Goodbye Main Studio Rule - The FCC Underway

STATEMENT OF MICHELLE BRADLEY: ELIMINATION OF THE MAIN STUDIO REQUIREMENTS 

Submitted by admin on Tue, 10/24/2017 - 20:09

Today marked the beginning of the end of local radio, especially in the commercial sector. A station now only need to leave a toll free telephone number to make a mark on their community. While I agree that there are some stations that are facing financial burdens as a direct result of maintaining a "brick and mortar" main studio, I do feel that REC's proposed solution was a reasonable compromise.



Under REC's proposed "middle" solution, stations would not be required to keep a main studio that would be accessible by the general public but instead must maintain a local presence within the service contour of the station and that station has some form of local program origination requirement (even if it is in the spare bedroom of the owner's residence). Management personnel must be physically located within the main studio area of the station and must be accessible through a geographic (non toll-free) telephone number.



Pai's version of local radio has destroyed virtually all accountability that a broadcaster entrusted to use the scarce resource of broadcast spectrum is obligated to. I feel that there is (unfortunately) more to come.

This could be a victory for hobby broadcasters to finally be able to broadcast legally.

Druid Hills Radio/WLSL-LP Comments:   Huh?

I'm Thinking About All This

It is understandable that the FCC should be concerned with "Main Studio" because what they really mean is the "Control Point" from which programming is technically dispatched to the transmitter, giving "main studio" a technical definition as part of the total constructed radio station.

But "main studio" also means "main office", the point of human management of the day to day business.

One would expect radio stations assigned to a certain city to be required by the municipal government to have a business license and a registered business address within that city.

It would be my mission, were I a mayor or alderman of a city, to investigate and possibly fine or confiscate a radio station that was licensed to my community but without an office or business license. In fact we would file a law suit against Aijet and have our judge rule that he had to make an appearance to explain his shady dealings.

This thing has organized crime written all over it.

How dare they intimate that we are pirates when look at what they are up to!

The great Theodore Sturgeon once wrote "90% of everything is sh*t". And I think he was being optimistic.

He was referring to literature, but the same holds true for people, politicians (definitely a different species) and radio stations.

I seriously doubt that for that 90% or 95% (or whatever) the main studio rule will make much difference. They already aren't local in virtually everything else, and only care about the bottom line - certainly they don't care about their programming (or their listeners). They try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and sometimes even miss that.

The 5% or 10% of radio stations that do care will continue to operate as they always have. They're out there. Unfortunately, I live in a market in which the only remotely interesting station (other than my own) is at the fringe of reception area in Seattle (a classical station). There's an NPR jazz station that I sometimes can barely hear, but I really can't listen to it for any length of time.

And I hope this doesn't get sidelined into another 'want more power' branch.