Industry News

It bears a 1-year target estimate of $7. And, it hasn’t been priced that low since mid-November.

Cumulus Media stock has proven resilient in these COVID-19 pandemic times, and with Thursday’s trading on Wall Street, is again approaching its highest closing price since early March 2020.

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Urban One shares soared in Wednesday afternoon trading on Wall Street — triggered, perhaps, by the confirmation that Democratic control of the U.S. Senate had been reached.

Whatever the reason, the C-Suite has responded with a major offering of aggregate principal amount of senior secured notes due 2028.

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It’s been a wild 24 hours in Washington, D.C.

That includes the stock performance on the Nasdaq GlobalSelect market for the multimedia company superserving African American consumers based in the Nation’s Capital.

Urban One shares rose by more than 100% on Wednesday. Within the first 25 minutes of trading on Thursday, UONE had given back some 29% of that gain.

What’s to come could be predicated on Urban One’s Q4 results. And, the company released a sneak peek of its fourth-quarter financial report card on Thursday, ahead of the Opening Bell on Wall Street.

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On January 4, RBR+TVBR exclusively reported on a matter involving Urban One and the Nasdaq stock market. The multimedia company superserving African American consumers had received notice from Nasdaq that it was no longer in compliance with its trading policies and, with no resolution, could face a delisting.

Such an action was unlikely, but nevertheless concerning. Now, Urban One has guaranteed that it will not happen.

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I see trouble ahead in our business in the shortage of qualified broadcast engineers.

I am not speaking of IT people. I am speaking of the guy in a T-shirt and jeans who gets to the transmitter, looks for the problem, reads the schematic, crawls inside the box and replaces R-16, R-17, C-232 and Q-4, and the music again blares forth.

We are losing those guys every day, and they are being replaced by the guy who walks into the site, looks at the box, grabs his cell phone, calls BE or Nautel to find which board to pull, and ships it back while waiting for a loaner to get the rig going.

I never thought of myself as an old-timer. Starting in the business in 1963, old-timers were the guys I learned from, mostly World War II graduates. They knew everything about audio and RF. I wished I knew a tenth as much as they did.

My first real bit of engineering was converting a 50 kW FM station to stereo in 1963. No one listened to FM then, I think there were 10 FM radios in the city and five were in Cadillacs owned by mob hit men.

I remember putting the stereo generator in an eight-foot rack. It took up four feet of the rack and had enough 12AU7s in it to heat the building. It had two outputs, one L+R that went into the phase modulator of the serrasoid exciter and the L–R output that went into the exciter about 200 multipliers later (the crystal frequency was multiplied 864 times).

It was a technical nightmare compared to mono FM. Getting two matched phased phone lines from the studio to the transmitter over three exchanges was another task. But we were stereo most of the time.

The FCC had a rule that if you weren’t transmitting stereophonic program material for more than a certain length of time, you had to shut the stereo pilot off so as not to mislead the 10 listeners by illuminating their stereo beacon. So the pilot on/off was wired into the old Rust remote control so the studio could turn it off when a monophonic recording of a symphony played.

Times changed; we wound up with RF STLs, stereo generators on a single chip, CD players, computers and lots of stuff made in foreign countries that wasn’t worth fixing or whose parts were not available, so when they broke they wound up on a shelf at the transmitter site.

Today many stations have guys who can swap XLRs or RCA plugs from one item to another. But we also still have transmitters, antennas, phasors and all of the other sundry items that make a radio broadcast station distinct from an internet music source (I don’t call internet streams “radio stations” because you can’t have radio without RADiate).

When we talk of RF, we talk of a whole lot more than 5 volts, maybe 3,000 times that, and a whole lot of amps both DC and RF. Sending an IT guy into that is like sending a 90-year-old woman into the Indy 500 with her Buick LeSabre. She ain’t gonna win and she will probably die trying.

One of the problems is lack of interest. When I was young I got a ham license at 12, built my own CW rig with a 6L6, turned it into a phone rig with another 6L6 and a Heising choke, built a superregen receiver and went on 80, 75 and 40 meters. Parts from a few old television chassis and old radios my dad brought home, parts from a military surplus store down the road  in 1960 there was still a lot of WW2 surplus.

Try that today; there are no radios or television sets with good parts or even worth trying to get parts from, there is limited surplus and most of the corner parts stores are gone. You can’t even build a Heathkit anymore.

A few years ago, I built a guitar amplifier for my son. What a project, just to find octal tube sockets for the 6L6s took forever. Kids have no interest in this kind of stuff anymore.

We all, especially big conglomerates who own most of the broadcast stations, have to make a concerted effort to get high school and college kids interested in broadcast engineering as a career.

Get them interested, get them educated, best by shadowing an old goat who can show them the tricks of the trade. Yes an EE degree is great to learn Kirchoff’s laws, but Kirchoff never spent several hours at 3 a.m. looking into a dead HT-25. The likelihood is that the old goat will tell the youth that he should probably look at the screen blocker kapton, a lesson the youth is not likely to forget.

Broadcasters have to realize that us old goats are going away, and they had better not only get the youth trained to take over but make the pay comparative to working in an office as an IT manager so they don’t do just that.

We, the limited number of old-timers who learned from the old old timers and through the wisdom of age and smelly fingers from getting too close to the ATU coils, have to keep alert for anyone who might express the slightest interest in our business. I ask around schools, especially the science teachers, if they have any students who seem interested in electronics.

We have to persuade them, nurture them and tell them lies (don’t mention having to walk into a remote site at 2 a.m. in a blizzard with the temperature at –30). Tell them they will have a job for the rest of their life, they can’t ship their job off to China or India or wherever.

At least if we all make an effort to replace ourselves, things can stay status quo. If our ranks aren’t refilled soon, the radio dials are going to start getting really quiet.

The author is a veteran industry engineer.

Radio World sidebar: TPTP Aims to Help

The Society of Broadcast Engineers recently announced a response to ongoing concerns about new technical talent choosing broadcasting as a career by creating the Technical Professional Training Program.

“As technology and the average age and tenure of technical professionals advances there is concern to adequately fulfill the technical staffing needs in the long term,” SBE noted. The goal of the program is to train new entrants to the field of broadcast technology through a series of webinars, mentoring, certification support and other resources.

Learn more about it at http://sbe.org/sbe-technical-professional-training-program/

Comment on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject line.

The post Commentary: “The Old Goats Are Going Away” appeared first on Radio World.

TEGNA and Comcast-owned FreeWheel have announced a new multi-year deal “to further transform and automate the way TEGNA’s buyers and sellers transact” — including through CTV/OTT advertising platform Premion.

Under the terms of the deal, TEGNA will continue working with FreeWheel to help enhance business operations in several different ways, including using FreeWheel’s Strata platform to process electronic orders through ePort, an automated platform that enables purchasing ads from local television stations.

TEGNA currently connects with agencies through FreeWheel’s ePort platform, enabling its sellers to receive electronic orders from buyers, send makegoods back to the buying platform, and receive revisions electronically.

Premion, a CTV/OTT advertising platform for regional and local advertisers, will continue to use FreeWheel’s Strata ad management platform. FreeWheel’s marketplace-based technology enables Premion to further enhance its advertising operations, facilitate automation, and increase agency access to its OTT inventory.

The companies have also committed to continuing their joint innovation initiatives, with a specific focus on working on new marketplace-based technology to enhance programmatic transactions and inventory acquisition.

“The media industry has transformed over the past decade, and through our partnership with FreeWheel, we continue to show our customers that we are an industry leader,” said  TEGNA Chief Technology Officer Kurt Rao. “Agencies are relying on automation more than ever. With FreeWheel, we are able to process orders more quickly and more efficiently for our agency partners across our marketing and advertising solutions, including Premion.”

Townsquare Media on Wednesday told the SEC that it has successfully completed the previously announced sale of $550 aggregate principal amount of its 6.875% senior secured notes due 2026 at an issue price of 100.0%.

The New Notes mature on February 1, 2026. Interest is payable on the New Notes semi-annually in cash in arrears on February 1 and August 1 of each year, commencing on August 1, 2021.

Townsquare used a portion of the net proceeds from the New Notes Offering to repay
borrowings under its term loan facility provided under the Existing Credit Agreement. The company also intends to use a portion of the net proceeds from the New Notes Offering,
together with cash on hand, to redeem all of its outstanding 6.500% senior notes due 2023 on January 14 and to pay the premium, fees and expenses related thereto.

The New Notes were issued and sold in a private offering to persons reasonably
believed to be qualified institutional buyers in accordance with Rule 144A under the Securities Act and to non-U.S. persons outside of the United States pursuant to Regulation S under the Securities Act.

The New Notes and related guarantees will not be registered under the Securities Act, or any state securities laws, and unless so registered, may not be offered or sold in the United States except pursuant to an exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act and applicable state securities laws.

To view the entire 8-K filing with the SEC, please click here.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — One of the FCC’s biggest champions for the radio industry, forced to exit over a Section 230 disagreement with soon-to-depart President Donald Trump, has resurfaced as a visiting fellow at a Washington think tank.

He’ll be working alongside another former Commissioner — someone who served on the FCC from 1997-2001.

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By Adam R Jacobson, Carl Marcucci and April McLynn

At 9:30pm Eastern, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate in a joint session of Congress that resumed some five hours after a rowdy and violent group of supporters of Donald Trump engaged in what Romney called “an insurrection supported by the President of the United States.”

Romney’s speech was well-covered by national media, with live coverage broadcast on NBC.

At the same time, one Washington, D.C. radio station wasn’t covering Romney’s speech. Rather, a field reporter was recalling an incident at the J.W. Marriott with a dozen Trump supporters hours after a 6pm curfew put into effect by Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser to help quell any after-dark eruptions from Trump supporters.

The report from WTOP-FM Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller was just one way local radio and TV went above and beyond as national media outlets faced immediate danger simply by doing their jobs.

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Call it a Blue Bump thanks to the apparent victories of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as Democratic U.S. Senators representing the state of Georgia.

Urban One shares soared by 102.1% on Wednesday, with big gains coming in the afternoon hours. After-hours trading shows a decline, but it still represents a super surge for the media company super-serving African American consumers.

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