News

It's the 16th year for the NAB Education Foundation's Broadcast Leadership Training program and 15 broadcasters graduated from the 10-month Executive MBA-style program. With this class, 270 participants have graduated from the program.

News director and morning show co-host Shelia Hamilton at Alpha's KINK in Portland has signed an extension on a multi-year deal. The five-time Emmy-winner began her career in documentary film before producing and reporting two-decades of television investigative news for such television stations as Portland’s KATU and Salt Lake City's KTVX. She was also voted Best Radio Personality in 2013.

When the NAB caught wind of Wheeler's fact sheet, the trade organization representing radio and TV was not happy. NAB Executive Vice President of Communications Dennis Wharton said, "It is shocking that regulators who bless mammoth mergers like AT&T/DirecTV and Charter/Time Warner Cable would still bar common ownership of two TV stations or broadcast/newspaper combinations in a local market." Here's the full NAB statement...

In his May 26 blog entitled "Court Chides FCC For Not Doing Its Job," Broadcast attorney John Garziglia predicted the FCC might just take the easy way out and basically do nothing to the ownership rules. And, for sure, The Commission did nearly exactly what Garziglia opined last month. He also wrote about what the court might do if the Commission did decide to do nothing.

Chris Mosser will start hosting mornings on Emmis' KGSR-FM (AAA) starting Wednesday, July 6. Austin listeners might already recognize Mosser’s voice as he was most recently the AM Drive and Program Director for 103.1 iHeart Austin and PM Drive and Texas Regional Programming Director for KVET-FM.

The streaming pure-play announced Monday that Pandora is now integrated directly within the Uber driver app. Uber senior product manager Bob Cowherd said, "Many drivers already use music to get their day started on the right note, but it can be challenging to find high-quality music that both drivers and riders love -- without radio ads and interruptions to the music."

Bob Papper, who is a Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University, has released his seventh annual survey of newsrooms across the United States. Papper reports that salaries in radio newsrooms were up 3.1% from last year – after dropping 4.1% a year ago and barely moving the year before that.

According to the new BIA State of the Industry report, stations in the largest markets account for a disproportionate share of overall industry revenues. Radio stations in the top 50 ranked markets constitute 19.1 percent of commercial radio stations in the U.S. but generated 52.8 percent of all over-the-air advertising revenues in 2015. Check out this chart for more details...

In the new BIA/Kelsey State of The Industry report, the research firm says stations airing those formats attract larger numbers of higher income and higher educated listeners. In contrast a lower share of revenue goes to Spanish language stations.

MediaPost has the details from a new Juniper Research study that says digital advertising revenue will double to $285 Billion by 2020. The study also says ad blocking is expected to cost publishers $27 billion in lost revenues in the next five years. The study also predicts mobile advertising is expected to grow by 64.2% through 2020.