Grab News on the Go? Sure. Pay? Nope.

Nearly half of all adult Americans use their mobile devices to get local news and information, but only 1 percent of grown-ups pay for the privilege, according to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

According to Ian Paul pcworld.com, the recent survey of 2251 American adults also found only 11 percent of people access local news through a mobile app. Presumably, users opt to use the mobile Web and text alerts instead.

The Pew study calls this preference for app alternatives the "app gap." The study considers mobile devices to be both tablets such as the recently launched iPad 2 as well as cell phones.

The study -- done in conjunction with the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Knight Foundation -- finds that weather updates are the primary draw for local information for about 36 percent of all American adults (42 percent of mobile device owners).

Local restaurant and business information was the next most sought-after category, followed by general local news, sports scores, and traffic.

Despite the high interest in getting local information via mobile devices, not many people appear to be interested in paying for it with subscriptions or flat fees. Only 10 percent of adults using mobile apps to get local information pay for the privilege.

The Pew study says that means only 1 percent of people overall are paying for local news on mobile devices.

Read more here.

Read the Pew results here.

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POYNTER:  The 3 things people want on their mobile devices and how you can provide them

WQHT Features Diverse Crew

'a Black, a Puerto Rican and a Jew' - and wins ratings

Unlike almost every other morning show in radio, Cipha Sounds and Rosenberg of WQHT (97.1 FM, Hot-97) slipped in quietly.

And it worked, according to David Hinckly at nydailynews.com.

Joined by K. Foxx and billed as "A Black, a Puerto Rican and a Jew," they have crept ahead of perennial leader WHTZ (100.3 FM) in their target audience of 18- to 34-year-olds.

"It's turned out better than we thought it would," says Cipha.

The show has the standard morning mix of music, comedy, gossip, show biz and conversation, but like all good shows, they stamp it their way.

"We don't just do 'urban' topics," says Cipha. "But if there's a story that involves the N-word, say, we'll do it differently from everyone else because of who we are."

At the same time, part of Cipha's own role is to sometimes ask if there's really any story at all. "If someone says 'Real Housewives' or 'Jersey Shore,'" he says, "I'm the guy who goes, 'Uhhhh, why?'"

Meanwhile, Rosenberg plays the white guy in a culture whose artists remain predominantly black.
"Other programmers always told me not to talk about being white," he says. "But that was part of [Hot-97 program director] Ebro's whole concept here."

Read more here.

Opinion: Get NPR Off The Public Dole

From Glenn Garvin The Miami Herald:

Honest — the column you are about to read does not argue that National Public Radio is programmed by Karl Marx. But as I watch NPR’s public-relations counterattack in the wake of the scandals of the past couple of weeks, I can’t help but think of that old Marxist strategy of “heightening the contradictions” of capitalism.

Faced with a serious move in Congress to eliminate their funding, NPR bosses are arguing that losing their taxpayer subsidy would mean the death of journalism, democracy and possibly the devolution of the entire human race. But without even taking a breath they add that federal funding is barely 2 percent of their budget. You don’t need IBM to tell you that those two statements don’t compute.

If just 2 percent of NPR’s money comes from the government, why not just tell Congress to take a flying frack at a rolling doughnut? Two percent, heck, you could make that up on doughnuts. Tens of millions of Americans have taken hits of more than 2 percent in this economy and lived to tell about it. And think of the inner tranquility that 2 percent nip and tuck would buy: Nobody from NPR would ever again have to listen to some braying reactionary complaining that NPR has more practicing witches on its staff than Republicans. (Even if it’s true: NPR reporter Margot Adler is a Wiccan high priestess, while any registered Republicans on the staff remain deeply closeted.)

The answer: NPR gets a lot more than 2 percent of its budget from taxpayers — perhaps 20 times that. It’s completely a creature of government subsidies and cannot possibly survive in anything like its current form if Congress plucks public broadcasting from the federal teat. NPR’s real costs are hidden in a system of back-and-forth payments quaintly known along the Bogota-Miami axis as “money-laundering.”

Read more here.

CBS Chicago Whacks Jack, 104-3 K-Hits Debuts

First Song: 'Beginnings' By Chicago, Listen Here

The all-new 104.3 FM, “K-HITS,” will combine Chicago’s greatest hit music of the 60′s, 70′s & 80′s with personalities that are synonymous with the Windy City including Eddie and Jobo, Gary Spears and Bo Reynolds, among others.

A website posting states the station will showcase a who’s who of the industry’s most successful recording artists. The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Earth, Wind & Fire, Rod Stewart, Chicago, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, U2, REO Speedwagon, and John Mellencamp are just a few of the bands and musicians that will prominently play on “K-HITS” along with the best of Motown, and top 40 hits of the 70′s and 80′s.

Well-known to Chicago listeners of all ages, Eddie and Jobo are set to anchor “K-HITS’” line-up with their unique brand of comedy interspersed with a variety of music every weekday morning (5:30-10:00AM). Gary Spears, one of the original B96 Hot Hits jocks from 1982-84, follows as host of middays (10:00AM-3:00PM). Spears also could be heard on B96 from 1990-94. Afternoon drive (3:00-8:00PM) will be presented by Bo Reynolds, a Chicago radio veteran who had a successful run on B96 from 1987-90. Evening and weekend talent will be announced at a later date. In the meantime, various guest hosts familiar to Chicago audiences will fill-in during these timeperiods.

Beck's Blaze Praised For NPR Sting Video Analysis

Read more here.

Social Media Plays Role In Quake Family Reunion

Palin Went Rogue On FNC's Ailes

Before Sarah Palin posted her infamous “Blood Libel” video on Facebook on January 12, she placed a call to Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, according to a posting at newyorkmagazine.com.  In the wake of the Tucson massacre, Palin was fuming that the media was blaming her heated rhetoric for the actions of a madman that left six people dead and thirteen others injured, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.



Palin told Ailes she wanted to respond, according to a person with knowledge of the call. It wasn’t fair the media was making this about her. Ailes told Palin that she should stay quiet.

“Lie low,” he said. “There’s no need to inject yourself into the story.”

Palin told Ailes that other people had given her that same advice. Her lawyer Bob Barnett is said to have cautioned her about getting involved. The consensus in some corners of Palin's camp was that she faced considerable risks if she spoke out.

But, this being Sarah Palin, she did it anyway.

Ailes was not pleased with her decision, which turned out to be a political debacle for Palin, especially her use of the historically loaded term "blood libel" to describe the actions of the media. “The Tucson thing was horrible,” said a person familiar with Ailes’s thinking. "Before she responded, she was making herself look like a victim. She was winning. She went out and did the blood libel thing, and Roger is thinking, 'Why did you call me for advice?'”

Ailes’s displeasure matters, not only because his network is a holding pen for Republican candidates-in-waiting, but because he is paying Palin a hefty $1 million annual salary while she strings out her decision over whether to run for president.

Read more here.

State Dept. SPOX Quits Over Remarks

State department spokesman P.J. Crowley was forced to resign after his controversial comments about suspected WikiLeaker Bradley Manning, according to multiple reports cits by the nydailynews.com.

The abrupt resignation came after he criticized the Defense Department's treatment of Manning, who is being held in a military prison accused of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks.

"Mike Hammer will do a great job as my successor at State," Crowley tweeted Sunday afternoon. "He and I worked together 12 years ago on the NSC staff at the White House."

Speaking at an MIT seminar last week, Crowley said Manning was being "mistreated".

"What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the Department of Defense," he said.

An 11-page letter from Manning's lawyer released last week detailed treatment of the Army private that included him being stripped naked, held in solitary confinement and allegedly harassed by prison guards.

Read more here.

Mike Allen, who writes the Politico Playbook, notes:

Administration officials have long wanted to get rid of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, and were looking for an ambassadorship for him to avoid a messy exit. Instead, Crowley did the dirty work for them. He resigned Sunday after infuriating the White House, the Pentagon and his own bosses at Foggy Bottom by criticizing the military's treatment of Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of WikiLeaking all those diplomatic cables. "Ambassador" Crowley will now be working on his golf game. He has briefed his last, and will clean out his office this week.

• Several administration officials said that the Manning defense was simply the LAST STRAW, and that Secretary Clinton had already decided to replace him, for lots of reasons that had nothing to do with Manning. "He's just not a disciplined spox," one official said. "Hasn't ever been." Another official echoed: "In a domain where every word is watched, and every word can have ramifications in other countries, you have to be a little more buttoned-down."
• What Crowley was thinking: He believes that harsh treatment of Manning is counterproductive, and undermines America's strategic narrative by opening us to challenges about our commitment to freedom of expression - whether we practice what we preach. Crowley is unusually sensitive to the treatment of prisoners because his late father, a B-17 pilot, was a prisoner of war for two years in a camp that at the time was part of East Germany. But that wasn't the main reason for his comments.
• Secretary Clinton's statement: 'It is with regret that I have accepted the resignation of Philip J. Crowley as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. PJ has served our nation with distinction for more than three decades, in uniform and as a civilian. ... Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) Michael Hammer will serve as Acting Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs," and is likely to be nominated as the permanent successor."
• Statement by Philip J. Crowley: "My recent comments regarding the conditions of the pre-trial detention of Private First Class Bradley Manning were intended to highlight the broader, even strategic impact of discreet actions undertaken by national security agencies every day ... Given the impact of my remarks, ... I have submitted my resignation."
• "Morning" Joe Scarborough defended Crowley for saying "what lots of people at the State Department are thinking."

CNBC's Kudlow Apologizes For Quake Comment

CNBC's Larry Kudlow on the earthquake in Japan: "The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that."



He later apologized for the comment on Twitter.

Study: iNet Passes Newspapers As News Source

Platforms: Web rapidly graining ground

By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010, according to a posting by Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell for the Pew Project for Excellens in Journalism.

After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover, according to Pew's annual Media report.

With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.

According to the report, among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year — an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost—meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000.

People are spending more time with news than ever before, according to Pew Research Center survey data, but when it comes to the platform of choice, the web is gaining ground rapidly while other sectors are losing. In 2010, digital was the only media sector seeing audience growth. And cable news joined the ranks of older media suffering audience decline.

Digital: In December 2010, 41% of Americans cited the internet as the place where they got “most of their news about national and international issues,” up 17% from a year earlier. When it came to any kind of news, 46% of people now say they get news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Only local TV news is a more popular platform in America now (50%). The new wild card in digital is mobile. A new survey released as part of the State of the News Media find finds that 47% of Americans now say they get some kind of local news on mobile devices such as cellphones or other wireless devices (such as iPads). As of January 2011, just 7% of Americans owned electronic tablets, according to our new survey, but that is nearly double from four months prior; and 6% of American adults have e-readers.

Cable News: That activity may explain one other change in the sociology of news consumption in 2010. The audience for cable news in the last year declined substantially. In aggregate, the median viewership fell 13.7% across the entire day in 2010. Prime-time median viewership fell even more, 16% to an average of 3.2 million, according to PEJ’s analysis of Nielsen Market Research data. Daytime fell 12%.
And for the first time in the dozen years Pew monitored this segment, every channel was losing. CNN suffered most. Its median prime-time viewership fell 37% to 564,000 viewers, and MSNBC beat it in total viewers during prime time for the first time. But Fox fell, too, 11%, and MSNBC declined 5%.

Network News: If the losses were new to cable, they were not for network broadcast news. Audiences for almost every network news program fell again in 2010. Evening news audiences fell by 752,000 viewers, or 3.4%, from 2009 and have been on a downward trend for three decades. Network evening news is, however, still an extraordinarily powerful source of information in America. Some 21.6 million people on average watched one of the three programs each night. That is roughly four times the combined number watching each cable news channel’s highest-rated program. In the morning, an average of 12.4 million people tuned in each day over the year, 3% fewer than in 2009. That is the sixth consecutive year of losses. The PBS NewsHour averaged 1.1 million viewers nightly during the 2009-10 season, basically unchanged from the year before.

Newspapers: Print circulation also continued to decline in 2010. Weekday circulation fell 5% and Sunday fell 4.5% year-to-year for the six-month period ending September 30. There is some good news in those numbers, however. The losses in 2009 were double that. Online audience, though imprecisely measured, did grow some, and many papers can claim their overall audience is bigger than ever, but the data suggest that it did not fully compensate for print losses industrywide. One survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, finds the total audience that reads newspapers, in print and online, at least three times a week dropped by six percentage points over the last two years. By this count, 40% of Americans report reading a newspaper in any form, down from 46% in 2008 and 52% in 2006.

Magazines: Circulation for the six news magazines in our report fell 8.9%. By far the largest portion of that, subscriptions, fell 8.6%, but that number is controlled, based on how much magazines want to spend to “buy” readers. Newsstand sales, which is a smaller component, dropped 17.7%. Circulation for the magazine industry as a whole dropped 1.5%.

Audio: Of all the traditional media, the audience for AM/FM radio has remained among the most stable. In all, 93% of Americans listened to AM/FM radio at some point during the week in 2010, according to data from Arbitron, and this has dropped only three percentage points in the last decade. News may have suffered more. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 16% of Americans say they get most of their national and international news from radio, down 6% from 2009. And 34% of Americans said they got some news on the radio “yesterday,” down from 43% in 2000.

NPR, by contrast, has flourished as commercial all-news radio programming has become scarcer. NPR’s audience grew 3% in 2010, according to NPR internal data, to 27.2 million a week. That is up 58% since 2000.

But the biggest change in radio listening may be just ahead. A good deal of radio listening occurs in cars, and we are on the brink of internet radio being widely available there for the first time. Toyota is including Pandora in its multimedia system in all new models in mid-2011.  Pandora also signed a deal with Pioneer that would put its online radio service in at least six other car manufacturers by the end of 2011. People may be ready. More than quarter of Americans (27%) said they were “very interested” in online radio in the car in 2010; this is up 17 percentage points from 2009.

Read more here.

Cumulus Can't Discount Listeners In Citadel Deal

Cumulus Media's official announcement of its agreement to swallow up WLS-AM and FM parent Citadel Broadcasting said the cash-and-stock deal valued Citadel at approximately $2.4 billion, including assumed debt.

Citadel's announcement said it was valued in the deal at approximately $2.5 billion, based on a calculation of the worth of Cumulus shares.

But Phil Rosenthal at The Chicago Tribune writes one thing each company's outline of the transaction and its anticipated benefits had in common, however, is that neither mentioned "listeners."

Moody's Investors Service, the credit rating outfit, likes the deal. To pick up Citadel, which emerged from reorganization in June, Cumulus has lined up $500 million in equity investment commitments from Crestview Partners and Macquarie Capital and about $3 billion in debt financing.

A notion Moody's advanced in a note is that acquisitions enable radio to grow amid increasing competition from the Internet, satellite pay-radio and other formats. Then there's the $50 million or more in savings Cumulus says it thinks it can squeeze from synergies as a result of the deal, although it offered no details.

Rosenthal wonders if those synergies come at the expense of live local programs, as past consolidation often has, and listeners no longer feel connected to the stations in the same way, how much savings is there really?

WLS-AM 890 conceivably could simply open a spigot and run national programs all day. But the station has carved a niche in the Chicago market, and its brand is now as tied to Don and Roma Wade in the mornings and Roe Conn and Richard Roeper in the afternoons and their Chicago-centric view of the world as it is to Rush Limbaugh's syndicated show in middays, if not more so.

That might not show up in a spreadsheet for investors. The Federal Communications Commission, in reviewing the deal, is more likely to note that there is Cumulus and Citadel overlap in markets such as Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco, and there may be reasons to disallow combining the holdings in Harrisburg, Pa., and Nashville, Tenn.

But, frankly, amid increasing competition from the Internet, satellite pay-radio and other formats, the ability of listeners to identify a station as uniquely their own is not to be taken lightly.

Read more here.

Grandy's Contract Keeps Him Off DC Air 'til May 2012

Listeners in the nation’s capital might be hearing again from Fred Grandy, the former “Love Boat” star and ex-congressman who left his radio show last week after a fallout with management allegedly over some on-air Islam remarks.

But it might take awhile, according to posting at foxnation.com.

Catherine Mann-Grandy, Fred’s wife, told FoxNews.com that his contract does not expire until May 2012 and that he can’t do any radio shows in the Washington, D.C., region for another year. She also said WMAL, the radio station where Grandy was a host since 2003, is making it “very difficult” for her husband to sever his relationship with the company.

Read more here.

Glenn Beck Gets Slot at WILM Wilmington

Clear Channel GM says move not influenced by Philly affiliation drop

1450 AM WILM  is adding controversial conservative talk show host Glenn Beck to nine to noon  line-up, while moving long-time morning host John Watson to the 9 p.m. to midnight slot. The move becomes effective on Monday, according to Doug Rainey at mydailybiz.com.

Clear Channel Delaware General Manager Chris Walus said the move by the AM radio station was a business decision. " It's something we do in the radio business," he said. He said the switch was driven by the fact that the line-up of Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity is considered to be the strongest in talk radio. Limbaugh and Hannity occupy the afternoon time slots for WILM.

Walus said the decision was not tied to a move by a Philadelphia station to drop Beck and Hannity from their line-up, although he added that the decision would be a plus for WILM. WILM's daytime signal does reach some western portions of the Philadelphia area, including the area around the airport.

Moving Watson to the 9 a.m. to midnight time slot would allow the host to hear from more callers on his talk show, according to Walus, who added that the station is committed to having a diversity of opinion. He claimed that Watson sometimes has trouble getting enough callers in his current time slot. Talk shows in smaller markets often have a small group of callers who check in daily. In larger markets, callers are often limited to once or twice a week.

Read more here.

The Sunday Funny

Frank Caliendo on Letterman Show 2006.