Headlines

The radio industry cheered when it became known that Ajit Pai would be elevated from FCC commissioner to the chairmanship thanks to President Trump’s 2017 designation. Pai has been a great friend and cheerleader for radio, and an advocate to fix the FCC’s archaic rules governing the industry. And, he's on the cover of the April 17 issue of Radio Ink Magazine.

(By Deborah Parenti) A week later, the United debacle has continued to spread its wings, with panel discussions, analyses, and commentaries featured as part of this weekend’s news programs on cable and broadcast networks. And now that the lawyering-up has begun, we can expect this will not subside anytime soon.

(By Bob McCurdy) Reach is hot. It’s getting some well-deserved love in this fragmented media landscape for good reason: Companies typically grow by expanding their customer base, not by getting current customers to buy more often.

(By Randy Lane) When I asked Brian Phillips (President, CMT Networks and previous award-winning radio programmer) his perception of radio after being in television for several years, his response surprised me. “Radio is an audio medium that generally does a poor job with audio.”

(By Ronald Robinson) From time to time, a local station will crank out a brilliant piece of creative advertising. The staff will gather around, howling with delight while offering kudos all around. “Let’s enter it for an award!” Salespeople will hold their tongues and grudgingly wince out a qualified smile as they wonder to themselves: “Nice. But, will it sell anything?”

The 2017 NAB Show will explore the Alexa voice-service technology that powers the popular Amazon Echo device. The Alexa Skill Building Bootcamp will be held Saturday, April 22 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Designed for software developers and non-developers alike, the Bootcamp will provide participants with an in-depth overview of voice-user technology.

As promised, WYMS 88.9-FM will continue to support local artists. And now it will be broadcast and streamed around the clock on 414Music.fm, a new HD2 radio channel and stream that 88Nine Radio Milwaukee will launch June 20.

The People’s Morning Show with Nipsey, Jen and Earl on Harrisburg, PA’s WQXA-FM 105.7 THE X was honored by Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals with the English Radio Personality of the Year Excellence Award.

It's a small club but it includes 20 of the best people in radio. On Monday, Radio Ink's newest list will be unveiled -- The 20 Best Leaders in Radio. This list was chosen by the radio industry. In an extremely exciting and close vote, that included about 50 people when we first started, thousands of votes were cast on our website to help decide the final 20 names that will appear in Radio Ink Magazine next week. Forcht CEO Mike Tarter is one of those 20 leaders.

(By Deborah Parenti) As bad as Sunday’s United incident was, the public handling of the situation has continued to compound it even further in what appears to be one bungled, weak attempt to quell one storm after another. While the first line of defense is to have a set of company policies in place designed to prevent or minimize the chance of such disastrous instances occurring to begin with, sometimes even the best efforts fail and bad situations happen.