Streamline Digital Inc., a division of Streamline Publishing
Inc., has acquired the Radio Discussions message boards
(www.radiodiscussions.com) from In3Media, operated by Diana Fleming. The
popular boards were originally the discussion arm of In3Media's Radio-Info.com
site, and were retained when In3Media sold Radio-Info.
Streamline Publishing CEO Jim Robinson said, "This is a
perfect fit for Streamline's Radio Ink and RBR-TVBR news brands. These three
strong individual businesses provide distinctly valuable content to our
audiences, and effective environments for our marketing partners. We are
dedicated to keeping readers current on news and the media conversations that
are trending. The social interactivity of the discussion boards is the right
complement to Radio Ink and RBR-TVBR."
B. Eric Rhoads
The popular Radio Discussions boards offer thousands of
active conversations in well over 100 geographical, format-based, technical,
and other categories related to radio, television, and digital media. The
boards have more than 40,000 registered users, and attract 150,000-200,000
unique visitors each month.
B. Eric Rhoads, chairman and founder of Streamline
Publishing, stated, "We're investing heavily to grow our digital services
in the broadcasting industry to give the radio and television industries deeper
sources of information, and to give our advertisers a platform with which to
grow their businesses. These discussion boards attract significant amounts of
traffic and give us the opportunity to offer wide reach across multiple
interest groups and to offer geographic targeting."
Streamline Publishing, which earlier this year acquired
Radio & Television Business Report, will expand the television section of
the boards and encourage conversations about news and current events in the
media industry. There are no plans to alter the boards' moderation policies or
structure with the transition.
“Yesterday I completed my television show at 5:00 and I… I
walked off the air, and the head of Mercury One said to me, ‘Glenn, just a
devastating tornado in Oklahoma in a little
town called Moore, Oklahoma’,” Glenn said on radio this
morning.
“Joe came to me and he said ‘Devastation’. I said, ‘Well, I think we should get there as
soon as we can.’”
“So last night I tweeted:
Does anybody, anybody have a couple of tractor‑trailers we can borrow
for the night? And about 9:30 last night
my team was packed and ready to go and the tractor‑trailers that had been
supplied really by a local church were already at the gates of a place called
Operation Blessing. It’s an organization
that we have helped fill the pantries of and they have helped deliver food for
different things whenever there’s been a crisis.
We couldn’t use their trucks this time
because they were all on the East Coast and it would be a couple of days. We knew that here in this little teeny town
in Oklahoma,
there were people that needed food and water and just whatever it is that we
need to run our life every day. They
needed it not in a couple of days but last night, early this morning. So we loaded up the trucks, two eighteen‑wheelers
and four SUVs hit the road last night about 11:00. We arrived here about 4:00 a.m."
“Home Depot opened their doors, kept them open for the First
Responders and anybody that needed anything. You need a shovel, you need a flashlight,
you need some plywood? What do you need? The cash registers were locked. The
cash registers were turned off.”
April was not a productive ratings month for Houston’s all-sports
radio stations.
According to David Barron at The Houston Chronicle, for the
Arbitron rating period March 28-April 24, segment leader KILT 610 AM slipped
out of the top 10 among men 25-54, the key demo for all-sports radio, in both
morning and afternoon drive.
In morning drive (6-10 a.m.), KILT slipped to a 2.6 share
for 17th place. KFNC 97.5 FM was 19th with a 2.0 share, and KBME 790 AM was
26th with a 1.1 share.
In middays, KILT ranked 12th with a 2.9 share to 1.1 for
KBME and 0.7 for KFNC. In afternoon drive (3-7 p.m.), KILT dropped to 12th with
a 3.3 share to 1.5 for KBME and 1.3 for KFNC. From 7 p.m. to midnight, KILT led
with a 1.5 share to 1.3 for KBME and 0.2 for KFNC.
KILT’s April decline was particularly surprising. Its March
shares were 4.1 in morning drive, 3.0 in midday (the time slot with the
smallest decline), 4.5 in afternoon drive and 2.3 at night.
In January, at the height of Texans mania, KILT was at 5.6
in morning drive, 4.1 in middays, 5.2 in afternoon drive and 2.8 at night. In
that month, the three all-sports stations that show up in Arbitron combined for
shares of 10.0 in morning drive, 6.8 in middays, 8.7 in afternoon drive and 4.3
at night. In April, those totals were, respectively, 5.7, 4.7, 6.1 and 3.0. In
April 2012, they were 10.9, 7.2, 9.4 and 3.3.
This month is the first time that KILT has been out of the
top 10 in morning drive among men 25-54 since last August, when it slipped
behind KBME in a one-month hiccup, and its first drop out of the top 10 in
afternoon drive since August 2011.
A huge tornado at least a half-mile wide and with winds up
to 200 miles per hour hit the town of Moore, Oklahoma, on Monday (May 20th),
killing at least 91 people, including 20 children, according to the NYTimes. The tornado leveled whole
neighborhoods and flattened an elementary school in the Oklahoma City suburb.
The death toll is expected to rise, with the Oklahoma
Medical Examiner's Office saying the number of dead could rise.
The National Weather Service issued an initial finding that
the tornado was an EF-4, the second most-powerful type. Scenes from the
aftermath of the afternoon tornado saw rescuers pulling children from the
destroyed PlazaTowersElementary School
and looking for others in the debris, however children from the school were
among the dead. Search efforts in Moore
continued overnight. President Obama declared a major disaster and ordered
federal aid to help pay for recovery efforts.
The tornado loosely followed the path of a major tornado
that hit the region in May 1999, and was the fourth twister to hit Moore since 1998.
The CBS-affiliated station, KWTV in Oklahoma City, had a helicopter hovering over
the damage not more than 15 minutes after the tornado passed. The cameras, in
some cases, beat the rescuers to the worst-hit neighborhoods, and helped
viewers near and far process what had happened.. The visuals from Mr. Welsh’s
helicopter, in particular, spurred national news organizations to make the
tornado damage the top story on their nightly newscasts and Web sites. NBC and
CBS even televised special reports shortly after the tornado dissipated.
The NY Times reports live pictures and information, almost universally
praised by viewers from afar who saw it online and on cable news channels,
reminded some of the enduring value of local broadcasters at a time when apps
and social networks tend to get more attention.
The reporters in Moore
were supplemented by residents who posted photos and videos on those social
networks. CNN at one point on Monday afternoon interviewed an eyewitness to the
tornado aftermath who had published six-second videos with Vine, a relatively
new app owned by Twitter. By the evening, the text message number for donations
to the American Red Cross, 90999, was a nationwide trend on Twitter.
A number of national reporters, like Al Roker of NBC’s
“Today” show and Sam Champion of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” were a short
distance away from Moore when the tornado touched down. That’s because they had
rushed to Oklahoma
a day earlier, after an earlier outbreak of tornadoes elsewhere in the state.
By nightfall on Monday they were in Moore. So was Mike Bettes, a correspondent
for The Weather Channel, who was among the first to arrive in Joplin after the tornado there. Reporting
live on the channel on Monday, Mr. Bettes walked through what used to be a home
and gestured to the kitchen, where a car laid, mangled. “I have only seen this
once in my life, and that was two years ago in Joplin,” he said.
NBC and CBS said their evening news anchors, Brian Williams
and Scott Pelley, respectively, would helm their broadcasts from Oklahoma on Tuesday. The
“Today” show, which was supposed to emanate from YellowstoneNational Park on Tuesday morning, part
of a week-long cross-country tour, scrapped that plan on Monday night and said
all of its hosts would be in Moore
in the morning instead.
FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn became Acting Chair — and the first
women to run the regulatory agency — on Saturday taking the job just vacated by
Julius Genachowski until the Senate confirms President Obama’s
choice to replace him, Tom Wheeler.
“I see myself as a member of a relay team, running one of
the middle legs,” Clyburn told FCC staffers Monday. “My job is to build on forward momentum, give the next
teammate a running start, an improved position, and no matter what, my goal is
not to drop the baton.”
It could take months before she can pass that baton to
Wheeler, according to deadline.com. The Senate likely will confirm him in tandem with a Republican to
replace former Commissioner Robert McDowell who also left the FCC on Friday.
Last week the U.S. Office of Government ethics disclosed
that Wheeler — a former lobbyist who’s now an investor with Core Capital
partners — said that if confirmed he would divest holdings in 78 companies
including AMC Networks, Apple, Cablevision, CBS, Comcast, DirecTV, Dish
Network, Gannett, Google, Liberty Media, News Corp, Scripps Networks, Time
Warner, Time Warner Cable, and Disney.
A Fox News correspondent was accused in a Justice Department
affidavit of being a possible criminal "co-conspirator" for his
alleged role in publishing sensitive security information -- in a leak case
that takes the highly unusual step of claiming a journalist broke the law.
According to court documents, the Justice Department
obtained a portfolio of information about Fox News' James Rosen's conversations
and visits to the State Department. This included a search warrant for his
personal emails.
The effort follows that by the department to secretly obtain
two months of phone records from Associated Press journalists as part of a
separate leak probe. The department in this case, though, went a step further
-- as an FBI agent claimed there's evidence the Fox News correspondent broke
the law, "at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator."
Michael Clemente, Fox News' executive vice president of
news, defended Rosen in a statement issued Monday afternoon.
"We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was
named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,"
Clemente said. "In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally
defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a
free press."
Those very confident or confident in chances for a strong
economy wobble in May, decreasing slightly to 39 percent. With the up / down
action Prosper been seeing with confidence this year, it’s evident that consumers
are struggling with feelings of uncertainty regarding the economy.
Eight out of ten consumers feels that there will be “more”
or the “same” number of pink slips handed out over the next six months,
increasing slightly over a year ago. So even as the official US unemployment
rate continues to decline, consumers seem unable to quell their concerns.
Consumers are feeling uncertain about employment because
their guts are telling them what the numbers are saying – the unemployment
rate is down because the opportunities are slim and an increasing number of
capable, working age adults are being labeled “discouraged” – and are lost from
the labor force as a result.
It appears that, at least in recent months, consumers have
become a bit more comfortable in their ability to meet monthly spending
demands, with a decreasing number of consumers saying that there’s too much
month at the end of their paychecks “all” or “most of the time.”
However, more than a quarter of adults 18+ reported that
they are feeling “worse off” financially compared to a year ago.
And, while consumers may feel that they are getting better
at handling their month to month expenditures, it appears they may be doing so
at the expense of their savings, with the US personal saving rate currently
remaining at lows not seen since just before the Great Recession.
New discoveries from our Analytics Unit provide support that
happiness increases. Members of the Silent generation rank as the happiest in America
followed by Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials.
Ray Manzarek, founding member and keyboard player for the
Doors, has passed away, according to the band’s official Facebook page. He was
74.
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting publicist Heidi
Robinson-Fitzgerald says in a news release that Manzarek died Monday at the
RoMed Clinic in Rosenheim, Germany, surrounded by his family. He had been
stricken by bile duct cancer.
“I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend
and bandmate Ray Manzarek today,” said Robby Krieger, the Doors’ guitarist and
long-time collaborator. “I’m just glad to have been able to have played Doors
songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will
always miss him.”
The Doors first came to San Francisco in January 1967 to
open for the Young Rascals and Sopwith Camel at the Fillmore Auditorium. It was
the same weekend that more than 25,000 hippies filled Golden Gate Park for the
Human Be-In, and the Doors were there, too.
After nearly three months without a news division leader,
former ITV News editor Deborah Turness has been named president of NBC News.
The announcement came Monday from NBCUniversal News Group
chairman Pat Fili-Krushel, who led the search after Steve Capus stepped down
last February.
“Deborah has built an outstanding reputation as both a
journalist and business executive with a proven track record for innovation and
collaboration,” said Fili-Krushel in a statement. “She is a leader with a
global perspective, who is also very familiar with NBC News, having worked
closely with us through our partnership with ITN. Her passion for the news
business, combined with her creativity and vision, will be a tremendous asset
to NBC News, and I’m very pleased to welcome her to the team.”
Turness will report to Fili-Krusel and begin Aug. 5.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, her appointment comes at
a challenging time for NBC News. Primetime newsmagazine RockCenter
with Brian Williams – which had been moved around the schedule multiple times
before landing on Friday nights – was among the casualties of the new season. NBC's
Sunday morning public affairs program Meet the Press with David Gregory has
fallen behind CBS News' Face the Nation with Bob Scheiffer. And the Today show
has lost its long grip on dominance to ABC's Good Morning America. Today, which
airs over four hours on weekdays and several hours on Saturday and Sunday,
generates a disproportionate amount of the division's ad revenue. In 2011, the
show's 7-9 a.m. hours pulled in $485 million. (For the same period, GMA had
$299 million, according to Kantar Media.)
The morning duo's new home is WRIF 101.1FM. They start Tuesday, May 28, the day after Memorial Day.
The Detroit Free Press reports the news – which many media
had speculated was a done deal when Greater Media Detroit, announced two weeks
ago that it wouldn't be bringing the “Drew and Mike” show back.
The show’s
hosts, Drew Lane
and Mike Clark, news director Trudi Daniels, and the four producers signed off
of WRIF with an emotional, bittersweet swan song on Friday after 22 years on
the rock station.
Last fall, Hunter and Urquhart shocked fans when they
revealed on Facebook that their show was ending. In the months since they
signed off Nov. 23, speculation has swirled about where they and cohost Lisa Way would end
up. Hunter and Urquhart have dropped more hints in recent weeks via social
media suggesting that they plan to return to the airwaves soon.
