| reply to RadioDoc
Re: This is a great idea Agreed. Actually, I agree about the improvements in transmitter technology. In reality, since most of them are off-site at the tower some distance away, you're already doing remote monitoring. At the station where I worked in high school and summers during college, the transmitter was in a room right next to the control room. It was this ancient Collins behemoth. And did it ever need monitoring and routine tweaking. But anyway, my point was more that monitoring was beneficial because it kept a live human at the station, and, more often than not, it was a DJ, so it kept at least a few more stations live for a while longer.
As for ownership limits, 12-12-12 may be a bit strict, but there needs to be curbs, especially on how many stations can be co-owned in a single market. Other than leading to bland, cookie-cutter programming, large clusters tend to squeeze out the remaining independents. If you're a local operator, it's hard to compete with a couple of corporate-owned clusters that have everything fed in via satellite and/or voice-tracked from another city. The big group owners like to say that, because of satellite radio, iPods, CD's, etc., there is plenty of competition and no need for limits. However, one could also argue that, because of satellite radio, iPods, CD's, etc., there are plenty of other avenues for these companies to pursue and no need for them to own a bunch of stations.
I'm not for overly-restrictive rules, but it's the lack of any meaningful regulations that have turned local broadcasting, especially radio, into the cesspool of mediocrity that it is today. Radio used to be a pleasure to listen to. The big-city stations had slick production values and the best talent, while the small-town stations had all that homespun local programming and the new guys who were trying to get good enough to make it to the big stations. It was fun to listen to, no matter where you were. But now all we hear is the same shitty programming coast to coast. The big media companies swooped in, bought up everything, and flushed quality right down the toilet.
Oh, about the Tuscaloosa/Birmingham situation, some of the rules might have helped, specifically the duopoly prohibition. When Albritton (sp?) bought WCFT, they couldn't use it to cover all of the Birmingham metro, so they also bought WJSU, which could hit the other side of the metro area, and combined them. Since Tuscaloosa was no longer its own DMA (it was absorbed by the Birmingham DMA), the old duopoly rules might have kept ABC 33/40 from being created, which might have meant that WCFT could have remained a Tuscaloosa station. No guarantees there, but in a more regulated environment, this situation might not have been allowed to happen. If a company wants to serve a large city, let them buy a station in that city, not steal local service away from nearby communities to enter the market. Another side effect of the combined DMA is that we now get to have WIAT as the market's CBS affiliate. That station isn't even viewable OTA in Tuscaloosa. If you don't have cable or satellite, you can't even get it at all. |
