The National Association of Broadcasters today announced the launch of new spots focused on the enduring value of local broadcasting and the commitment of TV and radio stations across the country to deliver trusted information in convenient, modern and familiar ways.
In recognition of NAB's centennial anniversary, the spots juxtapose history with the present day to showcase how local broadcasting is continuously innovating to meet the new ways people consume news and information. The spots encourage viewers and listeners to contact their members of Congress and remind them that local broadcasting is here to stay.
OutKick 360 is rebranding with the new name “Outkick Hot Mic with Hutton and Withrow” beginning today. Jonathan Hutton and Chad Withrow will continue as the hosts of the show, which airs live Monday through Friday from 3 PM–6 PM/ET exclusively on OutKick.com and across all OutKick social platforms.
Hot Mic will provide fans with smart sports talk that regularly questions the consensus while driving the conversation beyond the traditional sports show. Hutton and Withrow will also be exclusively interviewing high-profile athletes, sports executives and newsmakers across the sports and culture landscape.
The production company of right-wing radio host Alex Jones can reorganize itself as a small business even though Jones owes $1.4 billion to the families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims, a Texas judge ruled Monday.
Bloomberg reports US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. Lopez agreed with Jones’ company, Free Speech Systems, which argued that it met the test as a small business when it filed for bankruptcy in July. The families and the US Trustee argued that Free Speech lost eligibility when Jones filed a related, personal bankruptcy a few months later.
The ruling means Free Speech, based in Austin, Texas, can retain the advantages of the small business bankruptcy rules, including the ability of Jones to keep ownership of the company. The families also won’t have the right to vote down a repayment plan they don’t like.
Jones is locked in legal battles with families of the school shooting victims, who have sued him for inflammatory comments he has made about the 2012 massacre. Jones has lost cases in Connecticut and Texas related to the shooting. The families are trying to collect about $1.4 billion from Jones.
The predecessor to the current WGN was WDAP, which signed on the air on May 19, 1922, and was founded by Thorne Donnelley and Elliott Jenkins. Originally based in the Wrigley Building, the station moved its operations to the Drake Hotel in July.
WGN's main studio in Tribune Tower, circa '30s-'40s
On May 12, 1923, the Zenith Radio Company signed on radio station WJAZ from the Edgewater Beach Hotel. However, after this brief period, the Tribune switched its operations to WDAP, and the Zenith station became WEBH, the license eventually being deleted on November 30, 1928.
Scope's Trial 1925
Early programming was noted for its creativity and innovation. It included live music, political debates, comedy routines, and some of radio's first sporting event broadcasts, including the Indianapolis 500 automobile race, and a live broadcast of the 1925 Scopes Trial from Dayton, Tennessee.
In 1926, WGN broadcast Sam & Henry, a daily serial with comic elements created and performed by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. After a dispute with the station in 1927, Gosden and Correll took the program's concept and announcer Bill Hay across town to WMAQ 670 AM and created the first syndicated radio show, Amos 'n' Andy. WGN 720 AM served as a founding member of the Mutual Broadcasting System.
Over many decades, WGN was a "full service" radio station. The station played small amounts of music during the mornings and afternoon hours, moderate amounts of music on weekends during the day, aired midday and evening talk shows, and sports among other features. The station's music was easy listening/MOR-based until the 1970s, when its switched to more of an adult contemporary-type sound.
Music programming was phased out during the 1980s, and by 1990, the station's lineup mainly consisted of talk shows. In 1961, the WGN radio and television stations moved to a studio facility on West Bradley Place in the North Center neighborhood, a move undertaken for civil defense concerns in order to provide the station a safe base to broadcast in case of a hostile attack targeting downtown Chicago.
WGN radio moved back to North Michigan Avenue in 1986, relocating its operations to a studio in the Pioneer Court extension (WGN-TV remained at the Bradley Place facility, where that station operates to this day).
Some former well-known personalities on WGN include longtime morning hosts Wally Phillips, Bob Collins, Spike O'Dell, Paul Harvey and Roy Leonard. Orion Samuelson has been the station's farm reporter since 1960. Late-night hosts over the years have included Franklyn MacCormack, Chicago Ed Schwartz, Don Vogel and the husband-and-wife team of Steve King and Johnnie Putman.
Disney will begin layoffs this week, the first of three rounds before the beginning of the summer that result in about 7,000 job cuts, according to CNBC citing a memo by Chief Executive Bob Iger.
The cuts are part of a broader effort to reduce corporate spending and boost free cash flow. Disney said last month it plans to cut $5.5 billion in costs, including $3 billion in content spend.
“This week, we begin notifying employees whose positions are impacted by the company’s workforce reductions,” Iger wrote in the memo, which was obtained by CNBC. “Leaders will be communicating the news directly to the first group of impacted employees over the next four days. A second, larger round of notifications will happen in April with several thousand more staff reductions, and we expect to commence the final round of notifications before the beginning of the summer to reach our 7,000-job target.”
The layoffs were initially announced in February. The job cuts will be cross-company, hitting Disney’s media and distribution division, parks and resorts, and ESPN.
Disney is following the lead of Warner Bros. Discovery and other legacy media companies that are cutting jobs and spending. Disney has said its streaming business, led by Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, will stop losing money in 2024. Disney shares are up about 8% this year after falling 44% last year.
Riley Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer who competed at Kentucky, blasted ESPN for honoring Lia Thomas in its "Celebrating Women’s History Month" segment, reports Fox News Digital.
Gaines has been at the forefront of women’s sports calling for fair treatment and keeping transgender women from competing against biological females at the highest level of competition. Gaines tied with the former Penn swimmer at the NCAA championships last year. Thomas’ performance in the pool caused a national firestorm.
Lia Thomas is not a brave, courageous woman who EARNED a national title. He is an arrogant, cheat who STOLE a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman. The @ncaa is responsible.
The Babylon Bee has had nearly 100 joke headlines turn into prophecies after the stories eventually came true, the CEO of America’s largest right-leaning satire website told Fox News.
"The problem isn't that our satire is too close to reality," Seth Dillon told Fox News. "It’s that reality is too close to satire, so our jokes keep coming true."
The Bee maintains a running list of its satirical headlines that became real — or at least partially real — stories after publication. The fulfilled prophecies include a wide range of topics and include jokes about Democrats and Republicans alike.
"So we have a spreadsheet of nearly 100 jokes now that we've tracked," he said. "They were fulfilled like prophecies instead of punch lines."
The Bee published one article, "To Improve Public Perception, Kamala Harris Taking Likability Lessons From Hillary Clinton," in July 2021. A month later, Axios reported that a former Clinton advisor hosted a dinner with prominent Democratic women — including Clinton's former spokeswoman — to discuss how to defend Vice President Kamala Harris from bad press.
Roughly one in five Fox News viewers trust the network less after the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems revealed text messages and emails from top figures at the network expressing doubt about former President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election, according to a new poll.
A survey conducted by Maru Group for Variety Intelligence Platform found that 21 percent of Fox News viewers over 18 trust Fox News less after the revelations, which including text messages from prominent Fox News hosts and executives as well as testimony from Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch.
Still, 45 percent say they continue to trust the network. Eleven percent say they didn’t trust it before and continue not to, while 23 percent said they have no opinion.
Time spent online has increased by 12% over the past 3 years, and the average American adult internet user will dedicate about 4.5 hours of their day to using the internet via desktop or mobile, according to Comscore. As time spent online has risen, though, social media has taken an increasingly smaller role.
Comscore’s data shows that among adults, 15% of time spent online in December 2022 was spent with social media. That represents the third consecutive year-over-year decline, down from 22% share in December 2019.
By contrast, Entertainment takes the largest portion of adults’ time online, eating up 28% share. What’s interesting with the Entertainment category is that the pandemic may have led to a shift in consumption habits: in December 2019, just prior to the pandemic, Entertainment accounted for 21% share of online time (slightly trailing social media). By December of the following year, Entertainment had ballooned to 29% share, stealing from time spent with social media, services, and others. Since then, however, Entertainment’s share of online time has stayed flat, even dropping a point in December 2022 from a year earlier.
Within the Entertainment category, Comscore highlights the appeal of streaming audio sites and apps, which account for half of the daily time spent with the category. Previous research from Comscore has shown that time spent with streaming audio grew during the first year of the pandemic.
One in 4 smartphone users listens to a podcast in a typical week, according to Comscore, with Advice and Self-Help the category with the widest reach, followed by Comedy and Music.
Twitter Inc. said it would start taking away legacy blue check marks on April 1 for users whose accounts were verified before Elon Musk took over the platform, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Musk has said he wanted to end the legacy verifications since he bought Twitter in October. He has repeatedly criticized the way Twitter verified accounts before he took over the company.
Twitter verified accounts for free under its former leadership that it deemed notable and trustworthy, including those belonging to politicians, journalists, entertainers and others. The company placed a blue check next to those users’ names, allowing them to stand out in interactions on the platform.
Legacy blue check marks have coexisted on the platform since November with accounts verified through Twitter Blue, a subscription service Mr. Musk has championed. Any user can pay as little as $7 a month to be verified through Twitter Blue and receive a blue check mark, along with other perks. The company said Thursday that Twitter Blue is now available worldwide after a monthslong rollout that sometimes hit snags.
Twitter said Thursday that users with legacy verifications can pay for a Twitter Blue subscription to keep their check marks. Organizations, including businesses, nonprofits and government agencies, can pay at least $1,000 a month to verify their accounts. Associated accounts will receive a so-called affiliate badge next to their check marks, Twitter said.
Radio personality Scott Shannon has listed his home in Purchase, New York, for $3.45 million, reports The NY Post.
Known for his four decades on New York airwaves — including hosting the “Shannon in the Morning” show on WCBS-FM until his retirement last December at age 75 — he still lends his voice to nationally syndicated “America’s Greatest Hits” and the True Oldies Channel.
His massive 9,620-square-foot Colonial home, which sits on 2.52 acres at 132 Lincoln Ave., comes with six bedrooms, six bathrooms, three powder rooms, a pool and a tennis court.
A soaring entry features double staircases and French doors that open to a flagstone terrace, a chef’s kitchen, a family room and a main bedroom decked out with dual walk-in closets and a sitting room with a fireplace.
Severe storms rumbled across parts of the South on Sunday, two days after violent tornadoes smashed through the Mississippi Delta region — one of the country's poorest areas — gutting rural towns and leaving more than two dozen people dead, reports USAToday. The Storm Prediction Center said "strong tornadoes and very large hail'' were most likely to hit from central Louisiana across central and southern Mississippi and Alabama through the night. The National Weather Service office in Jackson, Mississippi, retweeted photos of hail that apparently fell in the state Sunday, some of it nearly the size of a baseball.
The devastation in Rolling Fork, Mississippi is seemingly insurmountable, but Mayor Eldridge Walker is confident the city will be restored.
"It will just take time," he said. "The city of Rolling Fork will come back bigger and better than ever before." https://t.co/ey967aKFde
Search and rescue teams worked Sunday through the rubble left by the weekend tornadoes. At least 25 people died in a twister that stayed on the ground in Mississippi for more than an hour Friday night. Houses were torn from foundations, trees were stripped of branches, cars were flipped like toys, and entire blocks were wiped out.
Rolling Fork in Sharkey County, about 60 miles northwest of Jackson, was devastated so quickly by the tornado that Mayor Eldridge Walker said the sheriff’s department barely had time alert the community of under 2,000 residents. “And by the time they initiated the siren, the storm had hit and it tore down the siren,'' Walker said.
Meteorologist prays for Mississippi residents in path of tornado while on air: ‘Dear Jesus, please help them’ https://t.co/k5zTgOllxt
➤BIG BANK DEAL: First Citizens Bancshares Inc., one of the nation’s largest regional banks, is buying big pieces of Silicon Valley Bank more than two weeks after the lender’s collapse sent tremors through the banking system. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said First Citizens FCNCB 1.85%increase; green up pointing triangle is acquiring all of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits, loans and branches, which will open Monday morning under the new ownership. The purchase includes $119 billion in deposits and about $72 billion of SVB’s loans at a discount of $16.5 billion. Some $90 billion of SVB’s securities will remain in receivership. Regulators took control of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB on March 10. The collapse sparked a panic that led to the weekend failure of Signature Bank and a dramatic intervention by financial regulators aimed at easing fears that depositors would flee smaller lenders. The sale represents a milestone in regulatory efforts to clean up after two of the largest bank failures in history, at a time when investors are on edge about the health of the global financial system.
Former Attorney General William Barr defended Fox News from claims of defamation brought in court by Dominion Voting Systems in an opinion column published in The Wall Street Journal.
Calling the voting tech provider’s case against the cable news giant “weak,” Barr argued a ruling against Fox would severely weaken the First Amendment protection that all news media enjoy.
“A ruling against Fox would be a major blow to media freedoms generally, subjecting news outlets to the prospect of outsize liability whenever they report on newsworthy allegations that turn out to be false,” Barr wrote in the op-ed published Thursday evening.
William Barr
The Hill reports the former attorney general’s line of thinking mirrors arguments Fox’s lawyers have been making in court documents and public statements for months: that Fox was not responsible for the claims made by Trump’s allies about voter fraud and the fact the president of the United States was making those claims was newsworthy.
Dominion has charged top executives and hosts at Fox knew the allegations being made by Trump and his allies were false but decided to air them anyway. The voting systems company has unearthed in court filings in recent weeks a series of internal communications and depositions from leaders at Fox showing them privately dismissing Trump’s claims of voter fraud but worrying how the network’s audience might react to fact checks of those claims.
➦In 1899...Radio pioneer Marconi transmitted a test from Wimereux, France to South Foreland Lighthouse, England. Marconi set up an experimental base at the Haven Hotel, Sandbanks, Poole Harbour, Dorset, where he erected a 100-foot high mast. The demonstration was the first international radio transmission.
Fred Foy
➦In 1921...Fred Foy was born (Died at age 88 – December 22, 2010). He was a radio and television announcer and actor. He is best known for his narration of The Lone Ranger. Radio historian Jim Harmon described Foy as "the announcer, perhaps the greatest announcer-narrator in the history of radio drama."
Shortly after graduating from high school in 1938, Foy began in broadcasting with a part-time position at WMBC, a 250-watt independent station in Detroit. He moved to WXYZ in 1942, but World War II interrupted his radio career. After the war, Foy returned to WXYZ in Detroit.
He took over the position of announcer and narrator for radio's The Lone Ranger beginning July 2, 1948 and continuing until the series ended on September 3, 1954. He understudied the title role and stepped into the part on March 29, 1954 when Brace Beemer had laryngitis.
His long run as announcer and narrator of The Lone Ranger made the Foy's distinctive voice a radio trademark. He was also heard on radio's The Green Hornet and Challenge of the Yukon.
His stentorian delivery of the program's lead-in thrilled his audience for years and helped the program achieve even greater popularity and status. Most radio historians agree that Foy’s Lone Ranger introduction is the most recognized opening in American radio:
Hi-Yo, Silver! A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty "Hi-Yo Silver"... The Lone Ranger! With his faithful Indian companion, Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early Western United States. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoof-beats of the great horse Silver. The Lone Ranger rides again!
➦In 1928...KGB-AM, San Diego, California signed-on.
