Organizers of World College Radio Day saluted 10 stations in six countries that made special efforts for the event this year.

WCRD announced recipients of the “Bret Michaels’ Spirit of College Radio Awards” recognizing efforts made by college stations on Oct. 2.

The award was named this year for Bret Michaels, singer-songwriter, entrepreneur and front man for the band Poison. He is also a diabetic and survivor of a brain hemorrhage, and is active in a number of causes and charitable efforts.

He took part in a Q&A with students and donated $10,000 through his Life Rocks Foundation.

The 10 winners, listed below, were announced by Anabella Poland, president of College Radio Day 2020, and Eva Gustavfsson, president of World College Radio Day. They said a total of 570 stations in 43 countries participated in the day.

• Aggie Radio 92.3 KBLU-LP at Utah State University (USA)
• K103 Gothenburg Student Radio at University of Gothenburg/ Chalmers University (Sweden)
• KRSC-FM at Rogers State University (USA)
• MavRadio.fm at University of Nebraska-Omaha (USA)
• RADIO-E at Universidad de Costa Rica (Costa Rica)
• Radio 6023 at Università del Piemonte Orientale (Italy)
• Radio Katipunan 87.9 FM at Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines)
• The Wolf Internet Radio at University of West Georgia (USA)
• UST Tiger Radio at University of Santo Tomas (Philippines)
• Webradio EAP at Hellenic Open University (Greece)

The College Radio Foundation supports student radio including online, cable, carrier current, FM and AM outlets.

The post World College Radio Day Salutes 10 Stations appeared first on Radio World.

The recently published book “Radio’s Second Century: Past, Present and Future Perspectives” is an academic survey of our industry, a collection of essays, statistics, graphs and antidotes edited by author and professor John Allen Hendricks that features contributions from scholars in media and journalism.

Hendricks is department chair and professor of mass communication at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and author or editor of 11 books.

This one is a collection that belongs on the shelf labeled “media studies.”

Promotional information for the book notes that as the industry enters its second century, it continues to be a dominant mass medium even in the face of competition.

“Lasting influences such as on-air personalities, audience behavior, fan relationships and localism are analyzed [in the book], as well as contemporary issues including social and digital media,” it states.

“Other essays examine the regulatory concerns that continue to exist for public radio, commercial radio and community radio, and discuss the hindrances and challenges posed by government regulation with an emphasis on both American and international perspectives. Radio’s impact on cultural hegemony through creative programming content in the areas of religion, ethnic inclusivity and gender parity is also explored.”

Michael Brown writes in the forward that the book “points to a diverse and open field for those who wish to study radio and those who have an interest in learning what we know about the technology, programming, social issues and international use of radio.”

Academic text John Allen Hendricks

To give you a further idea of its content mix, Part I is titled “Contemporary Radio: Social and Digital Media.”

This section includes discussions about listening “from AM to FM to XM, and beyond”; audience research and web features in radio; the “para-social” nature of podcasting; and social media analytics.

Part 2 explores “Programming Matters: Localism, Personalities and Audiences.” Chapters focus on “the shrinking electronic town square” and localism in talk radio; the fandom of Howard Stern; lessons from the “War of the Worlds” broadcast; and how to encourage creative programming.

Part 3, “Social Issues,” includes chapters on religion in radio, NPR’s role in America and “resisting podcasting’s sonic whiteness,” while Part 4 takes on international perspectives including community/campus radio in Canada, the dominance of public radio in podcasting and the role of women in radio.

Among discussions I found interesting are ones focusing on radio as “theater of the mind”; how NPR aspires to create “driveway moments” through storytelling; how radio and podcast producers use sound to create a feeling of intimacy and connection; and how using headphones changes the listening experience.

The book would be an excellent read for a college student pursuing a degree in communications or journalism and needing insight into the radio industry. It’s also suitable for those who like to think hard about the roles that radio and audio play in our culture and how people interact with them.

This isn’t a book for those who want to know how to sell more radio spots or learn about the next technology platform that will change our industry. In general I found that it does not offer much in the way of definitive direction and improvement; a reader is left to conclude what direction radio should take in the next century. The stats and graphs can get repetitive, causing one to want to skim ahead.

However a strength of the book is its exploration of podcasting. It breaks down the success and appeal of the new medium and why it has such dominance with radio listeners:

I enjoyed passages about podcasting as a “converged medium” that brings together audio, the web and portable media devices, as well as a disruptive technology that has forced some in radio to reconsider established practices. I think the book is spot-on in its conclusion that podcasting will continue to dominate and be a strong substitute for listeners seeking news, information and entertainment.

The book is published by Rutgers University Press and retails for $39.95 in its paperback version.

The author is a project engineer at Lawo North America.

The post Book Takes Scholarly Look at Radio appeared first on Radio World.

We’ve received good feedback and a couple of questions regarding Wayne Eckert’s submission on grounding wooden poles used to support STL antennas, described in the Workbench column in the Nov. 25 issue. (Like all recent issues of Radio World, you can access it online at radioworld.com/digital-editions.)

You’ll recall that Wayne is an engineer with the Rural Florida Communications Cooperative, so he’s had a bit of experience in bonding and grounding to reduce lightning damage.

Fig. 1: Wayne’s drawing of a properly grounded pole for supporting an STL antenna.

He told us last time about an AT&T document “Grounding and Bonding for Network Facilities.” It’s on the website https://ebiznet.att.com/sbcnebs/.  Much of the document is applicable to broadcast sites and studios.

Fig. 1 is Wayne’s diagram detailing the bonding of an STL antenna to a down ground. Note that the bond sweeps down from the antenna to the grounding conductor.

In answer to the first question we got, yes, the down ground wire does extend above the pole by about 6 inches to a foot. This “pigtail” conductor then is sticking up from the pole.

The down ground cable is typically #6 hard-drawn copper, solid or stranded. Yes, all pole attachments should be connected to the down ground cable using silver solder and short sections of the same #6 gauge cable.

These short grounding cables, attached to the mounted structures can be connected to the down ground using a C-Tap crimp lug (Fig. 2). If the installer doesn’t have crimping tools and dies, the connection can be made with silver solder.

Fig. 2: You can crimp connections to the down conductor using a C-Tap and lug.

Silver solder should be used for all RF and grounding connections — 60/40 tin/lead solder will melt under the heat of a lightning strike given that its melting point is only 360 degrees Fahrenheit. Silver solder’s melting point is above 1,000 degrees.

Strong adhesive

You may have gone to the dentist and received a filling made of a composite resin, a mixture of plastic and glass or quartz. It’s applied in layers, with each layer cured using an ultraviolet light.

A similar liquid plastic adhesive that uses UV light is available for consumer use. Bondic is ultra-strong and unlike super glues is not messy.

Fig. 3: An image from a promotional video for Bondic. The adhesive works on nearly everything and doesn’t “stick” until it’s cured by UV light.

Each Bondic kit includes a special dual-purpose pen. One end dispenses the liquid plastic, the other consists of a UV LED used to cure the bonding material. So this is not really a glue but rather a liquid plastic which, when activated by the UV light, welds the pieces together.

The bond is waterproof, and (should you wish to repair a coffee cup handle) it’s dishwasher safe. Another plus: Unlike glues that eventually dry out in the tube, Bondic stays wet until it is cured by the UV light.

Bondic can be used not only to bond two items but to fill in chips or cracks in metal, wood, plastic, ceramic or glass. One typical use is to repair broken insulation on a smartphone charging cable.

In addition to the starter kit, refill tubes of the Bondic liquid are available. Search Bondic on Amazon or visit getbondic.io.

Guy insulators

Professional Engineer Charles “Buc” Fitch writes that he was quite surprised to find out that Preformed Products, the folks who make all those guy wire grips and associated mounts for towers, also manufactures fiberglass guy wire insulators. Buc says they offer a full line of ceramic insulators as well as fiberglass guy strain insulators. Visit www.preformed.com.

Buc points out the importance of using isolating guy wires with these fiberglass extensions near an FM antenna, as the steel guys can cause FM signal distortion.in nearfield positions. Visit the Preformed site, you’ll be amazed at their varied products.

Classic mic repair

Dan Slentz is always finding entertaining or educational subjects on the web and often shares with Workbench readers. His latest submission is both entertaining and educational.

Fig. 4: A video on YouTube profiles Clarence Kane, a former RCA employee who is still servicing microphones.

Clarence Kane is the owner of ENAK Microphone Repair (ENAK is Kane spelled backward!). He was born in 1926 and got interested in electronics while in the service. Afterwards he attended the Radio Electronics Institute and went to work at RCA, where he worked for 33 years, mostly repairing microphones.

Radio World’s James O’Neal wrote about him in Radio World in 2010. His company continues that service, and he’s the last remaining RCA employee still servicing microphones.

Dan points us to this 12-minute mini documentary video about him on YouTube.

John Bisset has spent more than 50 years in broadcasting and recently began his 31st year writing Workbench. He handles western U.S. radio sales for the Telos Alliance. He holds CPBE certification with the Society of Broadcast Engineers. He is also a past recipient of the SBE’s Educator of the Year Award.

Workbench submissions are encouraged, qualify for SBE Recertification and can be emailed to johnpbisset@gmail.com.

The post Workbench: More on the STL Support Pole appeared first on Radio World.

Have you ever wondered how many ads you should be airing in a certain week in order to reach your audience effectively? The short answer is, “it depends on what your goals are.”

Cumulus Media/Westwood One and the Radio Advertising Bureau partnered to offer some specific guidelines for radio stations. The goal was to reach  a range of listeners, ranging from a 34% reach to a 78% reach of a station’s audience, with four separate campaign goals defined as very light, light, medium and heavy.

The very light and light schedules were ideal for advertisers who want a maintenance campaign with modest levels of reach and frequency. A medium schedule is a good fit for a general sales event or promotional campaign with modest levels of reach and frequency. A heavy schedule is best for a major sales event or a product launch where many listeners are reached very frequently.

Those four approaches offer stations guidance as to how much and how often an audience is reached, wrote Pierre Bouvard, chief insights officer at Cumulus Media/Westwood One, in a blog post.

The study revealed that turnover is a key factor. Turnover is calculated by dividing a radio station’s cume (the number of different people reached by a station in a week) by its average quarter-hour audience. The greater the turnover, the more ads needed to reach an audience in a typical quarter hour. Stations with high turnovers have lower time spent listening while stations with lower turnovers have higher time spent listening.

“There’s no such thing as good or bad turnover,” Bouvard wrote. “You just need to know what it is. Turnover is a helpful ratio to understand how many commercials, promos or song spins are needed to reach a station’s audience.”

To determine the ads needed for a very light schedule, for example, take half the turn over. For a medium schedule, double the turnover.

The report also offered suggestions for different radio formats. For a top 40 station, for example, a station would need to air 15 ads, promos of song spins per week to reach 34% of its audience. To reach 78% of its audience, a station would need to air 103 ads.

The study also found that although agencies and FM/AM radio sellers agree on the number of ads needed for light schedules, they typically underestimate the number of ads needed for medium or heavy campaigns.

A companion study determined what kinds of campaigns are actually being run across the country. Cumulus Media conducted a Media Monitors analysis of AM/FM radio advertising in 99 markets during a week. The report found that during the first week of August 2020, 182,425 commercials were run on 1,685 monitoring radio stations in 99 markets. The study assigned one of the four types of schedules — very light, light, medium and heavy — in those 99 markets.

The report found that the vast majority of weekly radio station campaigns (73%) are very light, meaning they are reaching only one-third of a station’s audience. Only 2% of radio campaigns were considered heavy while 4% were considered medium intensity and 66% were considered medium.

It appears that the underestimation of the number of ads needed for medium and heavy schedules is the reason why there are so few medium/heavy campaigns, Bouvard said, even though heavy campaigns are an important strategy for advertisers.

[Read: Bouvard: More People Are “Ready to Go”]

One of the best practices as recommended by the study is that radio stations run heavy schedules of AM/FM radio ads if these advertisers are looking to generate significant impact. A previous study conducted by the National Association of Broadcasters and Coleman Insights found that advertisers who run heavy schedules rate the campaigns as excellent far more often than those running different campaigns.

The bottom line: set the right expectations with your advertisers. “Don’t expect grand opening results from a light weekly campaign,” Bouvard wrote.

Instead, press your advertisers to examine their existing plan to see if the schedule intensity matches desired results. The strategy that answers an advertiser’s concern about cost of medium- and heavy-intensity ads is two-fold: run shorter ads and run ads at all day and time periods, since ad costs for nights/weekends generally run about half of prime-time hours.

Remember, Bouvard wrote: advertising is not one-size-fits-all. “Understanding the campaign goal is crucial to determining a correct AM/FM radio plan strategy and as important as the message itself,” he wrote. “While the number of occurrences/spots needed for various campaign goals might be underestimated, the use of these tools can serve as guidelines to better optimize the AM/FM radio planning and buying process.”

 

The post Determining How Many Ads a Station Needs to Run to Get Results appeared first on Radio World.

Eliminating injuries and fatalities in tower work is the aim of a new partnership of OSHA, NATE and the FCC.

 “The goal of the three-year partnership is to eliminate worker injuries and fatalities while performing wireless and telecommunications, tower erection and maintenance operations,” they said in an announcement.

“The partnership will address some of the industry’s frequently encountered hazards, including falls from height, electric, falling objects, tower collapses, and inclement weather.”

[Read: FCC, OSHA Team Up on Tower Safety]

The agreement was signed in an online ceremony involving officials of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, NATE: The Communications Infrastructure Contractors Association and the Federal Communications Commission.

They included Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor Loren Sweatt, NATE Chairman Jimmy Miller and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

Sweatt said demand for wireless communications and broadcast services has increased the need for construction, service and maintenance of towers around the country.

The effort is being done under OSHA’s Strategic Partnership Program.

 

The post NATE, OSHA and FCC in Safety Partnership appeared first on Radio World.

Entercom named Ashok Sinha to a key communications role.

As senior VP, head of corporate communications and PR, “will lead the communications strategy and execution across the company’s entire portfolio of assets.”

[Read: Entercom-Urban One Deal Shakes Up Four Markets]

That includes oversight of internal and external comms, media and press relations, corporate messaging, crisis communications and issues management, and “executive thought leadership management.”

He was formerly vice president, communications lead, technology at WarnerMedia. He has also held communications positions at Publicis Media, NBCUniversal, Viacom and Product(RED).

He reports to Chief Marketing Officer Paul Suchman, who said the appointment is part of the company’s efforts to “build the future of audio.”

In the announcement, Sinha called himself “a lifelong consumer of music and the spoken word” and said “I believe in the power of audio and its ability to engage, entertain and inform the world.”

 

The post Entercom Names Sinha to Communications Post appeared first on Radio World.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau has begun targeting property owners and managers that tolerate pirate broadcasting on their properties.

It started today by notifying owners of three properties in Queens in New York City that there is apparent illegal broadcasting happening at their buildings.

The bureau issued an announcement that it is exercising the FCC’s new authority under the recently enacted PIRATE Act, which gave the commission a significant new hammer in its anti-pirate toolkit: “Parties that knowingly facilitate illegal broadcasting on their property are liable for fines of up to $2 million,” it stated.

Enforcement Bureau Chief Rosemary Harold said, “It is unacceptable — and plainly illegal under the new law — for landlords and property managers to simply opt to ignore pirate radio operations. Once they are aware of these unauthorized broadcasts, they must take steps to stop it from continuing in their buildings or at other sites they own or control.”

If they don’t, she said, they risk a heavy fine, followed by collection action in court. “In addition, our enforcement actions will be made public, which may create further unforeseen business risks.” She emphasized what the FCC and broadcasters have been saying for years: that pirate radio is illegal, and can interfere with licensed stations and emergency alerting.

The bureau will provide written notice to property owners and managers that it thinks “are turning a blind eye to — or even helping facilitate — illegal broadcasting.” It also has created a new “Notice of Illegal Pirate Radio Broadcasting.” The notice provides owners a period of time to remedy the problem before any enforcement action proceeds.

The first three notices were mailed — first class and certified mail — to owners of buildings in Queens that are just a few blocks apart. The bureau said it traced a signal on 105.5 MHz from 3520 97th Street, Queens; another on 91.3 MHz from 3535 95th Street; and a third on 95.9 MHz from 3512 99th Street. They were given 10 days to respond; the FCC said the bureau will “consider any response before taking further action.”

Under the prominent headline “Notice of Illegal Pirate Broadcasting,” each letter’s language should get the attention of a landlord. It reviews the possible penalties, then adds: “If you do not respond to this Notice, the FCC may nonetheless determine that, as a legal matter, you have sufficient knowledge of the above-referenced pirate radio activity to support enforcement action against you. Service of this Notice to you or your agent establishes the foundation, along with other evidence, that could lead to significant financial penalties.”

Broadcasters have pushed for decades for the FCC to be more aggressive in combating illegal broadcasting. FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly has been a vocal proponent of giving the commission more tools to do that, and Congress did so in the PIRATE Act.

The argument is that landlords and property managers often know of the activity, and the bureau said it has previously sent warnings to landlords and sought cooperation from national property owners’ organizations to raise awareness. “With pirate broadcasts persisting despite these efforts, Congress took action and empowered the commission to penalize property owners and managers that knowingly permit pirate broadcasters to remain operating from the landlord’s buildings or unbuilt areas,” it stated.

“Landlords and property managers also may be found liable if a pirate station ceases operation for some period of time but later resumes at the same site.”

 

 

The post FCC Starts Crackdown on Pirate Radio Landlords appeared first on Radio World.

The author is membership program director of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. NFCB commentaries are featured regularly at www.radioworld.com.

With 2020 ending, many people in noncommercial radio are looking at the defining moments of the year. And though the big stories of the nation had a lot of resonance, one topic in particular towered over the community and public media industries.

COVID-19 had a stunning impact, including upon stations forced to change core operations and to lay off staff amid financial problems. The presidential election spawned an array of community discussions, such as escalating polarization and the complex issues opened up by misinformation. 2021 is likely to see both of these subjects dominating headlines and our popular consciousness.

[Read: Community Broadcaster: Difference Makers]

However, if you are a watcher of community media or public radio, nothing quite shaped the industry like diversity, equity and inclusion.

DEI was front and center in no small part due to the proverbial dam breaking in community and public media. Scandals had been brewing at prominent organizations since at least 2017. But where leaders once beset by controversy angled out of positions largely on their own terms, 2020 was the year jobs were withdrawn, people were fired, organizations committed to do better, and everyone ignoring problematic cultures was officially put on notice.

This year, noncommercial media outlets of many sizes saw their names tied to claims of racism, exclusion and abusive workplaces. St. Louis Public Radio and WAMU drew national headlines for serious internal issues. Social media and the internet became forums for workers at Georgia Public Broadcasting, GBH, PRX and elsewhere to speak out. Where staff may have once been quiet, this was the year they instead called for accountability at places like WNET in New York and NPR. Past issues sunk the jobs of Sonya Forte Duhé and Andi McDaniel; they had new positions at Arizona State University’s well-regarded journalism program and Chicago Public Media, respectively. Elsewhere, 2020 saw a wave of retirements and resignations by those caught up in staff conflicts, the most visible of which was American Public Media Group CEO Jon McTaggart. Even community radio saw the spotlight, with sexual misconduct and other issues being raised.

It was not all bad news. The killing of George Floyd and nationwide racial justice demonstrations pushed many communities to have dialogs about bias and equality. Seattle’s KEXP announced it was changing its DJ lineup in a bid to more accurately represent its diverse city. In July, Colorado Public Media offered a sober look at its own failings, pledging to do better. And in the fall, Public Media for All organized a day of action that mobilized dozens of major public media organizations and hundreds of employees to commit to improvements related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

How diversity initiatives will be executed in 2021 remains to be seen, though signs are good that such topics will continue to be a high priority. In December, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting hosted a discussion on diversity with managers across the industry. Organizations like Greater Public, NFCB and the Station Resource Group are leading conversations with their cohorts. And outlets such as Capital Public Radio, KALW and Blue Ridge Public Radio have agreed to accomplish at least one Public Media for All goal in their first 30 days of signing up.

2020 has been a most difficult year for radio. Yet, new calls for inclusion may make 2021 a year we step up to be more relevant, diverse and engaged.

The post Community Broadcaster: Diversity Was Radio’s Story of the Year appeared first on Radio World.

Four of the six bays are shown during installation.

From Radio World’s Who’s Buying What page: WSEW(FM) in Maine will soon operate from a fresh tower site that includes a six-bay Dielectric DCR-H FM antenna with radome.

It’s shown here with four bays up during installation.

The site is across the border in Barrington, N.H., and will go live early next year.

The noncom Christian station is relocating from a tower site in Sanford, Maine, in order to improve signal strength and reach more people including listeners in Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth, according to a press release from Dielectric.

Ron Malone is president of the licensee, Word Radio.

“WSEW’s market penetration was previously limited with the use of a log-periodic antenna system solution using linear, slant polarization,” Dielectric stated.

“In addition to the advantages of circular polarization, the side-mounted, six-bay antenna will have a prime position on the 400-foot tower to maximize coverage, with its center of radiation at 287 feet above ground level.”

The tower at the new site is owned by Vertical Bridge. Malone was quoted saying the project is intended to resolve issues that the station has had with multipath and occasional dropouts.

Users and suppliers are both invited to send news for Who’s Buying What stories to radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post A New FM Site and Antenna for WSEW appeared first on Radio World.

Emerging technology could simplify facility infrastructure and reduce costs for broadcasters by eliminating reliance on hardware and utilizing the cloud instead.

A two-part session at this fall’s virtual Radio Show conference explored virtualization of traditionally hardware-based systems and the benefits of the fourth generation of HD Radio technology.

Moderator Roz Clark, senior director of radio engineering for Cox Media Group, framed the conversation as a look at the next generation of radio architecture, which will involve fewer hardware boxes in facilities as broadcasters move toward more service-based systems.

[Read RW’s free ebook “Virtualizing the Air Chain: Next-Gen Radio Architecture”]

“We know broadcast equipment is specialized, expensive and wears out. It requires maintenance and cooling. And all of these things are magnified by the number of stations you own, so evolving things forward and making it a more cost-effective and useful part of our business is a goal we all have,” Clark said during his introduction.

He noted that the NAB Radio Technology Committee is working with equipment manufactures to create common platforms to develop technology solutions.

“We are trying to simplify things, make it interoperable and adopt best practices, to develop technology to fit within the existing infrastructure — and the modern infrastructure as it evolves,” Clark said during his introduction.

PPM and EAS

The first panel included Jason Ornellas, regional director of engineering for Bonneville International Corp.; Alan Jurison, senior broadcast engineer at iHeartMedia; and Lakeya Jefferson, director of audio client engineering at Nielsen Media.

A goal of the NAB Radio Technology Committee, Clark said, is to make it easier and more cost-effective to implement HD Radio as the industry transforms into a digital transport delivery mechanism.

One part of that effort involves the software to insert Nielsen Audio PPM codes. Another is the implementation of Emergency Alert System content into an HD sub-channel stream.

Jefferson said Nielsen has taken its enhanced Critical Band Encoding Technology, or CBET, which is used in its PPM hardware encoders, and made it available in a software-based version to be integrated into third-party devices and products that may exist in broadcast facilities.

“We are excited to offer a wide variety of options when it comes to encoding. Nielsen is planning a beta release of our audio software encoder to a select group of audio processing vendors, including Orban, Wheatstone and Telos/Omnia, and AM stations with a wider production release later this year,” Jefferson said during the online session.

Field evaluation for AM stations began in early October with plans to release FM and streaming in 2021, Jefferson said.

Ornellas, who chairs the PPM Subgroup of the technology committee, said Bonneville successfully beta tested software-based PPM encoding using Orban processing at KHTK(AM) in Sacramento, Calif., and KSL(AM) in Salt Lake City. So did Cox Media at its stations WSB(AM) in Atlanta and KKYX(AM) in San Antonio, Texas.

“It was pretty seamless, with no issues for either the terrestrial AM or HD channel,” Ornellas said of the Bonneville testing. “We were able to see that the PPM encoding was being present right on the processor as well as the Multichannel Encoding Monitor. Nielsen was happy with the quality assurance they were expecting. This is a huge first step.”

iHeartMedia’s Jurison has been working for some time on getting the EAS component of the broadcast air chain put into software and virtualized into HD Radio subchannels.

“It’s been a challenge for (iHeartMedia) to get EAS onto the HD-2, -3 and -4 subchannels. We expect the next-generation architecture to move a lot of things out of defined-purpose hardware and into the cloud,” he said.

“We think some of the low-hanging fruit is the multicast channels. A lot of those stations just play music with few elements. As we migrate audio and radio into the cloud, these seem like good choices for us to virtualize.”

iHeartMedia uses a physical audio switcher that is tied to the EAS encoder to get EAS messaging onto the FM subchannels, Jurison said. The industry’s challenge, he says, is how to get EAS onto the subchannels without requiring hardware in the local market while remaining FCC-compliant.

He said Gen4 HD Radio technology and an embedded HD Radio importer/exporter will allow broadcasters to “virtualize” this process.

“It’s a whole new way of looking at HD Radio. The HD-2, -3 and -4 are perfect for us to begin putting things up in the cloud; but the cloud doesn’t have an EAS encoder,” Jurison said.

He explained that broadcasters will have the capability, thanks to the Gen4’s embedded importer/exporter, to connect the EAS encoder via 2wcom’s HDRCC, an HD Radio capture client appliance, which will encode all audio.

According to 2wcom’s website, the HDR-CC “requires a setup that has EAS audio connected to the capture client as well as a GPI to trigger the alarm. When the alarm is triggered, the three-channel HDR-CC logs into the importer and replaces all supplemental channels (HD2–HD4) with the alarm program. After the GPI is released, the HDR-CC logs out and the importer continues with normal operation.”

Jurison says Gen4 HD Radio technology will eliminate complicated audio switching requirements for emergency alerts. iHeartMedia is field testing the new system. The session included an explanation of how audio is delivered from an iHeartMedia data center in Cincinnati through its tech center in San Antonio to WWHT(FM)’s transmitter site in Syracuse, N.Y.

“We are essentially generating audio in the Cincinnati data center that goes through our WAN to the transmitter site in Syracuse with no hardware in between to generate the HD2 channel,” Jurison said.

In conclusion, Jurison said by using the Gen4’s embedded importer/exporter and 2wcom’s HDR-CC, broadcasters have the ability to insert EAS into any multicast channel from any data center anywhere across the country and eliminate physical hardware switching.

HD Radio Gen4

Part two of the virtual equipment evolution session featured presentations from broadcast equipment manufacturers Nautel, GatesAir and Rohde & Schwarz. The companies are working on Gen4 HD Radio virtualization technology for use in the cloud.

Moderator Roz Clark described an ongoing open collaboration to find radio architecture solutions that includes radio broadcasters, equipment manufacturers and Xperi, the parent of both HD Radio and the hybrid radio platform DTS Connected Radio.

“It’s really the three-legged stool approach between all of us. We want to simplify the architecture, we want to ease implementation to make it cheaper, better and faster. And also to leverage the technology that surrounds the broadcast business in general,” he said.

Philipp Schmid, chief technology officer for Nautel, said since a lot of the radio air chain is based on “purpose-filled boxes,” there is the need to look at the transition to a software environment and that HD Radio presents the opportunity to do so.

“However, HD Radio also adds cost and complexity,” Schmid said, “due to having to keep audio aligned between the FM and the HD-1.”

Nautel, which manufacturers transmission equipment, has partnered with Telos Alliance to develop a new Gen4 HD system using Omnia Enterprise 9s audio processing software and the Nautel HD multicast transmitter platform.

“The whole system can be applied in the cloud and can be scaled and is highly reliable,” Schmid said.

Nautel’s goal is “easy HD Radio conversion, cheaper HD Radio conversion, security and interoperability for third parties and legacy equipment,” he said.

A webinar of the Gen4 HD Radio system by Nautel is available on the company’s website.

Rohde & Schwarz manufactures the THR9 liquid cooled FM HD Radio transmitter and its HD component, the HDR900 built on the Gen 4 HD Radio architecture, according to information presented during the virtual conference.

“We suggest creating a functional block for all of the HD encoding. This block can live in the cloud or it can live virtually,” said Don Backus, account manager of radio transmitters at Rohde & Schwarz. “It gets us simplicity and it also gets us the ability to provide an abstraction from the hardware layer and that does allow for a virtual implementation or in the cloud.”

Backus said standardization on AES67, a technical standard for audio over IP and audio over Ethernet interoperability, and IQ over IP interfaces are key to the overall process.

“We want to define structures that enable less costly solutions with virtualized hardware and cloud computing,” Backus said.

To conclude the virtual Radio Show technology session, Kevin Haider, product manager, radio transmission for GatesAir, touched on the latest Intraplex IP link audio codec.

Haider said integrating IP tunneling capabilities within audio codecs provides multiple benefits for HD Radio applications, including maintaining relative delay between FM and HD signals across the network and providing reliable HD Radio E2X data streams across IP networks and limited bandwidth STL networks.

“It also allows for broadcasters to move their HD Radio exporter and importer to a studio where it is easier to maintain,” he said.

The post Engineers Explore Next-Gen Architectures appeared first on Radio World.