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In a potential boost to African American-centric media company Urban One and the nation’s Hispanic and Asian-targeted radio and TV communities, McDonald’s is moving forward with what it calls “bold new investments to further reflect its diverse customers, crew members and communities in its marketing.”

It’s a four-year effort, and women-owned and LGBTQ+ platforms are also poised to benefit.

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With the merger of Tribune Broadcasting and Nexstar Media Group, ownership of one of the nation’s largest affiliates of The CW Network — KTLA-5 in Los Angeles — came to be.

Now, Nexstar and the network have inked a new deal ensuring that KTLA, and every other affiliate of The CW, keeps the relationship in place for the next several years.

Multi-year agreements have been signed that see the renewal of The CW affiliations in 37 markets. The accord includes not only 28 Nexstar-owned stations but also nine owned by companies Nexstar enjoys a shared services agreement with.

Among the latter group: WPIX-11 in New York.

Other key Nexstar affiliates of The CW Network include WDCW-50 in Washington, D.C., seen as an in-flight offering on Southwest Airlines; KDAF-TV in Dallas; and KIAH-TV in Houston.

The 37 DMAs where Nexstar owns affiliates of The CW represents 31% of the U.S. audience.

“As the nation’s largest CW affiliate group, Nexstar is very pleased to extend its longstanding relationship with the network,” said Nexstar COO/CFO Tom Carter. “The CW’s line-up of prime-time entertainment shows, coupled with Nexstar’s highly-rated local news and other market-centric programming
enables us to deliver great content to millions of viewers and exceptional value to our advertisers.”

Betty Ellen Berlamino, The CW’s EVP of Distribution, added, “We are pleased to extend our valued partnership, through a multi-year agreement, with our largest station group, Nexstar. The linear broadcast model remains the backbone of our business model and vitally important as it gives us the scale and local reach that distinguishes us in today’s marketplace as the original multiplatform network.”

It’s time again for the U.K. audio industry’s annual tech and engineering event — in a new interactive, virtual format.

Aimed at broadcast engineers, technologists, managers and program creators, Radio TechCon 2021 is set to take place Monday Nov. 29. Through a series of speakers and masterclasses, the one-day conference will dive into the technical challenges and opportunities facing the U.K. radio and audio industry.

“Radio TechCon is vital for ensuring that the technical industry in radio and audio is able to come together to share ideas, learn and celebrate successes during these complex times,” says Aradhna Tayal, director of TBC Media Ltd., a radio and audio event company and organizer of Radio TechCon.

This year’s conference will be a virtual one due to ongoing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, she said.

In preparation for this year’s event, the Radio TechCon team has released videos from previous TechCon events on their website, including sessions on audio acoustics, wireless technology, voice control and radio wattage power issues.

The post Radio TechCon to Host Virtual Convention appeared first on Radio World.

LOS ANGELES — Ten free ad-supported streaming television, or “FAST,” channels have been added to the Local Now platform recently unveiled by the Byron Allen-controlled Allen Media Group.

The FAST offerings come courtesy of a new agreement with The E.W. Scripps Co.

It sees the expansion of local news by adding to the Local Now streaming platform the following Scripps O&Os:

• KNXV-15 (ABC) in Phoenix, Ariz.
• WFTS-28 (ABC) in Tampa
• WXYZ-7 (ABC) in Detroit
• KMGH-7 (ABC) in Denver
• WEWS-5 (ABC) in Cleveland
• WTVF-5 (CBS) in Nashville
• KGTV-10 (ABC) in San Diego
• KSTU-13 (Fox) in Salt Lake City
• KSHB-41 (NBC) in Kansas City
• WPTV-5 (NBC) in West Palm Beach

The partnership is not inclusive of all non-Ion properties owned by Scripps. For instance, WKBW-7 in Buffalo is not included in the Local Now arrangement.

Local Now SVP/GM Michael Senzon noted, “Scripps’ focus on growing audiences and revenue in the free streaming space is smart and we’re happy to be in business with them.”

As Scripps Local Media President Brian Lawlor sees it, “Scripps is committed to serving its audiences with the essential news and information they need, whenever and wherever they consume it. With more consumers turning to streaming platforms to access the local content that helps inform their day-to-day lives, we’re looking forward to expanding our commitment to them by adding Scripps local TV stations to Local Now’s growing roster of news and entertainment.”

On Friday (5/14), the Board of Directors of Audacy approved a restatement of three specific company plans and/or policies.

An SEC filing made following Wednesday’s Closing Bell on Wall Street explains what transpired.

Amendments to the three documents were needed in order to formally recognize the change of the company’s name from Entercom Communications Corp. to Audacy, Inc..

These documents are the Audacy Nonemployee Director Compensation Policy; the Audacy Equity Compensation Plan; the Audacy Employee Stock Purchase Plan; and the Audacy Acquisition Equity Compensation Plan (formerly the QLGG 2017 Stock Incentive Plan).

The amendments coincide with the 2021 annual Audacy shareholders meeting, which saw the ratification of the selection of Grant Thornton LLP as the company’s independent registered public accounting firm for the 2021 calendar year.

The meeting also saw the election of David Levy as a Class A Director, in Board Class I, for a three-year term; Weezie Kramer and Susan Neely were each elected as a Director, in Board Class I, for a three year-term.

That’s not the only news Audacy shared with the SEC.

On Wednesday (5/19), it filed Articles of Amendment with Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State to amend and restate Audacy’s Articles of Incorporation. They consolidate all prior amendments, and in particular removes references to multiple series of preferred stock which are no longer outstanding: Series A Cumulative Convertible Preferred Stock; Series A Junior Participating Convertible Preferred Stock; and Series B Junior Participating Convertible Preferred Stock.

There’s a list of “the good, the bad and the ugly” when the Federal Emergency Management Agency migrated the nation’s IPAWS system to the cloud this past April.

According to IPAWS Engineering Chief Mark Lucero during a webinar on the transition, there were many reasons to move the IPAWS system from the legacy, on-premises data center into the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud environment. The cloud offers new levels of redundancy and native tools that will help IPAWS function faster, better, stronger and cheaper, he said.

But like any migration from a standalone on-premises system to the cloud, there were bumps along the way. There were also several smart moves that FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security made. For one, Lucero said, FEMA successfully handled upfront planning, architecture design and in-depth planning with stakeholders. The cloud also gives the agency more rigorous redundancy. “We have redundancy on top of redundancy on top of redundancy,” Lucero said. “If a server goes down in flames, there are two more buildings within 100 miles that can pick up the slack and continue working as if nothing has happened.”

[Read: FEMA Dials up IPAWS Playbook]

The cloud environment also offers a faster turnaround time for adding new features and functions. “In the past it would take us several months to implement a change,” Lucero said. The cloud also offers the agency a new, centralized control system. “One of the great things that we’ve done by pushing into cloud is that we’ve centralized control,” he said. “Now we have more control over more aspects of it. There’s still a lot of oversight and security requirements that DHS puts on us; however, we have [fewer physical assets] to go to if we need to fix something.”

That’s the good. But speed bumps were in there too. Lucero said the agency struggled with deadlines, with removing bugs, with network connectivity and with coordination with broadcasters when it came to testing code. “When trying to swing over 11 systems operated by cell carriers that had their own priorities, we made a projection as to how long this would take and we were way off,” Lucero said.

He said that FEMA could also do a better job of anticipating how a delay here might affect a deadline over there. That led FEMA to reschedule its go-date a few times. “The original plan was to get this done in calendar year 2020,” he said.

Then there was the ugly, Lucero said. He said there was scant guidance from FEMA on cloud implementation when the cloud conversations first began back in 2018. Another issue: at the same time that FEMA was working on its cloud transition, it was also trying to make updates to the legacy IPAWS environment. “That was kind of tough because we had some delays … and those delays directly affected our cloud migration timeline and made things difficult,” he said.

Lucero said that paperwork requirements, approvals and security evaluations put the project somewhat behind. And the transition team struggled with retooling its testing procedures. “On the government and contractor side, we need to do a better job of defining how that process is going to take place,” he said.

Lucero was speaking as part of a cloud transition webinar set up by the IPAWS Program Management Office. Information on upcoming changes — including URL upgrades, information on when the older system will be decommissioned and what broadcasters need to know next — is contained within the nearly hour-long webinar.

The post IPAWS Transitions to the Cloud appeared first on Radio World.

It’s always nice when a broadcast media company enjoys a big day on Wall Street as general indices decline.

On Wednesday, Urban One — the company founded as Radio One by Cathy Hughes and today led by her son, Alfred Liggins III — saw double-digit growth.

A late buying surge fueled UONE.

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The team at Fletcher Heald & Hildreth has put together an update on the important broadcast media FCC regulatory deadlines operators will need to take note of in the next several weeks.

Here’s a look at what should go on the calendar today.

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Two months ago, the News Director for TEGNA-owned KING-5 in Seattle-Tacoma was announced as the new ND for Nexstar Media Group‘s KTLA-5 in Los Angeles.

Now, the company formerly known as Gannett has selected his successor.

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The Association of Public Radio Engineers — like most organizations — put all in-person events on hold once the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year, but the group is planning a return to its networking roots soon enough.

APRE has announced plans for its PREC 2022 Conference in Las Vegas to run adjacent to the NAB Show next spring. The organization’s leadership says “having engineers rub elbows at networking events” is what APRE does best.

APRE is a nonprofit which “exists to advance preserve the mission of public radio stations through education, outreach, regulatory support and the ongoing development and preservation of best engineering practices,” according to its website, www.apre.us.

[Read: ABA Will Send 20 People to NAB Events]

Radio World spoke to Victoria St. John, president of APRE and director of operations for Vermont Public Radio, about how the group came through the pandemic, the lessons learned and its plans for the rest of 2021.

Radio World: What has APRE learned about itself during the course of the pandemic?
Victoria St. John: We wanted to keep our members involved and engaged, but it also caused us to look at what we are really about as an organization. We thought about all kinds of ways to keep membership engaged that were not in-person, but when the pandemic hit our membership was so busy. We did a few webinars, but it made more sense to not create extra busy work for them.

And we really are a networking and live event group. We prefer meeting and talking to each other in person. Our strength and our foundation is in connecting with people and sometimes that doesn’t relate to having webinars and holding Zoom meetings. We didn’t want to change who we are and what we do.

RW: Your membership had to react quickly to the pandemic?  
St. John: I’m so proud of them. Our members were just bombarded with work. Broadcast engineers were helping their co-workers work remotely and problem solving the issues involved in that. And many of them had to continue working at the radio station. They are typically people who have screwdrivers in hand and are physically doing work at the stations and transmitter sites. It’s not a job where you can do everything remotely.

Of all the people in our industry the station engineers were the ones who had to make sure everyone else could do their job remotely. That took a lot of energy and focus. They were incredibly important during that transition and keeping radio stations on the air and broadcasting important information. The pandemic created extra layers of work for broadcast engineers.

RW: Do your members get the credit they deserve?
St. John: These are the smartest and most talented people you’re talking about. And they are asked to everything from unclogging sinks to setting up towers. They are the most technically savvy people within most organizations and they deserve a lot of credit for keeping things together the past year. They were often called on to do things they never have before. This was unprecedented.

And obviously they were personally impacted by the pandemic just like everyone else; socially distancing and being required to stay away from the office in some cases. And all the time trying to protect their loved ones.

RW: With in-person events starting to come back this fall, are there plans for a PREC this year at the NAB Show in October in Las Vegas?
St. John: The door isn’t completely closed on that. We are not expecting to have a formal presence there this fall though some APRE members may be on-hand. There may be the potential for social or professional connections.

[Read: 2021 AES Show Will Co-Locate With NAB]

RW: And next year? PREC will be back for sure?
St. John: Yes, we are expecting to be there. Engineers so often work alone in the field. It’s exciting for them to get together and talk about projects and compare notes. We are expecting a full PREC experience in 2022.

RW: What issues or topics are priorities for APRE for the rest of 2021?
St. John: We are focusing on our core foundational efforts. I call it the iron side of engineering — the transmitter and the tower; the whole RF side. You have to know software obviously if you’re an engineer, but cables, fiber and networking are just as important.

We also want to examine how this pandemic changed the broadcast industry. How remote work changes what we do as broadcast engineers and how to best support our team members to that end.

RW: What else is on your mind these days?
St. John: This whole idea that broadcast radio is dead is silly. I believe that close to 90% of all radio listening is still done over the air via transmitters. So that part of the industry is still alive and needs a strong engineering team.

There is a lot of focus on the bright and shiny with multiplatform delivery and we’ll focus on that as well, but the foundation of what we do is broadcast.

The post APRE Seeks Return to Normalcy appeared first on Radio World.

TEGNA has transferred the Asst. News Director for its NBC affiliate in Charlotte to Connecticut, where he will take the News Director role for the company’s FOX and The CW Network affiliates serving New Haven, Hartford, and most of the state.

BE SURE TO FOLLOW RBR+TVBR ON FACEBOOK!

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NBCUniversal, MAGNA, and Identity have teamed together for a new research study released today that explores ‘the full spectrum of diversity, and the role that brands play in acknowledging and amplifying cultural identification.’

The study, Deconstructing Diversity Today, “flips the script on outdated cultural archetypes, and reveals the multifaceted and fluid nature of how people identify today.”

It also outlines what the three entities call “tangible next steps that marketers can take to connect with multicultural audiences in authentic, culturally relevant ways.”

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The number of new unique creative on radio increased by 44.6% in April, with 20,933 more instances than in April 2020.

That’s the positive news for AM and FM radio station owners seeking to bring their ad revenue out of the pandemic-driven doldrums, courtesy of iHeartMedia-owned Media Monitors.

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True-crime podcasts, by the nature of the stories they tell, tend to be underscored with tense and ominous sounds. While each episode of the “Anatomy of Murder” podcast, produced by Indianapolis, Ind.-based Audiochuck, deals with dark themes and details, there is also plenty of room for light, says executive producer Sumit David.

“If you look at the color palettes of a “Star Wars” movie, they always [begin] white and bright, and as the movie progresses, it gets darker,” says David. “[We were] like, ‘That’s how we should approach the sound design of this. Let’s start not-so-true crime. Let’s not start very heavy. Let’s ease our audience into it.’”

[Read: Survey Says Podcast Demographics Continue to Diversify]

Dayton Cole, who handles all the post-production work on “Anatomy of Murder” at podcast editing service Resonate Recordings in Louisville, Ky., likens the process to building a house, with the brooding sounds serving as the basement. Once they establish that baseline, Cole attends to the “brighter, sentimental moments,” which are his favorite to highlight. “More natural sounds, strings and piano — those kind of natural elements—rather than the synthetic, electronic pulsing and droning,” he says.

David’s background as an editor on reality television programs prepared him for his role on “Anatomy of Murder,” which is also unscripted. Hosts Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, a New York City homicide prosecutor, and Scott Weinberger, an investigative journalist, research the cases and keep a loose set of talking points for each episode, but otherwise the interviews and case discussions are fluid. The pair record on Blue Yeti USB microphones, while guests record locally on their own computers during video conferences with the hosts.

Before the audio files make it to Cole as an .OMF (Open Media Framework Interchange), an open-source format that allows him to import David’s Adobe Premiere files into Pro Tools, David edits the interviews and compiles related archival audio collected from law enforcement sources.

“I try and make it so that the story is all laid out, that all the bites, whether they be from Scott, Anna-Sigga, from the guests, or from archival material, are all put together in one big sequence, divided up into the four acts,” says David. “From there, it’s handed off to Dayton so he can do his magic of adding the sound design, pacing [and] music.”

David provides some creative direction, but after working together on dozens of episodes of the podcast, the pair have a largely unspoken workflow. Cole approaches each episode as a listener would, forming an outsider’s perspective on the structure and recordings David sends him. “I create blank tracks — little ‘slugs’ I call them — so I can just say, ‘This is kind of the emotion I want in this section,’” says Cole.

[Read: Maps Identify Top-Earning Podcasts by Country]

Many of the sounds Cole weaves into the podcast’s aural environment come from sound libraries, although he often manipulates the stems through processors like iZotope Rx to meet his needs. The main concern is to keep the music from distracting listeners away from the dialogue, so it is impactful but not overpowering. On an episode where he didn’t have access to stem tracks, he improvised to keep the bass and kick drums from overpowering the other instruments.

“I liked what all the other elements were doing,” so “I used the Elysia Alpha Compressor to be able to help the mids come back, and then open up the sides,” he says. “And, I was able to kind of blend that underneath so it wasn’t hitting you in the face so much.”

Transparency is key at the end of the day. Cole prefers to remain in the background and work without being detected. “My job is, don’t be noticed, but be impactful,” he says. “If people are in the story and they’re digging it and they don’t notice all the sound changes, that’s when I know I’ve done my job.”

The post True Crime Sound Design on “Anatomy of Murder” appeared first on Radio World.