Industry News

Across 2020, several multichannel operators  — including Comcast and Charter Communications — issued upward of $1 billion in rebates to subscribers following the cancellation and suspension of major televised sporting events.

Now, Kagan, the media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence, is putting the finishing touches on its annual Sports report. It examines how 2020’s sports programming numbers stacked up against prior years.

The report also provides status updates on the latest in the sports programming market and how pay TV operators are responding to the increases in sports programming costs.

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

More than ever, media organizations and other businesses are being open about salary ranges. For a previous generation, this kind of public posting about salaries was unheard of. Yet leaders are seeing there are advantages to this approach.

[Read: Community Broadcaster: How Stations Fight the Virus]

Many of us have seen generic wording before in listings. “Salary commensurate with experience” or variations thereof. For years, this obfuscation around pay was the norm. it benefits the employer to keep pay quiet, so the boss has room come negotiation time. However, big pushes for salary transparency in media have emerged the last three years, with some fields sharing what a baseline could and should be. These tendencies have rattled the fashion we’re accustomed to seeing salaries.

How does your station handle salary and wages in its employment searches? And how can this change be a win?

Almost as common in the generic language are situations where a promising candidate withdraws from a search. In the worst cases, they may drop out after they’ve gotten the offer. Why? In many instances, it is because the employer was cagey about the bottom line until the very last minute. That’s unacceptable for the candidate, who walks away with the impression your station may be cheap and is apt to hide it; and for the station, which just expended hours of paid staff time for a process they’ll now have to restart, all because they avoided a discussion that could have been cleared up by the very first posting.

Some may think that, by posting a salary range, you’ll limit the number of candidates. But really, what’s better: a small pool of candidates who know what they’re walking into, or a large pool of candidates in the dark and needing to either be persuaded by other perks or lied to by omission until the offer comes? And which candidate has higher morale coming in to the job?

There’s also an argument for fairness and diversity in hiring by being open. Last year, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters started collecting anonymously reported salary and wage data. “Chances are you are not facing pressure on pay fairness at the moment. That does not mean your community radio station can’t work on equity and your mission,” the page notes. And it’s true. More organizations want to build trust with candidates, and transparency is a means to uphold this value.

Pay transparency represents a cultural change for radio. But such a change needn’t be difficult. In fact, such change can meet our missions.

The post Community Broadcaster: Hidden Figures appeared first on Radio World.

The E.W. Scripps Company said after Thursday’s Closing Bell that it intends to redeem all $400 million in aggregate principal of its outstanding 5.125% senior notes due 2025.

The redemption will be made in accordance with the terms of the indenture governing the notes and the terms of the notice of redemption.

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For 16 years, she’s been a key executive at Nielsen, rising to GM and Head of Product Advanced Video Advertising in January 2019.

For 12 years, he’s been a product development leader who in April 2019 ascended to the role of GM and Head of Product for Audience Measurement.

Both will soon be former employees, but the latter departure is perhaps more noteworthy, given growing grumbles from the biggest TV networks that the pandemic resulted in audience undercounting by Nielsen.

Scott Brown, who rose through the product development ranks at Nielsen upon joining the company in 2009 as a Data Science Quality Assurance Director, is exiting.

According to MediaPost, he’s heading to Experian. Independent verification by RBR+TVBR of the report with Nielsen was still forthcoming at publishing time.

At Nielsen, Brown set the strategy for launching a currency-grade cross media measurement product across linear and digital. Industry-wide, Brown is considered a thought leader.

Brown’s departure comes amid a furor over alleged “systematic under-counting” by Nielsen, offered up by the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB). According to their findings, Nielsen lost 20% of its panelists due to this “under-counting.”

As the VAB explained, “Nielsen largely stopped visiting its panelists’ homes to make sure they were still properly participating because of the pandemic.”

This, VAB President/CEO Sean Cunningham argues, led to the under-count. He asks “Nielsen has streaming declining among 18-34 in 2020 versus 2019. How could this possibly be true?”

The Big Four networks are equally frustrated with Nielsen. According to Variety, CBS, ABC, NBC and the VAB collectively requested that Nielsen be subject to a third-party audit to be conducted by EY. They seek a response by Monday to the request.

In response to RBR+TVBR‘s request for comment on the flap, a Nielsen spokesperson offered a prepared statement:

“Over the course of the last year, COVID has disrupted lives, families, organizations and businesses. Nielsen is no different. We leaned in, kept the panel, our people and the ratings estimates safe and, like many of our clients, continued to operate.” 

In early March 2021, Nielsen started its return to pre-COVID maintenance protocols. In concert with local government guidance, this included the resumption of in-home field visits with the goal of returning to normal as quickly as possible. “While we have always been in the field, our return to in-home visits helps maintain our representative measurement panel and allows us to execute our Nielsen One vision for true, comparable cross-platform metrics,” the Nielsen spokesperson explained. “We have confidence in the fidelity of our ratings estimates and are focused on the continued quality of our panel.”

In fact, Nielsen responded to the VAB criticism by offering up research that shines a light on the “integrity” of its panel data and how audience viewership has shifted during COVID.

“Our research has shown that the audience estimates are in line with trends observed via other data sources, and we see no evidence to suggest that changes made during COVID to the panel have materially changed the audience estimates as reported,” the Nielsen representative said.

The research also takes a look at the value and impact that new content has in the marketplace, overall changes in premiere content scheduling and how streaming platforms play a significant role in the future of the entire media landscape. “We are working alongside clients to help the industry understand the true impact COVID has had on these accelerated shifts in audience behaviors,” the spokesperson said. “We have been fully transparent with clients and the MRC and will continue to guide the industry through the multiple factors that have influenced audience viewership during these unprecedented times.”

Meanwhile, Kelly Abcarian, who joined Nielsen in May 2005 as a Program Manager and has been a highly visible member of the global audience measurement team at Nielsen, is shifting to Roku once it completes its previously reported acquisition of Nielsen’s advanced video advertising business.

As RBR+TVBR reported March 1, Nielsen ad and content products will be integrated into the Roku platform via a “strategic alliance.” However, the pact’s key takeaway is that Roku will acquire Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business. This includes Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies.

And, Abcarian will continue to lead those businesses, now under Roku.

“I am so proud to lead a team that has built an amazing addressable product that can scale under Roku’s leadership,” she said March 3 via LinkedIn.

Broadcasters are well placed to help the public feel more confident about vaccinations, said NAB President/CEO Gordon Smith.

He said that includes reaching communities of color, multilingual ethnic minorities and rural areas where vaccine hesitancy is highest.

Smith appeared Thursday before the Senate Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill at a hearing on the topic of communicating “trusted vaccine information.”

“Our research showed that everyone simply wants the facts — news stories that make recommendations based on factual reporting,” Smith told the senators. “Fortunately, that is what broadcasters do best — they dig deep to provide accurate information to their communities — not spin, not rumors and without political theater.”

Smith described NAB’s partnership with the Reynolds Journalism Institute on a research project to identify effective vaccine education messaging. Generally, he said, the public is eager for the vaccine, but there is greater hesitancy among demographics such as African Americans, Hispanics, conservative-leaning Whites and women aged 18 to 34.

He said the NAB/Reynolds research “made it clear that a local and regional approach would be more effective than a one-size-fits-all national message,” and said NAB was “gratified that the Department of Health and Human Services has identified local broadcast stations as effective advertising partners.”

And he noted that the NAB is a founding member of the administration’s recently announced Community Corps, that seeks to develop “trusted messengers in local communities to encourage people to get vaccinated.”

He said radio and TV stations “are anxious to serve again as critical partners to government agencies and the public health and medical communities, to arm listeners and viewers with timely, accurate information about vaccines.”

The post Smith Goes to the Hill to Talk Vaccines appeared first on Radio World.

Spanish-language media is certainly in everyone’s sights right now, given the blockbuster bi-national merger plans of Televisa and Univision Communications. This only further demonstrates the continued power of the U.S. Hispanic consumer, and why Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS) is poised for more growth across 2021.

In this exclusive conversation, SBS EVP/Programming Jesus Salas shares how the company’s radio stations gained audience across the COVID-19 pandemic and has kept it, while also giving a preview as to what else SBS has in store for the rest of the year in this episode of the RBR+TVBR InFOCUS Podcast, presented by dot.FM.

Listen to “The InFOCUS Podcast: Jesus Salas” on Spreaker.

For nearly 12 years, Chattanooga, Tenn., sports fans seeking updates and programming from ESPN Radio have been able to tune to a Class A FM licensed to the town of Lakesite, Tenn.

Soon, a change in listening habits will be needed, as this facility is set to transition to non-secular religious programming under a new owner.

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Edison Research and NAB have jointly released their findings from a first-of-its-kind study on Radio.

The report identifies six segments of radio listeners, their listening behaviors and their attitudes toward advertising.

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May 10 at 10am will see the commencement of Saga Communications’ annual shareholders’ meeting. It won’t be a virtual affair, with the day’s events scheduled to take place at Saga’s suburban Detroit headquarters.

Daniel Tisch, head of key Saga investor Towerview LLC, could be in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., with Saga’s top leaders. What’s on tap for him and other Saga investors?

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On March 25, a FCC filing indicated that Marquee Broadcasting Group had agreed to acquire a trio of low-power television construction permits, two located in Albany, Ga., and a third licensed to Augusta, Ga.

It now appears the Augusta station is heading to a different buyer, a newly filed asset sale agreement from HC2 Holdings-controlled DTV America shows.

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