iHM Sez Cutting Skywave Protection Would Hurt Big AMers

In the on-going debate about how to help AM station owners, a visit this week to the FCC by iHeartMedia EVP Engineering & Systems Integration Jeff Littlejohn sheds light on how one station owner thinks about handling skywave protections, according to RadioWorld.

In a meeting that included Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, Audio Division Chief Peter Doyle and other FCC staff, Littlejohn noted that iHeart accessed Nielsen’s National Regional Database of diary and Portable People Meter ratings to see how many potential listeners a Class A could lose if the skywave protections were lowered to those equivalent for a Class B.

The NRD allows Nielsen clients to capture listening outside the standard market definitions.

The study showed about 600,000 existing listeners of Class As account for 3 million+ hours of listening per week, would potentially lose service if skywave protections were relaxed, according to an ex parte filing.

Quality and expensive full-service news and sports programming with reliable coverage is often what drives listeners to Class As, he noted. “National and regional advertisers expect wide-area, multistate coverage, especially at night, from Class A AM stations, so that the loss of listeners outside of standard Metro areas would undercut the profitability of Class A stations and reduce the ability to continue the high-quality programming expected by their audiences,” according to the meeting summary.

AMs are losing listeners to FM because of electromagnetic interference on the band. If current protections were relaxed, interference to higher class AMs stations would likely rise.