Back in the early days of FM, when AM radio ruled the roost and an FM radio was still a rare commodity, many station owners simply simulcast their AM station’s programming on their FM stations. In the 1960s the Federal Communications Commission put the kibosh on that scheme, ordering FM stations to air different programming. […]
Following up on last week’s post about LPTV stations on channel 6 effectively turning into radio broadcasters I’ve been researching the topic a bit more. Turns out that full-power TV stations had the option to stay on channel 6 in their transition to digital, as I learned from this April article in TV Technology. Although […]
Sometimes you have to hand it to the financial press, there’s nothing like a little money to make them believe in old fashioned values, like localism, again. Any keen observer of the commercial radio landscape knows that right now the nation’s largest radio station owners are certainly not making money. But, as the Wall Street […]
When I was a kid in the 1970s my parents would try to pry me away from the television, warning me that it was going to “rot my brain.” Yet, my dad also admitted to me that his parents made the same pronouncements to him about the dangers of listening to too much radio. Each […]
A couple of weeks ago I was scanning the FM band as I made my short commute from my far-north Chicago neighborhood to WNUR in Evanston for a station meeting. At the bottom end of the dial I encountered a fading station playing a steady stream of smooth jazz with no DJ. I’d never heard […]
This past Saturday I attended the Chicago Media Future Conference, which was an unofficial follow-up to the Chicago Journalism Town Hall held in February. Both events intended to address the current perceived crisis in journalism as evidenced with the closure of papers, reporters getting laid off and a sharp decline in ad revenue. One attendee […]
