Frosty Troy (The Oklahoma Observer, 10 September) quotes an unnamed "former TV reporter":

Frosty's been harping on this for at least twenty years; I sent him a particularly heinous example of non-news from Los Angeles back in 1988. Things have not improved a great deal.

And another thing:

That's scary, if nobody in Tulsa, where there's more serious news/talk competition than there is in Oklahoma City, bothers to position a reporter at the Capitol.

The New York Times Company will sell its nine television stations and refocus on its print and Internet properties.

The official company statement:

And they've been expressing concerns to investors:

Even allowing for the fact that all such statements to investors are primarily intended as CYA devices, it's no particular secret that NYT Class A stock has been tanking for almost a year, and the divestiture would put some cash in the company coffers while investors are staying away.

NYT operates television stations in eight mostly middle-sized markets, all of them solo operations except in Oklahoma City, where the company owns KFOR-TV (an affiliate of NBC) and KAUT (an affiliate of MyNetworkTV). There is no indication so far as to whether the stations will be dealt as a group or sold off to individual buyers.

Stories are circulating that leftish radio network Air America Radio is flirting (in a nonsexist manner, of course) with bankruptcy; if they do in fact go under, their affiliates might find themselves scrambling for new programming.

The following formats might draw comparable, or even higher, audience numbers:

10. All Def Leppard, All The Time
    
9. The British Invasion: Songs of the War of 1812
   
8. American Idol Rejects
   
7. Emergency Alert System tests
   
6. Disco Karachi (live from Pakistan)
   
5. The Expurgated Howard Stern *
   
4. Radio NASCAR
   
3. Pat Buchanan's All-American Radio Xenophobe
   
2. The Golf Channel
   
1. Paul Harvey saying "Good day!" every twenty seconds
   

* At an estimated fourteen minutes per day, this alone would not be sufficient to fill a daily schedule.

News Item:

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is "dismayed":

I can appreciate Boxer's dismay: whatever the alleged benefits of media consolidation, they are, I think, outweighed by the inevitably higher level of media homogenization that results.

The report claims that locally-owned stations put on more news:

Of the major-network affiliates in Oklahoma City, only one can be construed as "local": KWTV, the CBS outlet, owned by Griffin Communications LLC, whose holdings include two other stations, both in Tulsa. I avoid watching TV news as a general rule — bad for my dyspepsia — but if there's any indication that News 9 (or Tulsa's The News on 6) actually put on more news than their competitors, I'd like to hear about it. (And if there isn't, I'd like to hear about that too.)

(Disclosure: Yours truly was once interviewed by News 9. Good thing it wasn't twice.)

Now that I think about it, it's a perfectly legitimate question:

"Can they put Jack FM on AM?"

Apparently, they did, for a while anyway. Lou Pickney's VarietyHits.com, which tracks Jack and Bob and Sam and all those other characters, reports:

I mention in passing that KJAC was the first Jack FM station in the US, following a successful launch in Canada.

The crack young staff of The Hatemonger's Quarterly have thought about the Air America Radio bankruptcy filing, and have decided that it's the government's fault:

There are a couple of obviously-pickable nits here:

• A Prairie Home Companion, despite its ubiquity on NPR stations, is not in fact an NPR production.

• Taxpayer funding via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a relatively small percentage of NPR's budget, a somewhat-higher (but still small) percentage of local NPR affiliate budgets.
  

Still, the Hatemongers' point seems valid: there is only so much audience for any given radio format. NPR is the 800-pound gorilla in the left-of-political-center marketplace; farther to the left, there are a handful of community stations and the Pacifica network, and that's about it.

Tomorrow, WWLS-FM, the FM side of the Sports Animal, will move to 97.9, displacing KKWD, the erstwhile Wild 97.9, which will set up shop at the vacated 104.9 spot.

Precisely why this is being done is unclear to me: both of these are 6-kw facilities with essentially identical coverage areas. KKWD is promoting the arrival of HD Radio at the new frequency, which is all very well and good, since according to Ibiquity, the 104.9 spot is already set up for HD. But this invites the question: why couldn't Citadel add HD Radio at 97.9?

The answer, I'm guessing, has to do with adjacent-channel interference. Apparently the digital component of an HD Radio signal, while fitting within the assigned spectrum space, can leak over a channel (or two) in lower-quality receivers, which is most of them.

But I have other reservations about this entire digital-ish radio scheme. Robert Conrad heads up WCLV in Cleveland (coincidentally, at 104.9), and he's not thrilled with it at all:

No Oklahoma City station is using the HD2/HD3 channels for alternate programming, so far as I know. (Clear Channel's Tulsa FMs are.)

And if you thought HD in radio meant the same thing as HD in television, think again:

I will, of course, keep one preset for the Sports Animal: on AM, at 640.

I don't watch too much TV — practically none this time of year, what with the deluge of noxious political spots — so I probably won't be an early HDTV adopter.

And if I were going to be, Matt Deatherage would have talked me out of it:

And it goes on and on. Color me unsold on the concept for now.

(A plug here for HDTV in Oklahoma, which covers issues of this sort, and to which Mr Deatherage is a contributor.)

Former Sinclair Broadcast Group vice-president Mark Hyman, who has been delivering daily commentaries on Sinclair stations' news broadcasts, is giving up his slot at the end of the month, saying that he's "exhausted" and wants "to focus more on family activities."

Hyman's "The Point" was a regular feature of Sinclair's NewsCentral offerings, and was regularly applauded and/or excoriated for its distinct right-wing flavor. (Modest excoriation here.)

Sinclair CEO David Smith said that "The Point" has "invoked thoughtful discussions on many topics and across all demographics."

My own take, from January 2004:

"The Point" airs locally on KOKH, a Fox affiliate.

In the last couple of weeks, KQOB, aka Bob FM, has revamped its morning show and gone to Christmas music 24/7. The Rumor Mill™ seized upon this as an indication that there's a format change coming around the first of the year.

I'll throw a few cups of kerosene on the fire:

• After a steady 3.5-to-5 share for some time, Bob dropped to a 2.9 in the summer ratings book.
  
• The Bob format, as played here, sort of splits the difference between classic rock and Jack FM, and this is a particularly strong classic-rock market — just ask the guys at KRXO, who have run this format for nineteen years.
  
• Bob is the odd duck in the local Citadel Broadcasting portfolio, since they don't actually own it: they program it under an agreement with the real owner, Chisholm Trail Broadcasting of Enid.
  
• Bob is licensed to Enid/Oklahoma City; its tower is located near Crescent, and its signal vanishes quickly south of Oklahoma City, creating openings for Jack FM (KOJK Blanchard) and Kool 105.5 (KWCO Chickasha), both of which vend some variation on the Variety Hits theme.
  

According to Lou Pickney, who keeps track of these matters, the Next Big Thing is "Movin", a sort of Rhythmic Adult Contemporary format that targets women 25-44. The rationale makes sense:

I can certainly understand someone being bored with rock-based Hot AC, like Citadel's KYIS (KISS) FM.

What is Bob to do? The reflexive action is to go see what's happening in a hipper town, which some of us may define as "a place where the top two radio stations aren't both country," and rip them off follow their example. The nearest generally-acknowledged hotbed of hipness is Austin, Texas, and — whoops: the top two radio stations are both country and, what's more, both owned by Clear Channel. (If you were wondering why CC doesn't flip either KXY or the Twister, now you know.)

There are three possible options I could sort of endorse, none of which I expect to take place:

1. Bring back smooth jazz. (It's failed here once.)
   
2. Switch to Triple A. (Of the three, this is the one I prefer, but the least likely.)
   
3. Move the regional-Mexican "La Indomable" to Bob's slot, rename it WKY-FM to match the AM, and bring back the Spy on 105.3.
   

(Disclosure: Arbitron, the firm which produces the standard industry ratings, has been pestering me for two weeks to start keeping a diary as part of their local survey. I have declined.)

With everybody defecting to satellite or shuffling their iPods, allegedly there's no audience left for good old FM, let alone even-older AM.

But wait:

San Francisco-based KYOU ("Open Source Radio") says that's exactly what they do:

This does not necessarily have anything to do with the fact that I finally got around to replacing my 31-year-old microphone last week.

Radio is ruled these days by research, and research indicates that this batch of craptacular tune-like objects scored highest among microcephalics surveyed listeners this past year.

In other words, if you own a station and you have one of these formats, you are expected to set those specific tracks at the very heart of your rotation, because the hope of hearing them is what keeps the audience from pushing the Scan button during your string of twelve consecutive spots at 44 minutes after the hour.

Aside to Apple: This list, all by itself, should sell a few thousand iPods to an audience increasingly gruntled by these discs.

The New York Times is on its way out of the television business, having dealt its Broadcast Media Group to Oak Hill Capital Partners, a diversified investment firm with lots of holdings, none of them in broadcast. The Times retains its two New York radio stations, WQXR (classical) and WQEW (Radio Disney under a local marketing agreement).

So what happens to KFOR and KAUT, the two Oklahoma City stations that were sold? Nothing, at least at first. Oak Hill has given no indication that it plans to sell off any of the stations they're buying.

Oak Hill was founded by Fort Worth billionaire Robert Bass; among the partners are Phil Knight of Nike and Microsoft's Bill Gates.

That's the title of a radio program developed by Abram Ross in 1948, and it's mentioned in a retrospective of black radio in Oklahoma in this morning's Oklahoman, compiled by Oklahoma Historical Society columnist Max Nichols. One of the more disheartening aspects of it all was the fact that there was this tremendous music scene in Deep Deuce in the 1920s and 1930s that wasn't even slightly reflected by Oklahoma City radio. (Current OKC bands will sigh and go "So what else is new?)

In the late 1940s, things started to change, albeit slowly. Black churches got their services on the air; station KBYE, founded in 1946, began adding programs aimed at the African-American audience. The legendary Ben Tipton, later a fixture at KOCO-TV and eventually an Oklahoma City Councilman — just in case you thought Mick Cornett did it first — was arguably the first black radio star in these parts. (Tipton's last radio gig, if I remember correctly, was at the much-missed KAEZ, a black-owned station that broadcast from on top of a hill at 23rd and Coltrane.) KBYE, which later added an FM service, sustained its audience into the 1970s, the AM side concentrating on gospel, the FM on popular soul music. The go-to guy in "urban" radio these days, of course, is Russell M. Perry, publisher of the Black Chronicle, who started with one AM daytimer and now owns fourteen stations, including KRMP/KVSP in Oklahoma City.

All this is to herald an Historical Society production, scheduled for the 10th of February, titled "History of African Americans in Oklahoma Radio Broadcasting."

It was Billy Joel, I think, who addressed the issue most directly:

But that was 1974; in this era of InstaEverything, even 3:05 is an eternity. I once put together a compilation CD with no songs over two minutes, which if nothing else makes for rather more variety: 42 tracks in just under 80 minutes. Radio wouldn't dare do this.

Well, actually, they would. Enter Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), which unapologetically edits your standard classic-rock tracks down to the essential stuff. Purists, of course, will be horrified. Stations, they say, should be delighted:

I sampled some SASS, and I think I'd notice that they'd boiled down Manfred Mann's take on Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light," which runs around 7:05 in its LP incarnation and 3:48 as a single, to a startling 1:45 — but it would take probably half a minute for it to sink in, and by then they're a third of the way through the next song.

So I'm inclined to think this would work better than you'd think. Try to imagine Iron Butterfly's infamous psychotrope "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" in two minutes flat. I did.

There was media rumble at the end of February about country music returning to the Los Angeles FM radio dial after a six-month absence, and it didn't occur to me to ask what it had replaced.

Now I know:

Two college stations will continue with classical formats on FM: KCSN (Cal State Northridge) and KUSC (University of Southern California).

Much to my amazement, I now have HD. Sort of.

Monday I ordered this little LCD HDTV set for not a whole lot of money, and it arrived today in entirely too pretty a box.

In fact, that may be the whole issue with this set: it's too pretty. Functionality is there, mostly, but you have to look for it, and my capacity for finding such seems to be on the wane of late.

For instance: this set seemed perfect, at a mere 15 lb, for the articulated arm that sticks out of the bedroom wall to accommodate a television set. And indeed the arm isn't strained in the least. On the downside, the set is too narrow to take full advantage of the supports provided, and there is one noticeable form of strain: eyestrain, since I apparently can't see up that high anymore without craning my neck, which would cause yet another noticeable form of strain.

So it sits on the dresser, atop a DVD player. Noticeable good things:

• This being a factory refurb, there might be some concern over bad pixels. I didn't see any.

• The picture was nearly perfect as shipped; I didn't make any of my usual video tweaks.

• Distinctly better tuner than my Sony Wega.
  

Noticeable bad things:

• The program guide is utterly useless, since it's dependent on having the correct time, and there's apparently no way to set the time manually: you have to rely on PBS's time signal, which OETA doesn't deign to transmit. (I never could get the Sony to pick up the time, either.)

• Actually, that's about it.
  

And yes, this was bought from Woot, which sold over a thousand of them in nine and a half hours, most of which were dark.

On Wednesday I took delivery of a new television set, and few things in life make as little sense together as "20-inch" and "widescreen." Nonetheless, this is an HD-capable box with an ATSC tuner, and I was able to stare in mesmerized disbelief at the 1080i (1920 x 1080 pixels) broadcasts on CBS, NBC and OETA.

It is a measure of potential obsessiveness, I think, that I put in a bid on eBay this morning for another LaserDisc player, despite the fact that I have a working LD machine already, and a slightly newer one at that. (Then again, this model plays both sides of the disc without having to get up and turn it over, which appeals to my inner sybarite.) I was ultimately outbid, which is perhaps just as well, inasmuch as I couldn't really connect it up properly: my DVD player is connected up via S-Video and while there's a composite input to spare, there's no extra audio input to be had. I suppose I could avoid this by buying a new DVD player with HDMI — I thought the one I had was so equipped, and subsequently discovered the HDMI-like jack to be something else entirely — but I tend to be distrustful of any technology which is enthusiastically endorsed by content providers on general principle.

From the instructions for the remote to my little LCD HDTV:

Of course, some of us prefer the luxury of a dedicated DVD rewinder.

The sale of ABC Radio to Citadel is scheduled to close next week, and the FCC approved the deal on condition that Citadel spin off eleven radio stations. Two of them are in this market: KKWD (Wild 104.9) and KINB (La Indomable 105.3). The stations will be transferred to something called "The Last Bastion Station Trust," headed by Elliott Evers, and Mr Evers has been given his marching orders [link goes to a Microsoft Word file] as follows:

Not incidentally, the transfer will eliminate the need for Citadel's ongoing waiver of market-concentration rules to continue to operate Chisholm Trail Broadcasting's KQOB (Bob FM 96.9) under a local-marketing agreement.

So what happens to these two smallish stations? (And now you know why the Sports Animal was moved from 104.9 to 97.9, swapping with Wild, some months back.) Nothing, at first; but sooner or later, Evers is going to have to find buyers, and those buyers may not wish to maintain the existing formats, especially since both stations fall well into the bottom half of the local ratings.

In the meantime, if you're a minority or a female (or both), you are encouraged — "strongly," yet — to put in a bid.

I'm getting a fair amount of traffic looking for information on the WKY countdown, which isn't really referenced here.

I found this tidbit at Wikipedia:

Nothing too weird, but then this follows:

Chain, meet puller.

Update, 3:40 pm: Received via email forward:

Chain successfully pulled. (We've had pirates before, and they were nabbed a lot quicker.)

Update, 9 am, 20 June: Dead silence for about fifteen seconds, and then "Nothing bad is going to happen" from Mayor Cornett. What we have here is a non-Sports Animal sports station.

Whoop-de-freaking-doo.

La Shawn Barber eviscerates that mostly-silly study which calls for Serious Action to counteract all those awful right-wing radio shows that I make a point of not listening to. (She's posted a PDF copy of it here.) For the most part, I agree with her conclusions: the left is trying to gain by governmental means what it likely could never obtain in an actual free marketplace.

But this invites the question: is broadcast radio truly a free marketplace? Certainly the FCC won't stop you from putting up a station of your own — provided there's an open allocation, which there probably isn't. (You might be able to wangle an LPFM license, maybe; I can't, at least from where I live, as there are no open channels.)

In 1996, Section 202 of the Telecommunications Act established a sliding scale for how many stations an individual entity could operate in a given market: in the largest markets, up to eight stations can be under common ownership. We've had eleven years of this now, and can anyone actually say that radio is better today? It certainly isn't more profitable: Clear Channel, arguably the Wal-Mart of the industry, went private last year and sold off 30 percent of its stations after a succession of bad quarters. Disney unloaded ABC Radio onto Citadel, who had to unload 11 stations to comply with the Feds. CBS sold ten stations last year. None of this feverish station-trading changed the general sound of things very much.

That said, though, I have a philosophical bias in favor of more players rather than fewer, and the two think tanks who produced that study proposed a change in the cap laws which I don't think would be particularly unreasonable. They recommend a 5-percent cap nationwide — no single entity can own or control more than 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM stations (do LPFMs and translators count?) — and a reduced cap in individual markets: four in the largest (45 stations and up), three in the next group (30-44), then two, finally one in stations with 14 stations or fewer. Actually counting the stations might prove problematic: Radio-Locator.com lists 47 in and around Oklahoma City, but some of them are clearly duplicates (for instance, KGOU/KROU, or KQCV-FM and its two translators, or the Sports Animal AM/FM pair). I'm thinking we'd fall into the 30-44 group, in which case the local cap would be three. Almost a dozen stations would be up for grabs. There is of course no guarantee that things would suck less; theoretically, they could get worse. But I'm old enough to remember the old 7-7-7 rule: until 1985, you could own a total of 14 radio stations — seven AM, seven FM — and seven TV stations, no more than five of which could be on the VHF band. Now maybe that's too few for contemporary conditions; but until I see some evidence that ownership of truly huge segments of spectrum actually produces some benefits other than dubious economies of scale, I'm going to continue to believe that the way it was is better than the way it is.

Update, 2 pm: As of yesterday (when I wrote this piece) there is something called the Local Community Radio Act of 2007, which would loosen some of the restrictions on LPFM. Jesse Walker has the story.

Admittedly, that's a tad misleading, since the format isn't actually dead. On the other hand, it seems like every year a commercial station that used to play classical music starts playing something else.

In Milwaukee, that "something else" is ersatz jazz:

This is news you wouldn't even tell Tchaikovsky.

Two observations:

• "Smooth jazz" is neither smooth nor jazz.

• A 2 rating evidently isn't enough to sustain a format anymore. And the top-rated commercial classical station in a major market — KDFC in San Francisco — pulls around a 3.5.
  

I should note that there was a brief period when you could tune in "smooth jazz" in Oklahoma City; it was on my first group of presets at the time, although I reserved the right to push the next button at the first sign of the strangled-duck noises made by Kenny G. I wouldn't mind if it returned, subject to the same provisions. And anyway, our classical station, noncommercial as it is, isn't going anywhere.

(Via triticale.)

In the summer of 2005, Jack FM came to New York, and Michele said this:

I wonder what she'll say when it comes back:

And it's not hard to see why:

Explanation of title: "Alternate Title" was a record by the Monkees. In the US, it was titled "Randy Scouse Git", but this probably would not have gone over well among some of the snivelling little rat-faced gits in the UK, hence the "Alternate Title." And frankly, I had no reason to believe anyone would think kindly of the first title I'd chosen for this piece, which was "Jack off next week in NYC."

Will there be an attempt to restore the old-and-busted Fairness Doctrine for broadcast media? Not if Air America's Thom Hartmann has anything to say about it:

There are a couple of things askew here — Apple, once upon a time, had a market share far greater than 4.8 percent, and 10 percent of the content does not necessarily equal 10 percent of the audience — but otherwise Hartmann's nailed it. New formats do not flourish overnight. But should they catch on in a few major markets, others will take notice. (Jack FM was on in Canada for a year and a half before any US station picked it up.)

And the competition? There is that panoply of right-wing commentators, but perhaps the biggest threat to commercial "progressive" broadcasting is good ol' National Public Radio, a reliably left-wing bunch, firmly entrenched, pretty much ubiquitous, and known to receive actual checks from some of us center-right types. It goes without saying, though, that there are people for whom NPR is insufficiently leftish.

I can see one other possible snag: old-time radio guys, a lot of whom are still around, hear the word "progressive" and think it's the old FM album-rock format from the 1970s. Ultimately it may be necessary to coin another term. What is not necessary, of course, is any sort of government action.

I've been reading over the FCC's "final" DTV assignments, for use in the brave new post-analog world of television beginning in February 2009, which were issued earlier this month, and in Oklahoma, at least, there are few surprises. The following channels are assigned to Oklahoma City: 7, 9, 13, 15, 24, 27, 33, 40, 50 and 51. Shawnee gets channel 29, Norman channel 46. (The Norman station, KOCM, has no digital signal presently; it will begin digital broadcasts on the day of the Big Switch.)

One thing that strikes me as odd is the assignment of both channels 8 and 10 to Tulsa. KTUL, analog channel 8, currently broadcasts in digital on channel 10; I suppose they're keeping 8 open in case there is an issue with KOED, the Tulsa OETA station, which is going back to channel 11. OETA had apparently requested an increase in antenna height for KOED, which the FCC said would increase potential interference to KTUL on channel 10.

There will be no low-band VHF stations (channels 2 through 6) in Oklahoma after the transition, and very few nationwide. One reason, perhaps, is the possibility of interference caused by household electrical equipment, making reception on those channels more problematic. What's more, contemporary antennas (remember those?) tend to work better on high-band VHF (7 through 13) and UHF (14-up) channels.

The effect this will have on cable channel assignments is unclear, at least to me, but then digital reception over cable baffles me anyway. OETA runs four digital channels in the city, at 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 and 14.4; on Cox Digital Cable they're on 111, 112, 113 and 114. If you don't have digital cable, as I don't, but you do have a QAM tuner, as I do, you'll find them at 110-111, 102-112, 105-113 and 105-114. (OETA HD, which apparently is available on cable more often than it is over the air, shows up here at 106-713.) Life would be simpler, I suppose, with an actual set-top box, but I resist that sort of thing.

I did one actual Vent (#541) during World Tour '07, and one paragraph therefrom has come back to haunt me:

And now 96 Wave is history. From Lou Pickney's VarietyHits.com:

What's weird about this is that Chuck FM will apparently be leaving Chucktown:

Pickney speculates that this is a temporary move while a multiplicity of stations are shuffled, and the result will be something like this:

Who loses in this shuffle? Bamberg's WWBD is moving from that city to the Isle of Palms, east of Charleston, about 90 miles away, but, says its owner, Bamberg/Orangeburg loses nothing in the deal:

Which suggests to me that WNKT St George, which is moving to Eastover in this deal, presumably close enough to Orangeburg, will take over the Bad Dog format. Definitely a change from Cat Country.

On the other hand, I have to agree with former WWBD owner Vic Whetstone:

As I wrote in Vent #103 in 1998:

If anything, this process seems to have accelerated in the nine years since.

XM satellite radio sends an email to a subscriber:

Subscriber notes:

I think I'll go stuff a few more tunes onto my Walkman.

Russell M. Perry's radio empire has expanded into Georgia: the Oklahoma City-based broadcaster has acquired five stations in the Augusta, Georgia area from Radio One.

True to form, Perry is going with what's worked for him in Oklahoma:

Perry's six-station Duncan/Lawton cluster runs six different formats, including country station KKEN.

Apparently Perry won't be able to use the "Blazin' Hip-Hop and R&B" imaging from KVSP Anadarko/Oklahoma City in Georgia: Clear Channel is already using it on their urban-formatted outlet.

Radio One, which has had a rough year, owns 55 stations in 18 cities plus Giant magazine; Perry is paying them $3.1 million for the Augusta cluster.

The Oklahoman's Jim Stafford wonders if maybe the time has come for HD Radio:

Maybe so. I haven't found any compelling reason to try it out. (Here's a list of what's out there; a perfunctory glance at the listings suggests that Tulsa stations have embraced the possibilities more than Oklahoma City stations have, which doesn't surprise me; Tulsa, as a radio market, has always struck me as slightly less hidebound than Oklahoma City.) If you've played with HD Radio, I'd be interested to hear what you think about it.

I'm thinking Dean's a bit conflicted about National Public Radio:

It occurs to me that if they do put out stuff of extraordinary quality, their perceived pastiness and/or self-importance should become secondary considerations at best.

The taxpayer-subsidy argument carries a bit more heft, especially in Oklahoma, where two of the top three NPR outlets are operated by state universities. (The third, Tulsa's KWGS, is operated by the private University of Tulsa.) In other areas, stations might be operated by private foundations. Pretty much all of them, though, draw some sort of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — in fact, far more than does NPR itself. The station closest to this desk, KGOU (which, perhaps ironically, is located at the right end of the dial), gets maybe ten percent of its budget from CPB.

In 2003, Doc Searls suggested that it was time to get off the CPB dole:

At the time, I, perhaps prematurely, predicted the death of CPB:

And the slack, I predict with somewhat greater assurance, will be taken up by the likes of Dean, and me, and Jennifer and Ted Stanley.

In the current radio ratings, Spanish-language station KTUZ-FM dropped from a 4.2 share to a 2.4, and management says it's because of HB 1804:

Interestingly, Tyler has a billboard around town (I saw it along I-35 near NE 63rd) proclaiming that the local Latino market is 300,000 strong — and "we reach them all!"

Atheist Talk will debut on KTNF, Air America Minnesota, at 9 am Central on the thirteenth of January.

Which is, by sheerest coincidence, a Sunday.

(Via Saint Paul.)

A radio horror story that somehow made me smile:

(Note: Bonneville and Schulke/SRP were major syndicators of "beautiful-music" formats, which have largely fallen by the wayside these days.)

For the last 27 hours or so, KHBZ-FM (94.7 / The Buzz) has been playing Metallica nonstop (except for commercials) and warning of something happening Monday morning at 10 am. The rumor machine is running flat-out, and at this moment someone on Wikipedia has floated the possibility of a Spanish format — or of KTOK-FM.

I tend to doubt either of these, but then the format change I predicted for the first of the year — at KQOB-FM (96.9 / Bob FM) — didn't happen, so I figure I have no reason to think I'm actually correct.

Update, 10 am, Monday morning: Big deal. I don't remember anyone in town saying "You know, I really like the KATT. In fact, I like them so much I think every station should try to sound like the KATT."

The Lost Ogle's take on the KHBZ format change:

(Disclosure: I actually bought a Korn track this week off iTunes.)

This month, the University of Oklahoma's KGOU marks twenty-five years in Public Radio, and this story seems telling:

I bet CBS still has a bigger motor pool, though:

And maybe once in a while Cory Flintoff and Diane Rehm will carpool.

The Federal Communications Commission has given its blessing [link goes to PDF file] to the sale of Clear Channel's radio stations to private-equity firms, provided they spin off at least 48 stations in 42 markets. As with the ABC/Citadel merger, the licenses for the stations to be sold will be assigned to a trust — in this case, the Aloha Station Trust LLC — pending disposal.

The first thing I did, of course, was to see if any Oklahoma radio stations will be sold as a result of the FCC action. The answer is no. (The list begins on page 41 of that PDF file linked above.)

However, another condition for the sale is the closing of a separate deal for Clear Channel's television stations, which include KOKI-TV and KMYT-TV in Tulsa.

And that goes for you too, Clear Channel. Learn from this:

It's got to be better than Bob & Tom & Lex & Terry & any of those other morning-program jerkwads.

(Via Fark.)

If that particular bit of radio-format imaging struck you as just a hair authoritarian, you're ready for this: Jack FM in Russian.

Why, yes, they do stream. Here's what Sean Ross heard:

The first track I recognized was Blondie's "Call Me", followed not too closely by Tina Turner's "Private Dancer." Very Jack-ish.

If you're actually in Russia, you can hear the station on 89.9 in Moscow and on 91.1 in St. Petersburg.

Suddenly I don't feel so bad about not spending any money on HD Radio. Look what's (not) happening in Britain:

There's certainly nothing compelling on HD. (Aside: This is another case where we're using a "standard" that isn't really standard anywhere else; HD Radio has been adopted only in the US and Brazil.)

But there are other reasons to avoid buying a DAB set:

I guess the good thing is that so few people have bought DAB sets that the idea of changing the whole platform hasn't caused wailing and gnashing of teeth and threats of litigation.

This is the derisive term I use for my iTunes installation at work, which includes about 2500 tracks at the moment. Usually when you walk in, it will be playing something you don't like, hence the description. While inevitably the playlist reflects my highly-dubious sense of aesthetics, it certainly qualifies as eclectic: you will find therein, for instance, two actual 1910 Fruitgum Company tracks, and the entirety of Kind of Blue. I won't, however, argue that this somehow represents "the full spectrum of music," unlike a certain Kansas City radio station:

I don't have a lot of Nineties stuff, but I'm working on it. Of course, you might not really want a "full-spectrum" station:

I'm wondering where this leaves me, since those 2500 tracks contain, for instance, lots of R&B and not a whole lot of classical. Not that I have any business pretending to have either erudition or street cred. (Nor, for that matter, do I really want to segue Britten's Simple Symphony into Funkadelic's "Cosmic Slop.")

Still, I wonder what sort of radio show, or podcast, I could whip up out of that odd collection of ingredients, and whether more than one person could stand to listen to it for more than a couple of selections.

Rich Appel's Hz So Good newsletter contains the following tidbit of Scary Information:

I'm wondering if perhaps this explains the general stability of the Oklahoma City radio market: you couldn't get these guys to play a reggae record if Jamaica became the 52nd state.

A reader asked for the QAM channels in Oklahoma City. I posted these once to a QAM wiki, but it seems to have disappeared, and there have been changes anyway, so here we go:

69-25  KOKH-HD (Fox)
69-34  KOCB-HD (The CW)
72-9    KSBI-DT
72-24   KOCM-DT (Daystar)
73-3    KFOR-DT (NBC)
73-5    KTUZ-DT (Telemundo)
73-8    KOCO-DT (ABC)
73-10   KWTV-DT (CBS)
73-11   KOCB-DT (The CW)
73-12   KOKH-DT (Fox)
73-16   KAUT-DT (MyNetwork TV)
73-17   KOPX-DT (i)
73-19   C-SPAN2
73-68   C-SPAN
83-100  KOHC-DT (Azteca)
84-4    KFOR-HD (NBC)
84-5    KOCO-HD (ABC)
84-222    KOCO Weather
88-7    Cox Channel
88-14   KETA-DT (PBS)
94-22   GoScout Homes
98-4    TV Guide Channel
98-13   QVC
98-18   OKC-ETC
98-20   City Channel 20
98-21   Univision Oklahoma
98-23   KTBO-DT (Trinity)
98-69   HSN
98-116  Jewelry TV
98-118  ONTV4U
98-119  TV Superstore
101-70  Superstation WGN
101-71  GoScout Autos
101-910 ShopNBC
102-112 OETA Okla
105-113 OETA Create
105-114 OETA Kids
106-9   KWTV-HD (CBS)
106-13  OETA HD
109-59  NBC Weather Plus

These are subject to change without notice. If my channel scan didn't pick it up, it's not here; additions and supplemental information will be welcomed.

Update, 10 May: All the HD channels seem to have vanished, but no: they've simply moved around a bit. I had an explanation for this earlier, but it didn't seem to correspond to the facts.

The struggling CW network will turn over its Sunday prime-time programming to Media Rights Capital, which will produce two new dramas (presumably at 8 and 9 Eastern) and two comedies (presumably at 7 and 7:30).

MRC is run by Mordecai Wiczyk and Asif Satchu: they financed, among other things, the 2007 remake of Sleuth, which was released through Sony Pictures Classics, and the upcoming Sacha Baron Cohen project, which may or may not be called Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.