Re: Boston Globe Online / Sports / WWZN cuts staff and programming

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>]

<<On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 23:56:41 -0400, "A. Joseph Ross" <lawyer@attorneyross.com> said:
 
> Why not Brookline?

In the city of license game, it is *much* more advantageous for a
petitioner to request a community that has no (or only one) ``local
service''.  Unfortunately, whether a community has ``local service''
is determined solely on the basis of textual comparison with license
records in the FCC database, rather than on some even remotely
rational basis.  By that count, Brookline already has two commercial,
full-time local services, so it would not be useful to propose
Brookline as a new community of license.

The same game is played out with much more significant consequences in
the FM band, where as many as a dozen stations may be shuffled around
to different exurbs in order to move one station into a large market.
If the net result of the moves would take away a community's last
``local service'' -- not that it got any real service anyway, but this
is the FCC we're talking about, not reality -- then the petitioner has
to demonstrate that some larger community would receive its first
``local service''.  This is the game that allowed Dallas to rape the
Sherman-Denison market for FMs over the last decade.

-GAWollman