"Thinking out loud since 1997"
Still a work in progress
Questions, comments, miscellany: john@diymedia.net / @diymediadotnet
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"Thinking out loud since 1997" Still a work in progress Questions, comments, miscellany: john@diymedia.net / @diymediadotnet |
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News of the Moment 5/7/12 - Media Minutes: 2004-2012 [link to this story] After seven and a half years, Free Press has discontinued the production of Media Minutes, its weekly headline radio newscast that examined issues at the intersection of media and democracy. I developed and launched Media Minutes in 2004, as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois' Institute of Communications Research. I'd left the broadcast industry in 2000 out of disgust at what it had done to stymie the rollout of LPFM, and had thought that my days as a radio journalist were behind me. This was not to be. During my master's work at the University of Wisconsin, I co-founded Workers Independent News, the first labor-centric radio news program to be launched in the U.S. in more than 50 years. My work with WIN caught the ear of Bob McChesney, then a professor at ICR, and when I was accepted into that program he e-mailed me out of the blue to ask whether I'd be interested in starting a similar program focused on issues of media policy and reform. Having no funding guarantee, I jumped at the opportunity, and in the fall of 2004 I built my own studio on campus and began the Media Minutes adventure. The folks at Free Press gave me a lot of latitude with the show. We did a conference call at the beginning of each week, where we tossed around story ideas and discussed the various campaigns FP had going on or in the works. Within the first year, Media Minutes had gained a lot of traction, breaking stories such as the Bush-era politicization of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Supreme Court's decision that threw the principle of network neutrality into the realm of uncertainty. In addition to the weekly program, I produced special daily editions of Media Minutes at Free Press' National Conference for Media Reform in Saint Louis (2005) and Memphis (2007), during which I had the opportunity to meet and/or interview folks like Bill Moyers, Naomi Klein, Al Franken, Janine Jackson, Danny Glover, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Boots Riley, Bernie Sanders, and FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, among many others. I left Media Minutes in 2007 to teach (this was grad school, after all, and I needed to build experience for my newly-chosen vocation). To their credit, and in recognition of the show's importance to the organization's larger mission, Free Press committed to continuing the program under the able ministrations of Stevie Converse, Candace Clement, and Megan Tady. I disassembled my DIY studio and shipped all the gear to FP HQ in Massachusetts. And the program played on for another five years, until last Friday, when Media Minutes produced its last episode. At its peak, Media Minutes was carried by nearly 200 radio stations around the world and distributed widely online. The program became a source of its own for journalists covering media policy and activism, and often served as the venue in which Free Press spread the first word about its campaign-work. The discontinuation of Media Minutes is bittersweet. I'm no parent, but when I heard the news it felt like I'd lost a child. I wasn't privy to the rationale for ending the show, but I understand that there's only so much time and energy to go around, and it's a lot of work to put together a broadcast-quality program. Free Press itself is a much different (and much bigger) organization than it was nearly eight years ago, and the Internet's evolved immensely over time to become the primary outlet for FP's informational and outreach efforts. I can't thank Free Press enough for their support of Media Minutes over the years. They took on a grad student sight-unseen and made him part of the media reform family. Of all the work I've done in broadcast journalism. Media Minutes stands as one of my proudest accomplishments. I hope there's many more opportunities for us to collaborate in the future. 5/3/12 - Broadcast Engineers: A Dying Breed? [link to this story] A recent paper (PDF) from the Society of Broadcast Engineers paints a stark picture for the vocation of broadcast engineering. The SBE notes that the number of broadcast engineers (especially those employed full-time) has been in a steady decline since the 1980s. This is when the FCC began getting rid of rules that required engineers to hold specific (and often multiple) qualifications to work at radio and television stations. Broadcasters could thus get by with fewer engineers, and many jobs which engineers used to do could now be done by lesser-qualified staff. Following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as the radio industry consolidated many stations were clustered into centralized facilities. This further decimated the ranks of broadcast engineers; those still left found themselves responsible for multiple stations. Many broadcasters have done away with employing a full-time engineer altogether, preferring instead to contract the work out. In addition to this trend, those still in the field are aging rapidly. Nearly three-quarters (73.9%) of working SBE members are 46 years old or older; the average age of an SBE member is 54. Although the number of younger people entering the field seems to have picked up a bit over the last few years, "the raw numbers fall far short of what is needed to replace those who are retiring or leaving the field." The SBE says that "in some markets, a shortage of engineers has been developing....Station and engineering managers report that jobs they advertise sometimes don't attract enough candidates, qualified or otherwise; sometimes, no candidates at all." Furthermore, the skill-set of the broadcast engineer is changing. It's no longer just a job of maintaining transmitters and studio equipment: the digitalization of broadcasting has made knowledge of computers and network administration increasingly important. Broadcast engineer and blogger Paul Thurst has written on this trend, and notes that "The old days of the RF guru are coming to a close." The number of broadcast stations continues to rise, while the number of qualified engineers to oversee them is dwindling; meanwhile, those still working find themselves with much more to do, less resources to work with, and an expansion of engineering responsibilities more generally. Can this trend be reversed? And what does this say about the technical integrity of broadcasting today? 4/26/12 - Details Emerge of ZoneCast Pitch to FCC [link to this story] This week
a D.C. communications law firm working with Geo Broadcast Solutions
(GBS) unveiled the
company's The proposal stands to dramatically reconfigure the nature of an FM broadcast station: instead of one large transmitter covering a single area, GBS' ZoneCast technology would allow stations to deploy as many as seven booster stations on their parent frequency, with each booster targeting a specific region of a station's primary coverage area. GBS' 259-page filing (most of which is testing data, and some of which is duplicative) urges acceptance by the FCC because it would "be consistent with and further effectuate the Commission's longstanding goal of promoting localism. It would also improve the viability of a financially challenged radio industry and would benefit the U.S. economy as a whole." ZoneCasting is a proprietary technology, and GBS has patents pending on the control mechanisms that allow for the synchronization of multiple boosters in a station's constellation. There is resultingly no detailed explanation of how the technology actually works in the petition, other than that it interfaces nicely with automation systems and wireless Ethernet or WiMAX links are used to feed specialized programming to each booster. Interestingly, ZoneCasting seems to be designed to primarily allow the simultaneous broadcast of "different audio messages," such as commercials or public service announcements, across a station's chain of boosters. The proposal spends a lot of time explaining how such targeted programming could be a boon for advertisers and political candidates, as they could conceivably buy localized spot-coverage at a fraction of the price of traditional broadcast adverts, thereby providing more bang for their buck - as well as multiplying the spot-related revenue streams of stations nationwide. The petition does invoke the possibility of stations providing hyper-localized news, multi-lingual programming, or even the broadcast of customized religious programming "to be received by different denominations." However, I find it highly unlikely that broadcasters would increase their investments in program creation, which have been pared to the bone over the last 15 years. GBS, too, seems to want to discourage such practices, proposing a limitation on localized long-form programming to three hours per day or less. One station in Utah tested the technology in 2010, and another station in Florida tried it in 2011. Both tests utilized three booster-stations. GBS reported that ZoneCast allowed both stations to successfully send unique "audio messages" through their network of boosters without causing more than "minimal" interference to other boosters or the primary stations. There are, however, some big unanswered questions about the ZoneCast technology. Most notably, how much would it cost an average station to construct its own network of boosters, not to mention pay for the proprietary system? If multiple stations in a single market adopted it, what kind of engineering and regulatory intricacy would be required to build out booster networks that minimize the potential for interference? It is one thing to responsibly site a single transmitter, but quite another to site up to seven operating on the same frequency. Furthermore, how compatible is the technology with HD Radio? This is an intriguing question because the proprietors of digital broadcasting are deep in their own negotiations with the FCC to allow the placement of separate, digital-only booster stations to improve the coverage area and robustness of HD signals. If an FM-HD station wanted to use both HD Radio and ZoneCast, would they need to build two separate booster networks - one for analog programming and one for digital? The FCC is accepting comment on the GBS petition through May 23. The company's D.C. advocates expect the discussion to focus more on the engineering principles of the technology than its transformational potential for FM broadcasting more generally; the latter will come if the FCC moves ahead with a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the issue. |
Petition
for Rulemaking