Supreme Court sides with FCC in loosened Media Ownership rules

[Ct Yankee]

Perfect timing for the owners of Tribune Publishing currently in attempts to sell organization or parts thereof.  Price probably jumped a little this morning.

https://www.wctrib.com/news/nation/6964348-U.S.-Supreme-Court-lets-FCC-loosen-media-ownership-rules

[redhat]

I also heard through the grapevine that ihateradio is making large cuts to engineering and programming.  Some engineers are now tasked with keeping 50 or more signals on.  There is also rumors that the format lab is back again with a new twist....audio will now originate from a system at the transmitter.  All stations running the same format will run the same log, coast to coast.

This comes on the coat tails of a UK company now controlling almost half of the company.  The end is nigh.

+-RH

[BoomboxDX]

Radio has lost maybe 50-60% of their revenue (when accounted for inflation) since 2005. The corona economic impacts have only cut in to what revenue is left.

Expect a lot of changes all over. It isn't just IHeart that has had cuts. Some Hubbard, Sinclair, Salem and Entercom radio stations have also seen some cuts. Now that Entercom has changed names, I would expect that somewhere down the line other changes are in order as well.

Consolidation has its negatives, but it can keep marginal stations on the air. After Dereg 1996, when a company owned 'clusters' of stations, marginal stations usually were programmed with formats that weren't super popular (classic country, oldies, classic hits, sports talk networks, alternative talk, standards, etc.) just to keep the stick on the air, and they'd market the station as an add-on for commercial sales, as usually another station in the cluster was making the big money.