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The author is membership program director of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. NFCB commentaries are featured regularly at www.radioworld.com.

For much of community radio, the holiday period is a time for stations to do a bit of regrouping. Fall pledge drives are long gone. Giving Tuesday is over. And our year-end campaigns are already in flight. Our listeners and donors are occupied with the hustle of the holidays. Even some of our staff and volunteers are taking a needed and deserved break.

During the holidays, what is an earnest community radio person still at the station to do? The list is longer than we may care to recall!

[Read: Community Broadcaster: Generation Shift]

Studio maintenance is an excellent task to handle during this season. An engineer at my old station simply loved to use the holiday period to open up sound boards and dust, check loose wires, redo the tape that had worn down from people touching mixers, and recalibrate turntables and sundry equipment in master control. If your volunteers are gone, the Christmas and New Year breaks are perfect to flip on your automation system and roll up your sleeves to fix up the little things we neglected during the year.

Not to shame you, but how about cleaning up that desk, or other things around here? It is very easy to let clutter take over our spaces. I spent plenty of dead time during the holidays replacing light bulbs, vacuuming floors, filing papers, and taking down faded fliers from bulletin boards. If the calls are not coming in too much and email has slowed too, this is as wonderful a time as any to tackle the pickup you meant to do during the dog days of summer.

Oh, shoot! Did you forget to do that filing?! You would be surprised how often stations blank on doing their electronic submissions with the Federal Communications Commission, whether it was a quarterly issues report, a biennial ownership filing or — Uh, Oh — Form Two and Three from that Emergency Alert System test all those months ago.

Having conversed with many good folks at the FCC and other agencies, I can tell you the last thing they’re focused in on is dinging you with a hefty fine. However, they do need to ensure the public that you are meeting your obligations in using the airwaves and in service to the noncommercial educational mission to which you are devoted. This next two weeks is an excellent time to dig out the calendar and make sure your station has done its required filings this year. The last headache you ever want is to have your station’s license renewal period reveal missed filing dates.

Holidays make soaking in media a tempting proposition. Especially now, the news cycle could easily suck you in to reading impeachment analyses literally 24 hours a day. However, with the elections ramping up next year, fundraising is likely to be tougher come your spring campaign. How about using the holidays to craft your fundraising messages? Whether your station provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House of Representatives’ deliberations or just a welcome respite from the rancor in the public square, your station has a story to tell. Why are you relevant? How do you enhance your community? Why should people donate to your station over the scores of candidates, nonprofits and interest groups vying for funds in 2020? These are complicated questions that the holidays may give you a little head space to flesh out.

Earlier in the month, I suggested that enterprising people like you might consider creating your New Year’s resolutions. There are also lots of innovations to try out locally. One station formed a book club to engage listeners. And that’s only the beginning. We’re in an era of ambitious ideas. Now is the time to put some on your list for things to do at your community radio station in 2020.

Regardless of how you utilize these holiday weeks, we at Radio World, NFCB and beyond hope your break is restful and recharges you for a fabulous New Year.

The post Community Broadcaster: The Last 2019 To-Dos appeared first on Radio World.

Fig. 1: Damage to your tower fencing is a serious concern — and tower sections do not correct the safety violation.

So when a vandal cuts through your tower fence, Fig. 1 (at right) is an example of how not to prevent further break-ins or correct the safety issue.

Yep, those are tower sections placed along the cut fencing. No names here, to protect the contract engineer who found this; it was not his work.

The FCC takes a harsh view on safety violations like this. An unsecured fence is certainly a safety issue. This is a good reminder to inspect all your station towers and fencing periodically.

Fig. 2: Plastic muffin or mini-cupcake holders are useful in the shop. * * *

Brian Urban was in the audience for a recent episode of Kirk Harnack’s “This Week In Radio Tech” (TWIRT). I was a guest on the program, in which Kirk and I related a number of neat tips for engineers.

One of the tips was to use an aluminum muffin tin to hold small parts as you disassemble equipment. The depressions in the tin keeps parts organized, so they all get reinstalled in the proper order. 

Fig. 3: The small indentations hold parts; the hinged top keeps everything secure. (Co-workers also will enjoy the baked goods that come with the plastic container.)

Brian, who is the coordinator for the Television Studio Lab at Austin Community College, had another suggestion: Grab your phone and take pictures as you disassemble things. Those pictures can be invaluable in showing how a complex assembly goes back together.

Don’t have a muffin tin available? Before you raid your kitchen, treat your staff to some of those grocery store-prepared muffins or mini-cupcakes (Fig. 2). They are sold in flexible plastic containers, usually with a hinged lid. Store the parts in the indentations in the plastic as shown in Fig. 3 and save the muffin tin for baking.

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We so depend on the eagle-eyed readers of this column! 

An example is California’s Robert Lilley, who pointed out that in our discussion about Windows 7 “not genuine” in November, the correct address is www.itechfever.com (the letter “i” was missing!) However, Googling “How to Fix Windows 7 not genuine error” will get you to the itech site, along with hundreds of others. Bob notes that this obviously is a popular subject!  

Robert is still a consultant but these days he consults for radio-navigation systems. Still, he has collected a pretty good toolbox over the years, and it helps him keep the dishwasher running! 

Robert has put together a couple of pages showcasing his on-air career in the late 1950s in West Virginia. We’ve bookmarked them for you at https://tinyurl.com/rw-lilley and https://tinyurl.com/rw-lilley2. You’ll enjoy the sites, especially if you like pictures of vintage studios and equipment.

* * *  Fig. 4: Another example of an EAS receive loop antenna, using PVC tubing.

Lance Jackson is a technology engineer in the Communications Department of Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. Lance enjoyed reading Ken Beckwith’s “how to” article on constructing a PVC EAS Receive Antenna in our Workbench column in late September. 

Lance writes that he built something similar, pictured in Fig. 4, for the university’s station KSUU. In Lance’s iteration, he used 3/4-inch PVC pipe to form a simple square, two feet on each side. Like Ken, he used Cat-5e cable for the wire, looping it through the PVC pipe three or four turns. Since Cat-5e has four pairs of wires, fewer turns were required. Plus, since the Cat-5e cable pairs are already jacketed, you don’t have the problem of trying to snake multiple individual cables through the PVC tubing.  

The wires were soldered the same way Ken did, and the antenna has been in service for 2 1/2 years now and works very well. Lance is one of many engineers who wrote and called, saying how useful these technical how-to articles are. We plan to bring you more (and we want your good ideas)!

See how easy it is to help other engineers? Where else can you earn recertification credit when you share a tip published in Workbench? Thank you for sharing your tips and high-resolution photos by sending them to johnpbisset@gmail.com.

John Bisset has spent 50 years in the broadcasting industry and is still learning. He handles western U.S. radio sales for the Telos Alliance. He holds CPBE certification with the Society of Broadcast Engineers and is a past recipient of the SBE’s Educator of the Year Award.

The post How NOT to Repair Tower Fencing appeared first on Radio World.

In this document, the Media Bureau seeks to update the record in MB Docket No. 03-185 on the operation of analog radio services by digital low power television stations (LPTV) as ancillary or supplementary services.

This document seeks comment on whether the Commission should modify or eliminate its rule (the radio duplication rule) that bars same-service (AM or FM) commercial radio stations from duplicating more than 25% of their total hours of programming in an average broadcast week if the stations have 50% or more contour overlap and are commonly owned or subject to a time brokerage agreement.

When approached about a media project, I start by jumping to the end: “How are we going to measure success?” One would think that as measurement has become more sophisticated, accurate and granular, the reply would simple and direct. Wrong! 

If anything, expected positive outcomes are rarely fully considered before an approach is selected. Once they’ve committed to it, advertising agencies, clients and even stations tend to focus on media efficiencies. Yes, there’s a lot to unpack here!

BAD “IMPRESSIONS”

Ever since ratings were conceived, cost per point (or per thousand) has been touted as the holy grail. Defining success as spending the least to deliver the largest possible audience is perhaps the most misleading way to prove to advertisers that the person placing the campaign is a brilliant champion, looking after the client’s best interests.

The appeal to everyone involved in this oversimplification is that it can be devised with little effort, described as the best use of investment and delivered as a sure means of success.

First off, it is natural to figure that media efficiencies improved with the arrival of digital media in the 1990s. 

In my view, it actually got worse, because the media industry expanded the use of the term “impression” and adopted it as a key metric. 

Advertising had used “impressions” prior to digital, but it was mostly a guess. With websites, the definition was expanded to measure every time a banner ad loaded on page. If there were five banner ads that loaded, that became five impressions. Holy moley — the ad industry could generate thousands, even millions of impressions!! Man, that’s gotta sound great to any client.

The obvious difficulty is that impressions are meaningless if nobody actually notices them or takes action. Even when a user clicks, they don’t spend more than a second or two looking at whatever they’re now viewing because it doesn’t match their expectations. 

In terms of broadcasting, I hope you will agree that not every listener hears every single advertisement. I know this can be painful to admit, but we must look in the mirror. 

[Promo Power: Set Expectations With Advertisers]

I am not advocating that we never use media efficiencies; but we must understand that this one-trick pony does not measure the most crucial component of advertising, which is effectiveness! If one of your salespeople devises a schedule solely based on efficiency and the client’s cash register doesn’t ka-ching, would you say that the campaign was a success?

Advertising — like content creation — is an art, not a science. We measure it because clients expect us to do so and it’s encouraging to have apparent evidence in front of us. However, we must always remember that advertising’s center should be about creativity, relevance and innovation. Advertising that’s written and produced with entertainment, facts and special offers has a much better chance of motivating purchase decisions. 

Haters of my rant against media efficiency dynamics may site the successful utilization of big data in driving results. While big data is beginning to produce results, it is not about media efficiencies, and I’ve yet to encounter anyone in broadcasting manipulating huge databases, so we’ll save that topic for another day.  

AGREE ON EXPECTATIONS

So how do we measure success? 

This starts by having an open discussion with the client to agree on expectations. For example, a client may express that they expect their sales will go up by a certain percentage during and directly after the campaign airs. It’s then up to you to find out how or why they believe this to be an achievable result so you can expand their understanding. If you’re dealing with a client’s agency and they pick a media efficiency goal, you likely have no choice but to comply. It would still be worth trying to dig deeper to understand what the true expected outcome is so you might be able to adjust the creative or scheduling. You might also remind them that nobody ever wins awards based on media efficiency.

Mark Lapidus is a multiplatform media, content and marketing executive, and longtime Radio World contributor. Email mark.lapidus1@gmail.com.

The post Media Efficiency Versus Effectiveness appeared first on Radio World.

Getty Images/Ponsulak.Kunsub

The article “Fires, Your Station and You” by Buc Fitch was a great reminder to take a look around and introduce some common sense into planning for something we hope never happens — a fire.

As the chief of a volunteer fire department, I see lots of foolish and sometimes even borderline criminal things. Our mantra, unfortunately, is “You can’t fix stupid.”

Here are a couple of quick items to add to the sensible fire safety suggestions in that article:

1. All of that wiring and plastic in your station gives off nasty gases when it burns; and though the smoke from plenum rated cable is supposed to be “less toxic,” they stop short of calling it “non-toxic.” Even if the smoke is not obscuring your vision, there’s a good chance you are breathing stuff that your life insurance carrier would prefer you do not. If you can’t knock down a fire quickly with a single extinguisher, consider backing out; and make sure you close the door to limit the oxygen supply to the fire. That last part is very important. As you plan your fire escape strategy with staff, make sure they understand that exiting the building and leaving every door wide open is a great way to provide all the oxygen that a fire needs to spread.
2. Call the fire department — not when your station is already on fire, but before anything happens. Most fire departments are happy to do a “pre-plan” walk-through with you, which may also buy you some good will when they point out that you have code violations. Keep in mind that should those violations be discovered after you have a fire and someone is seriously hurt, the consequences will be significantly more unpleasant than the embarrassment of discovering them as you walk through with the fire department.
3. A pre-plan will not only be informative for you and management but will also give the fire department an opportunity to see the layout of your facility and identify any hazards that might lurk there when they do respond with your building full of smoke and time is of the essence.
4. Fire extinguishers need to be checked and recharged. Since you are going to pay someone to do so, consider having your staff practice with them as part of your ongoing maintenance cycle. The time to learn how to use one correctly is NOT when you actually need to use one.

While on the subject of not learning things when you need to use them, consider bringing in a CPR instructor to do a class for your staff. One of your fellow employees might save your life, and they will certainly be grateful if they save a family member using training you forced them to take.

Ron Kumetz N1WT

Director of Engineering, Broadcast Devices Inc.

Alburgh, Vt.

The post You Can’t Fix Stoopid: Fire Safety Suggestions for Radio appeared first on Radio World.

Media Bureau Order to reinstate the 2016 Quadrennial Media Ownership Rules consistent with the mandate issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Media Bureau announces procedures for processing license renewal applications for commercial radio stations in light of the mandate issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Media Bureau announces the effective date of the remaining KidVid rules, availability and extension of time to file the revised children's television programming report in LMS, and guidance concerning the filing of final quarterly commercial limits.

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Media Bureau announces procedures for processing assignment (FCC Form 314) and transfer of control (FCC Form 315) applications for commercial radio and TV stations in light of the mandate issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that IPAWS-OPEN release 3.10 went live on Dec. 18, offering several new enhancements, including support for 360-character alerts.

WEA, or Wireless Emergency Alerts, is used to send warnings about dangerous weather, missing children and other emergency situations to the public via their wireless phones and mobile devices.

The latest version of WEA also supports Spanish-language alerts, the ability to reach 100% of a targeted area without an overshoot of more than 1/10 of a mile as well as enhancements to the WEA test and public safety categories.

However, leveraging the enhancements requires more than an update to IPAWS, FEMA said. Wireless provides will need to update their networks nationwide, their customers’ phones and the software authorities rely upon to send alerts.

While the IPAWS Program Management Office (PMO) has tested and confirmed wireless providers can receive enhanced WEA messages from IPAWS, it will take time for wireless customers around the country to receive enhanced WEA on their phones, FEMA said.

IPAWS PMO also has confirmed that most of the software used by alerting authorities around the country has been upgraded and tested by FEMA; however, it is possible that not all of the alerting authorities are ready to write alerts taking advantage of the new WEA enhancements, FEMA said.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai issued his own statement about the WEA update:

“One of my key public safety priorities has been to ensure that America’s emergency alerting system meets the needs of public safety officials and the communities they serve. With these improvements, Wireless Emergency Alerts are now an even more powerful tool for emergency managers to warn and protect the public. These improvements respond to input we’ve received from the public safety community and will help save lives.”

This is expansion of mobile services is part of the architecture for delivery information during emergencies that broadcasters also take part in.

More information is available by emailing FEMA IPAWS PMO.

 

The post Latest Enhancements For Wireless Emergency Alerts Go Live appeared first on Radio World.

An important note for all TV and radio broadcasters — if you aren’t keeping up your online public file, penalties may be headed your way.

In March 2018, radio and television stations were required to transition their public inspection files to an online public inspection file system, or OPIF. The Federal Communications Commission told the National Association of Broadcasters that not only have some broadcasters failed to keep their files up to date but some broadcasters have not even started the process by activating their online public file.

While the FCC has apparently emailed warning notices to some stations, the NAB is strongly advising stations to take action now by confirming that they are correctly complying with current public file rules, according to a blog post by the Alabama Broadcasters Association.

[Read: AM Station Hit with $15,000 Forfeiture After Public File Lapse]

According to the ABA, FCC staff are now in the process of reviewing the online public file system for those still lacking an online public file, checking for dormant online public files, and looking for required items that are missing or late-filed.

It’s important to note that materials entered into the OPIF system are time- and date-stamped, so timely filing is essential. According to ABA, those out of compliance should expect to incur a fine.

“Significantly, the license renewal cycle is well underway for radio stations, and failure to properly maintain the public file takes on additional importance because stations must certify that their public file has been complete and up-to-date at all times during the license term, or disclose violations,” the ABA said in a newsletter to its member stations. “The FCC considers a lack of candor in renewal applications an extremely serious violation.”

In addition to fines, an incomplete online public file can lead to delays in the license renewal process.

Broadcasters should also closely focus on uploading their Quarterly Issues/Program lists, which show exactly how a station has addressed the needs and interests of its community. These lists must track issues and programs starting with the very first year in a station’s typical eight-year license term. “Failure to comply can be extremely costly,” the ABA said.

Stations should also promptly upload other required materials including their annual EEO Public File Reports and children’s television reports.

Keep in mind too that attempting to avoid enforcement by uploading the lists after their due date — without disclosure this the FCC — may increase the enforcement liability. The public can track online which stations have most recently uploaded public files on the FCC’s database.

The first place to start if you don’t know where to begin? Talk to your station’s legal counsel.

 

The post Out-of-Date Online Files Being Investigated by FCC appeared first on Radio World.