This has been a busy week for the American press. Last Friday, President Trump announced on Truth Social that three major outlets—CNN, MS Now, and Politico—were banned from White House grounds “effective immediately,” because of their negative coverage and “fake…
As we reported this week, the confirmation hearing for Danielle Thumann Severs, President Trump’s nominee to fill one of the two vacant FCC commissioner seats, has been scheduled for today (9/17). If confirmed, she will shift the composition of the…
When I was consulting a radio station in upstate New York, we had an operations manager who really got it. He once told me, “If you have ten problems and one of them is a sales problem, you have one…
You may have seen the story we ran last week about the FCC granting a petition from iHeart media to raise the cap on foreign investments. Some of our readers do business with foreign entities and might be wondering whether…
The rules are in place, but the enforcement sucks I was talking to a good radio operator a few days ago, and they were telling me about another radio station in their market that had been breaking all the rules…
As we look ahead to 2026, I don’t see an especially rosy path for radio, and here’s why: Large major-market group owners are killing radio, with round after round of cost-cutting that rarely results in profit. As I have reported…
As somebody once said, defending and growing radio is like a big game of Whac-A-Mole; we are constantly beating down popular but totally wrong impressions about our business. Our December 25 issue features a couple of bullish articles on radio,…
As we head into the final week of 2025, I want to express my appreciation and gratitude for your readership and support of our newsletter. We’ve had, as we say in the Midwest, an “interesting” year, what with a change…
Connoisseur Media is beginning the process of selling off some of the smaller Alpha Media stations they acquired. That makes sense; these stations just don’t fit the Connoisseur operating model. In a statement about the two stations they have so…
I was listening to a client station’s programming on hold the other day, when a spot came on which was obviously ”voiced” by artificial intelligence. It sounded horrible. It was mechanical, too perfect—and completely without soul or any human characteristics…
