"Hometown Tradition" Does NOT Continue At WCCM

[Doug Drown]

My two cents' worth, as a broadcasting nonprofessional:  That FCC rule about
newspaper/radio/TV cross-ownership should be scrapped.  It's meaningless,
and personally I think it was a non-issue to begin with.  Some newspapers
were actively involved in the news operations of their co-owned stations;
others were not.  WGAN AM-FM-TV in Portland were owned by Guy Gannett for
decades, but Gannett's three Portland newspapers were hardly ever mentioned
on the air, and the broadcasting stations and newspapers were virtually
entirely separate operations.  It's ironic after the WGAN split-up, Harron
Communications, the owners of rival TV station WMTW, struck up a deal with
the Press Herald (now owned by the Blethen family of Washington state) to do
joint news coverage.  That sort of thing has happened in a lot of cities.

I can see limiting the number of broadcasting stations that a newspaper can
own in a given metro area so as not to create a media monopoly, but
otherwise I don't see how it's a problem.

-Doug



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Laurence Glavin" <lglavin@mail.com>
To: <boston-radio-interest@rolinin.bostonradio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 1:08 PM
Subject: "Hometown Tradition" Does NOT Continue At WCCM


> I noticed that any kind of local news seems to have disappeared from
> WCCM-AM 1490, Haverhill-Lawrence.  Early in the day, they pick up Doug
> Stephan's "Good Day" show with news at the top-of-the-hour from the
> USA Radio network, but no local cutins going from one to the other.
> Mid-mornings they run program-length commercials that at least are
> real call-in shows, but nonetheless sponsored by area businesses...
> still no local news, not even at noon.  Yet part of the station ID
> package includes the slogan "the hometown tradition continues".
> Some of you may be aware that one of the missing soldiers in Iraq
> is from Lawrence, MA, but on WCCM today, the only reference to him
> has come through a network feed. A certain ubiquitous radio scribe
> recently opined that local ownership would be the best way to provide
> local service to a small-market city, but here we have a radio station
> owned in part by a NEWSPAPER (but for how much longer?) with NO
> NEWS AT ALL!
>
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