Re: Donna gets heard - and seen! (on Nightline, of course)

["Sean Smyth" <ssmyth@suscom.net>]

Aaron Read writes:
> At 09:37 AM 5/29/2003, SteveOrdinetz wrote:
> >And without these economies of scale, how many of these stations would
> >have gone dark by now?  That's REALLY serving the public.
>
> Isn't it?  A station that sucks goes off the air, thus providing a benefit
> in one of two ways: either A, someone else will come along and try a new
> idea with it, thus providing greater access to the (so-called) public
> airwaves.  Or B, the station stays dark, the allocation disappears, and
> there's a little less interference to the rest of the dial still in
operation.

On one of the radio boards I read regularly, a station owner was complaining
about the new rules. He stated that newspapers were going to be buying up
radio stations left and right, and then subsequently turning in the license
to corner the ad market for themselves. (The daily paper in Schuykill
County, Pa., has turned in a pair of AM licenses in the past 15 years (one
very recently) and he felt that would become the trend, not the norm.)

My argument is this: even if every daily newspaper out there bought up the
radio station licenses and turned them in en masse, there would be two
benefits:
    1. The dial would be free of much interference.
    2. Entrepreneurs, always out to make a buck, would seek to break the
strangle-hold that one organization had on the local ad market and offer a
different and better avenue for advertisers. At the same time, people
applying for these new stations would (going on the above-stated
Armageddon-for-radio-like theory offered by the station owner) have much
better facilities than the older graveyarders (remember, newspapers are
going to turn in every license, so he says). These facilities should
theoretically cost less to operate, since fewer graveyarders means fewer
ridiculous 6-tower arrays, with signals beaming one direction by day and
another by night, to power up.

So I basically just repeated what Aaron said, in a much more lengthy
fashion. :-)