Industry News

How can the FCC improve the regulatory fee process for broadcast licensees of radio and television stations?

The NAB has some suggestions, and offered them to the Commission in a filing submitted Thursday (10/22) by the leading lobbying voice in Washington for AMs, FMs, UHFs and VHFs across the U.S.

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As 2022 begins, NAB COO Curtis Legeyt will assume the role of President/CEO of the nation’s leading voice in Washington for the broadcast media industry.

Gordon Smith is winding down a 12-year tenure at the association, and with the cancellation of the 2021 NAB Show, there’s only one place radio and TV industry executives will get the chance to personally wish Smith well as he heads into retirement.

FORECAST 2022, presented by the Radio + Television Business Report and Radio Ink, is that locale. Scheduled for November 16 at the Harvard Club in New York, this year’s event promises to be dynamic and full of insightful, intelligence-filled panel discussions largely free of press coverage.

You read that correctly. Only Radio Ink and RBR+TVBR will offer select highlights from Forecast 2022 — and that includes an afternoon Conversation with Gordon Smith and Curtis Legeyt, sponsored by Katz Media Group.

What is the state of the broadcast industry from the Inside the Beltway view?

What are the key legal, regulatory and legislative initiatives that the NAB under Gordon Smith has championed, and are already working to define the future for broadcast media in the U.S.?

QUU CEO Steve Newberry, who worked closely with Smith and Legeyt during his own tenure at the NAB, will moderate the discussion — only at FORECAST 2022.

CPB now has an executive whose job is to assure diversity and inclusion in its HR process.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting named Dr. Stephen Wilkins as senior vice president of human resources and diversity, equity and inclusion, what has become known as DEI in organizational circles. He will start Dec. 6.

“In this new position, he will be responsible for the development and implementation of a human resources strategy that builds on CPB’s commitment to diversity and inclusion,” the organization stated.

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He will report to President/CEO Patricia Harrison. She praised Wilkins for his “organizational leadership, academic training and operational skills that will enable him to work with leaders and staff across the organization to advance a culture grounded in CPB’s commitment to collaboration, teamwork and DEI.”

Wilkins was chief human resources officer and then chief of staff at Alexandria City Public Schools in Alexandria, Va. “During the pandemic, he served on the senior leadership team that restructured the organization, recruited diverse leaders for schools and departments, and developed the division’s five-year strategic plan focused on equity and inclusion.”

Earlier he was on the Pentagon staff and served on the faculty at West Point as an assistant professor of political science. CPB said he “speaks fluent Spanish and has worked in Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean and Canada.”

He has degrees from West Point, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the senior service college at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., as well as a doctorate in administration and leadership from the Richard W. Riley College of Education at Walden University.

Send news of engineering and executive personnel changes to radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post CPB Names a DEI Leader appeared first on Radio World.

In radio’s formative years, most stations were only on the air for several hours in the evening, and the majority of what they broadcast was music. There were a few stations that provided news headlines and sports scores, but listeners did not expect breaking news coverage, nor live play-by-play broadcasts of their favorite teams.

Throughout the early 1920s, as the programming day gradually expanded, so did what was on the air. By the mid-1920s, radio was covering important news events, and many stations began broadcasting major league baseball games, much to the delight of the fans.

But there was one group of fans whose favorite teams never got on the air. If you followed the Chicago American Giants, the Kansas City Monarchs, the Indianapolis ABCs or the other teams in the Negro Leagues, radio ignored you.

In fact, the only way to find out how your team did was to either go to the game or read about it in the Black press. Because America was segregated, it was mainly sportswriters at Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American that offered extensive coverage of Negro Leagues teams.

No matter how well-attended Negro Leagues games were or how much talent the players displayed, radio stations weren’t interested.

Perhaps that wasn’t surprising: In the 1920s, all station owners were white, and they seemed convinced that white listeners wouldn’t care about Negro Leagues baseball — even though newspaper accounts noted that many white people went to the games.

It wasn’t until late 1929 or early 1930 (the exact date is uncertain) when the first Black sportscaster went on the air: Sherman “Jocko” Maxwell was a former semipro baseball player and manager from Newark, N.J. He debuted a five-minute radio show on WNJ (later WNJR) in Newark.

At first, he mainly read sports headlines, but his show went over well with local fans and by 1932, Maxwell was hosting a 15-minute program. By 1933, he was on the air in New York City at WRNY, and then at WHOM, where he hosted his increasingly popular sports show several nights a week.

By 1937, Maxwell was on the air at WWRL, where he was named the station’s sports director in 1942 — the only Black sports director in radio at that time.

Maxwell had an audience of both Black and white listeners, and he had so much credibility that Major League players would often stop by his show for a chat.

He was also a correspondent for the Sporting News, and during the 1930s, he covered some of the Newark Eagles’ Negro Leagues games. This gave him an opportunity to discuss the games on his radio shows, where he sometimes compared certain Black players to their major league counterparts, something most other sports commentators were not doing.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., another Black sportscaster went on the air in the mid-1930s.

Sam Lacy was already a sportswriter for the Washington Tribune who would go on to have a long career with the Baltimore Afro-American.

In the autumn of 1935, he began doing a sports show for WOL. Like Jocko Maxwell, Lacy was a big fan of the Negro Leagues, and both men had served as public address announcers at their team’s ballparks.

After Lacy returned to his sportswriting job, he mentored a young man named Harold Jackson, later better known as Hal Jackson and a major force in Black radio.

Jackson wanted to be a sportscaster, but no station owner in the D.C. area would hire him. He finally got on the air in 1939 at WINX, hosting a music and interview program, and thanks to Lacy, he also was hired as the public address announcer for the Homestead Grays games at Washington’s Griffith Stadium.

But it wasn’t until Aug. 9, 1942, 22 years after the Negro Leagues had been founded, that the first play-by-play broadcasts of Negro Leagues games finally occurred, with Jackson as one of the announcers.

Sponsored by the Baltimore Afro-American, Washington station WWDC broadcast the series featuring the Homestead Grays and the Baltimore Elite Giants. WWDC also agreed to broadcast several other Homestead Grays games, including one against the Kansas City Monarchs in September.

No Negro Leagues games seem to have been broadcast during the next several years. Meanwhile, Sam Lacy and Harold Jackson collaborated on a once-weekly sports show on WINX in 1944, during which they interviewed Negro Leagues players and recapped the games from that week.

Contrary to some internet claims, there is little evidence of any regular play-by-play broadcasts until 1948, when the Cleveland Buckeyes got on the air at station WSRS; the station’s sportscaster Danny Landau did the play-by-play, assisted by sportswriter A.S. “Doc” Young, who covered the Negro Leagues for the Cleveland Call and Post.

But an effort to broadcast the Atlanta Black Crackers games over WEAS in Decatur, Georgia in mid-May 1948 was not as well-received: After one game between the Black Crackers and the Nashville Cubs got on the air, a subsequent broadcast had to be canceled after complaints from what one Black newspaper referred to as “Southern bigots.”

Ironically, by the time more games were about to be broadcast, the Negro Leagues were in decline. Major League Baseball had finally begun to integrate in 1947 with the arrival of Jackie Robinson, and soon, there were questions about whether the Negro Leagues would survive.

The Negro National League disbanded in 1948; the Negro American League struggled on, in weakened form, through the 1950s.

As a media historian and a baseball fan, I am saddened that most radio stations ignored the Negro Leagues when they were at their best. Because so few stations broadcast any of their games — and not until the 1940s — baseball fans were deprived of the chance to follow the exploits of talented (and record-breaking) 1930s players like slugger Josh Gibson and speedster “Cool Papa” Bell or hear about how pitcher Satchel Paige’s legendary career developed.

It was a loss for the fans. But it was a missed opportunity for radio.

Donna Halper is an associate professor of communication and media studies at Lesley University, former broadcaster and radio consultant. She also writes for the Society for American Baseball Research.

The post Missed Opportunity: Radio and Black Baseball appeared first on Radio World.

Tascam has released a new, free application for audio editing — Tascam Podcast Editor.

Intended for the production of voice content such as podcasts, internet radio, audiobooks and voice logs, it is a standalone application available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and in a future update, Android OS. The Podcast Editor software integrates with Tascam’s Mixcast 4 podcast mixer hardware, and supports various functions necessary to publish a program with straight-forward, easy operation.

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Users can cut and paste voice snippets, record to each track, insert background music and jingles, insert sound effects, and control the level of individual tracks. The software is equipped with multiple “voice content export options” that correspond to the desired application, such as internet radio, podcast, and YouTube. Tascam Podcast Editor export files with MP3 and WAV format, but it also has a function to export an image along with audio, aiding users who publish files on YouTube. After exporting the contents, users launch a web browser with the shortcut button of each preferred media hosting site to access the desired upload screen.

Since the Podcast Editor interfaces with the Tascam Mixcast 4 Podcast Station, users can record directly without complicated track routing and assignments using the Mixcast 4. Users can read the data recorded on the SD card of the Mixcast 4 by pressing the Read Mixcast File button, and other options are also available.

The software supports editing with a maximum of 12 tracks/20 channels that can be switched between mono and stereo. VST-plug-ins are supported, enabling users to utilize available VST plug-ins from their own library in addition to the Mixcast 4’s internal effects library.

The Tascam Podcast Editor supports 2Mix, multitrack with WAV, and export with Poly file — enabling one to choose a file format that is easy to use in other editing software. Further, the application is equipped with a “time adjust function” that enables one to adjust the speed of playback without changing the pitch of the voice, along with an “automatic cleanup tool” that makes it easy to remove noise and normalize the recorded voice all at once.

The Tascam Podcast Editor does not require a driver when used with the Mixcast 4, though Windows 10, Version 1909 (Fall 2019 Update) or later is required.

The Podcast Editor can be downloaded from tascam.com.

Send your new equipment news to radioworld@futurenet.com.

Info: http://tascam.com

The post Tascam Podcast Editor Software Debuts appeared first on Radio World.

Here’s something you may want to read while not consuming anything hot: Advertiser spend on TV and social media is twice as high as daily consumption.

That’s the not-so-pleasant takeaway from new WARC analysis, conducted on a global level, of more than 715,000 consumers across 100 markets.

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At 1490 kHz on the AM dial, a 1kw Class C facility with a largely directional signal serves the Laredo, Tex., area.

Until now, it has been associated with regional entity MBM. Soon, an individual will be the licensee of this station, pending FCC approval.

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There’s a new President for Katz Digital Video, the division within national ad sales operation Katz Media Group.

It’s an individual who first began his career in media sales in 1984, as a radio and television specialist working for President Reagan’s reelection campaign.

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SAVANNAH, GA. — Nexstar Media Group has selected a company leader with more than 25 years of broadcast management and sales experience to serve as the new VP/GM of “The CW 33” in Dallas — KDAF-TV.

Taking the position is Marc Hefner, the four-year VP/GM of the NBC affiliate serving Georgia’s Coastal Empire, WSAV-3.

Before that, Hefner spent a decade as VP/GM of The CW Network affiliate serving Jacksonville, Fla., and Brunswick, Ga., WCWJ-TV.

Earlier in his career Hefner worked in sales positions at television stations in Kansas City and Nashville, respectively.

Traci Wilkinson, Nexstar’s broadcasting division SVP/Regional Manager,

“Marc’s familiarity with Nexstar and our broadcasting group will be a real advantage for him as he assumes his new role in Dallas, the country’s fifth largest market,” Wilkinson said. “Over the course of his career, he has consistently demonstrated the ability to significantly grow revenue and profitability by increasing existing advertising market share, identifying non-traditional accretive revenue streams, and developing a variety of innovative cross-platform marketing strategies and sponsorship opportunities. At both WCWJ-TV and
again at WSAV-TV, Marc grew ratings, revenue, and market share, and deepened the station’s relationship with the greater community.”

The growth at WSAV since 2017 is noteworthy, as Savannah is an extremely competitive media market. Here, Gray Television’s WTOC-11 has long dominant the television ratings. In recent years, the CBS affiliate’s competition has strengthened, with Dale Julin and the news team at The E.W. Scripps Co.’s WJCL-22 making significant ratings improvements alongside WSAV. Also in the mix: WTGS-28, the FOX affiliate owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Commenting on his promotion and move to Dallas, Hefner said, “I am genuinely pleased to begin this new role and grateful to Nexstar for giving me the opportunity to manage its broadcasting and digital operations in Dallas. KDAF-TV and its related digital and social media channels are an integral part of the Dallas community and I am looking forward to expanding our audience on-air and on-line and to providing our advertisers with solutions specifically tailored to fit their unique needs. I can’t wait to get started.”

In Savannah, Hefner serves as Treasurer for United Way of the Coast Empire and is a member of the organization’s executive committee.

MIAMI — For more than a decade prior to Wade Davis becoming CEO of Univision Communications, the Univision News arm of the company accomplished a lot with what some insiders lamented was a permanent skeleton crew.

Now under new leadership, those who’ve had something to say about getting more talent in the newsroom have had their wishes come true: Univision is on a hiring spree.

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