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Update your address books, the FCC has a new home. The commission has announced that it has officially moved its headquarters from 445 12th St. SW to its new location: 45 L Street NE in Washington.

The new space is likely to remain empty for the time being, as most FCC staffers are continuing to work from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The address change also does not impact the FCC’s current prohibition on delivery of hand-carried documents to FCC headquarters, again because of COVID-19. Nor does it change other ongoing COVID-19 restrictions or instructions regarding access to FCC facilities. Filers are encouraged to keep using the FCC’s electronic comment filing system.

With its new address, the FCC is now closer to Congress, the headquarters of NCTA–The Internet & Television Association and NPR. The move is expected to save more than $100 million over the lifetime of the lease compared to its previous location, according to reports.

The FCC announced that it was planning on moving its headquarters in 2015 when the lease at 445 12th St. SW expired.

 

The post FCC Officially Moves into New Headquarters appeared first on Radio World.

Getty Image/ Leo Patrizi

Life goes by in a f-l-a-s-h. One minute, I’m changing diapers … the next, my daughter is getting married! The June wedding, planned pre-pandemic, was moved to September with some hope for safer conditions. Of course, now we truly understand that we can’t predict when the virus will be vanquished.

We have our own new life partner and it is spelled Z-o-o-m.

Okay, maybe you prefer Go To Meeting, Google Meetings, or Skype; but whichever brand platform you prefer, video conferencing/webcasting has had a massive impact on our lives and is here to stay as part of our daily landscape.

As if sitting at my dining room table for hours every day for Zoom calls weren’t enough to convince me, I am now completely certain of Zoom’s ubiquity; many more people watched my daughter’s wedding online than were able to attend in person. And they loved it, really feeling the spirit and joy of it all.

Suddenly it occurred to me that even if there weren’t a pandemic going on, it still makes sense to have a Zoom feed available for those who can’t attend personal events. Then I started thinking about other Zoom uses for a station to boost relationships, engagement and ratings.

Focus Zoom

How do listeners feel about your station? Traditional focus groups are expensive, time-consuming and not always conclusive because it’s impossible to do enough sessions to detect trends.

What if you started doing them in a format people are now accustomed to using, like Zoom? You could solicit volunteers with a simple message: “We’d like to hear your thoughts about our ‘Joe in the Morning Show.’ The first 20 people who Zoom with us tonight at 7 p.m. get free pizza from Jerry’s. To sign up, just text your email address to 004445.”

While it may be a challenge to host focus groups on your own, it can be done well. Like anything else, it takes practice.

Come up with 10 questions you want answered. Ask the same questions of each group. Encourage everyone to participate.

Record five sessions. Compare the answers. If each unconnected group says the same thing, you’re onto something to explore further.

Happy Hour Zoom

Want to build relationships face-to-face with your listeners? How about a Zoom happy hour once a week?

Be prepared to join with topics, music videos to share on screen, maybe movie clips — fun things to kick around. Most importantly, let your listeners talk and get to know you as a real person; they’ll feel like they’re getting to know others on the call as well.

Remember that you can mute your group and set it up so that you call on people when they want to speak. Word will spread fast, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you had to start limiting attendance.

Zoom Zoom Zoom

Got a special live or pre-recorded performance to share? A special one-time-only premiere on Zoom will be remembered.

Run a contest for a “backstage pass” to hang on Zoom with a band in your format, or to meet a newsmaker or celebrity.

A word to the wise: Be sure to invest in a Zoom paid account. It’s not that pricy to increase time and attendance limits.

Haters will say that driving people to Zoom instead of listening to radio won’t do a thing to increase ratings. I am not at all suggesting you’ll be driving tens of thousands to Zoom. You won’t be that lucky.

The purpose is to create memories and loyalty that will spread gradually and consistently over time. Creating personal connections both during and after COVID is something stations of all sizes can accomplish.

Virtual relationships aren’t exactly like those that happen in person, but “being there” from a distance will still create many smiles — just like a wedding!

Reach the author at marklapidus1@gmail.com. Read more great promotion and management articles from Mark Lapidus.

 

The post Zoom as a Radio Research and Promo Tool appeared first on Radio World.

Order cancelling $1,500 Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture for failure to timely file Renewal Application

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Lanser Broadcasting Corporation enters into Consent Decree to Resolve Political File Investigation

Multimedia Holdings Corporation requests the substitution of channel 31 for channel 11 at Minneapolis in the DTV Table of Allotments

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PreSonus has launched its new PD-70 Dynamic Broadcast Microphone, intended for podcasters, radio broadcasters, YouTubers and live streaming.

As a dynamic end-address mic with a cardioid polar pattern, the PD-70 offers a 20 Hz to 20 kHz (±3 dB) frequency range. Onboard features include an integrated windscreen to reduce plosives, and an integrated hard mount.

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

Designed with an aim to reduce mechanical noise and breathiness, the mic is claimed to offer solid off-axis rejection, allowing mic owners to use it as a part of portable recording setups.

The mic is available now at a U.S. street price of $129.95.

Info: www.presonus.com

 

The post PreSonus Launches PD-70 Broadcast Microphone 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.

Radio World has recently hopped in at the right time by leading some important conversations related to radio. In covering the strains that stations face in diversifying their workforces as well as tensions in noncommercial media over dozens of diversity scandals, fresh discussions with readers like you are starting.

Hiring and leadership development among early-career and diverse voices we want to bring in to our stations is one of the more perplexing matters. One reader said it best: we tried, but had a hard time finding the right person with the right skills. This leg of the journey stymies many well-meaning managers. How do we overcome the obstacle?

[Read: Community Broadcaster: Inclusive Service Is the Future]

It is important to approach recruitment with an eye to what you want to see. If you are looking to expand your pool of candidates, you may need to expand your methods for finding them. While personal references, traditional networks and ads in the usual places can be helpful, keep in mind that the people you’re looking for may not have access to the contacts you have, or know yet about the networks you do. A new college graduate, a person of color fresh to the industry or someone whose skills could strengthen your station may simply not have access to the colleague networks we do.

Here’s one idea: have you thought about circulating job postings to groups like the University Station Alliance or College Broadcasters Inc., or reached out to a local university or community radio station? Many university licensees and student-run college radio stations have a steady stream of students who get radio training in many facets of the organization. Those campuses hand out diplomas to seniors each year, and those seniors go into an uncertain workforce. Having talked to many students at CBI’s conferences, I can tell you a lot of them would love to have a career in radio. They just do not realize it is a possibility, so they look elsewhere.

Finding early career and diverse talent for your station may also require you to think deeply about your organization’s needs and screening. Each applicant should get the same questions about the role and be asked to perform tasks required for the position. You might want to be open to skills that translate well to jobs you’re hiring for. In addition, for entry- and mid-level positions, you may be open to more on-the-job training.

Similarly, leadership development is as much about who the candidate is, as it is about the manager identifying an employee’s strengths and helping them cultivate leadership abilities with appropriate mentorship. Those not traditionally associated with radio may not understand the nuances we do, and it takes an astute manager to see how a candidate or new employee’s talents translate to our work. That may not be simple, but it is rewarding.

Of course, some of the big-picture issues may be out of our hands. Owners and our own bosses need to give attention to recruitment and retention organization-wide, as well as helping staff as a whole to be culturally competent in our ever-changing workplace, where five generations now meet. We as well-intentioned managers play a role in being advocates and sounding boards to the higher ups on diversity as well.

Evolving our stations to meet the needs of our communities is exciting work. Those of you thinking about diversity and the cultural shifts we are seeing deserve praise. Just as someone long before took a chance on us, we are in a position to change someone’s life by creating opportunities.

The post Community Broadcaster: Taking Chances appeared first on Radio World.

The author of this commentary is CEO and co-founder of On-Hertz.

As Radio World has reported, the pandemic has caused many radio organizations to pause cap-ex spending and to rethink their facility planning and workflows.

On-Hertz thinks that the industry, in general, is going to need to move more actively towards more agile workflows and operations to survive in the new media landscape.

Concretely, that means accelerating the transition to a fully digital, software-based, live production ecosystem.

We must stay humble: No one could have anticipated a global crisis like the one we are facing. The impact on our industry is severe and, unfortunately, there is no magic bullet.

At the same time, COVID-19 has put in full light some of the challenges that broadcasters have already been facing for some time:

• How to compete with the new on-demand and over-the-internet players?
• How to do it while maintaining the levels of quality and reliability that the audience has come to trust?
• How to stay relevant to our audience and embrace the new ways people consume content?
• How to address the changes in our organizations and production teams when budgets are going down but the demand for content explodes?
• How to shape our operations to stay (become?) profitable while we know that the speed of change is only going to increase from here?

Once again, COVID-19 has highlighted a key element: legacy dedicated hardware infrastructures are just not flexible enough. Worse: They play(ed) against us when trying to ensure business continuity!

The Adaptable Survive

It is not surprising that codec suppliers have seen a large increase in demand for their equipment: Suddenly, distributed operations are the norm rather than the exception.

It is not surprising either that we have all seen and heard many shows trying to carry on using publicly available applications like Skype, Zoom and the likes — often at the expense of quality, unfortunately.

On the other hand, shipping codecs to everyone at the start of the pandemic and trying to replicate the hardware-based infrastructure of the studio have proved to be logistically impossible, not to mention eye-wateringly expensive.

So, are there alternatives?

Evolution is not “survival of the fittest,” it’s “survival of the most adaptable.” At On-Hertz, we believe that involves a shift from legacy hardware-based infrastructures to modern virtualized ones.

We don’t want to “simply” swap out hardware for software, though; we believe the shift towards software-defined infrastructures will bring us three significant advantages: modularity, interoperability and better user interfaces. Combined, these characteristics open the way to better workflows.

This evolution needs to come with a few mandatory pre-requisites like maintaining or even improving the level of reliability, quality and functionality that our industry demands.

We must also capitalize on the tremendous amount of expertise and knowledge that we have collectively built over the last decades. Virtualization isn’t about turning everyone into IT geniuses but offering more opportunities to capture our audience’s imagination.

Modularity will then help us deal with the changing world: It doesn’t matter anymore if you have an X-channel mixers or Z number of codecs. With software, you can simply select the number of channels you need at any moment. If you need more or fewer channels the week after, you can scale accordingly. Likewise, find out what works and what doesn’t much faster than ever before.

Hitting two birds with one stone, modularity also comes with a cost advantage. You don’t need to scale your infrastructure for peak demand anymore. You can scale for the content you want to produce and make sure your cost structure follows your revenue.

The UX is paramount

Interoperability remains one of the major pain points of technical teams today. Who hasn’t heard a story or two full of dongles and converters?

There is no good reason for it. Outdated, insecure, proprietary algorithms and protocols should be things of the past. Instead, offering open (web) APIs allows for easier interconnection between solutions, less customer lock-down for a manufacturer and a lot less unnecessary support for your teams.

In other words, we can rely on technology that is already used at a massive scale by many other resilient industries to provide much greater convenience.

Finally, users, and therefore user interfaces, are of paramount importance. If teams are being reduced, if the speed of change increases, if the complexity of operations increases, shouldn’t we make sure that we focus on getting the best out of the tools we use to produce the best content?

Can we hide complexity in some cases? Can we automate operations that only have low added-value, that are tedious and potentially error-prone? Are we bound to physical interfaces for every input on the system or only by some of them? How do we embrace distributed operations?

Our philosophy is that engineers engineer, developers develop and producers produce, and that’s how it should be. So let’s make sure our user interfaces reflect that reality.

The pandemic has caused many radio organizations to pause cap-ex spending and to rethink their facility planning and workflows. These emergency measures might well be their safety board for the future too, thanks to the opportunities opened by software-defined infrastructures!

Comment on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject line.

For more on this topic, see the new Radio World ebook “Virtualizing the Air Chain”.

The post The Advantages of Software-Defined Infrastructure appeared first on Radio World.

Christian Faith Broadcast, Inc. enters into Consent Decree to Resolve Political File Investigation

FCC rescinds grant of application for construction permit for K260DK, Portland, Oregon and dismisses application pursuant to section 74.1204(f) of the rules

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