Report: Communities Hit By Loss Of Local Radio

America's rural radio stations are vanishing, according to a piece in The Guardian.  The article is attracting a lot of attention.

According to writer Debbie Weingarten, small-town radio is fizzling nationwide, as stations struggle to attract advertisement dollars. And as station owners are forced to sell, media conglomerates snap up rural frequencies for rock-bottom prices, for the sole purpose of relocating them to urban areas. In a more affluent market, they can be flipped for a higher price. With limited frequencies available, larger broadcasters purchase as many as possible.

At a time when local newspapers are vanishing at an alarming rate, the loss of a radio station leaves a community with another cultural and informational deficit. Communities are diminished when they lose their local radio stations, says Dennis Deninger, a communications professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. His first media job was working at an AM station in Hornell, New York, where obituaries were read on air along with board of education updates.

“We connected with people,” he remembers. “We told them stories about a fender bender that happened down on Main Street, or a local parade coming up, or the success of a youngster at the local science fair.”

Clinton signs

The 1996 Telecommunications Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, changed the radio landscape dramatically, allowing for deregulation, which led to the rapid consolidation of the industry. In the months after the act’s passage, Reed Hundt, then the FCC Chair, spoke before Congress about “fostering innovation and competition in radio” and “[promoting] diversity in programming and diversity in the viewpoints expressed on this powerful medium that so shapes our culture”.

And yet the act did not deliver on these ideals. Instead, for the first time, large media companies were allowed to buy up multiple stations without restriction. By 2002, the radio industry was essentially an oligopoly – just 10 parent companies controlled two-thirds of the listeners and revenue.

“Consolidation has, in a lot of ways, killed the radio business,” says Barry Cohen, a former rural radio host and managing member of AdLab Media Communications, LLC. “With consolidation comes scale, and then you end up with an 800lb gorilla that has hold of resources, licenses and the market. You can have one entity owning six of the top stations in a single area.”

Those large operators “buy up the best stations and signals, sucking all the money out of the marketplace”, says Cohen.

Today, the industry centers on remote service agreements – a shift driven by economics that has profound consequences for radio listeners. It’s common now for a single automated center to feed content to a slew of stations across the country.

Deninger sees this as particularly problematic for small communities. “If local radio stations are getting their content fed in from some distant studio in another state, you have less information about your home,” he says. “Having less information about where you live and the people you live with …” He trails off. “I can’t think that’s a good thing.”

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