This appeared in my email today, just thought you might enjoy reading it. It is pretty long, sorry for that, but it is a good read about our current situation!

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I enjoy Scott Fybush's radio station tower site website...fybush.com
<http://fybush.com/> .

He also is editor of the Radio Journal which is posted weekly by Inside
Radio and he himself edits the NorthEast Radio Watch.

At the end of each year, he has his year end rant about the state of
radio. You will see a link to the one he wrote 10 years ago. He warned of
many of the problems we deal with today in the industry primarily brought
on by the money changers running the large groups.

Here is his piece...

Year-End Rant

It's coming up on a decade now since the first of these Year-End Rants
appeared in NERW's Year in Review, and in re-reading that very first one
(attached to the 1999 edition), it's sobering to see how much hasn't
changed in all that time.

Nine years ago, our complaints had a very familiar ring - too much
out-of-market, generic-sounding voicetracking, too little local news, the
perceived threats of satellite radio and web streaming (no mention, back
then, of the iPod, still two years in the future), and ballooning station
prices that made station ownership a game for corporate speculators
instead of hometown entrepreneurs.

Back then, we bemoaned the loss of the sense of magic that radio was once
so good at creating - and of course the years that followed, especially
these last few, haven't brought much magic back.

It's easy to be bitter, whether you're one of the huge number of talented
people that the industry - not just radio, but TV as well - has chewed up
and spit out in the drive for ever-greater profit margins, repayment of
unsustainable debt loads, and better returns on investments that were
ill-conceived (did we mention that Citadel actually spent $2.7 billion on
ABC Radio?), or whether you're one of those still in the trenches, but
wondering - as everyone in the business surely now does - whether the next
swing of the ax will have your neck as a target, and how you'll keep doing
the work that three people used to do in the meantime.

So what kind of right do we have to show up here at the end of a miserable
year and suggest that there's at least a possibility that things might
take a turn for the better in 2009?

The key, just possibly, may lie in the one complaint from 1999 that was
wiped out by the economic meltdown of 2008: those unsustainable station
values.

The run-up started around the same time this column did, as FCC ownership
deregulation in the mid-nineties began allowing owners to go from one AM
and one FM in any given market to as many as eight, with no national cap
on ownership. It was good news, at least for a while, for the mom-and-pop
owners who'd worked for years to assemble small station groups - many of
them cashed out at significant profits, and it's hard to begrudge them a
decent windfall after decades of service to the industry.

But then the balloon kept inflating, as balloons do, and what began as big
corporations buying signals from small owners turned into big corporations
buying signals from other big corporations, sometimes hundreds of them at
a time. Odds are, if you're a regular NERW reader, you lived through the
results, and they weren't pretty.

Ask any station broker, and they'll tell you that the balloon popped, and
hard, during 2008. (For that matter, just compare our list of station
sales above to the previous editions of Year in Review, helpfully linked
up at the top of that gray bar on the left.)

The collapse in station values didn't happen in a vacuum - it came just
before an election that promises to bring about some big changes on the
Washington regulatory scene. After two decades in which Democrats and
Republicans alike carried the banner of deregulation, there's reason to
believe that the Obama FCC may take a different view on matters such as
ownership caps and local programming requirements. While the return of the
Fairness Doctrine appears to be more the fantasy/scare tactic of one
corner of the talk radio world than any real legislative priority, it
seems likely that the next Commission will take a tougher stand than its
predecessors on "localism" issues, which should give your editor plenty to
write about over at his other job, as editor of The Radio Journal. (Sign
up for the free e-mail, if you haven't already - we think it's well worth
reading...)

OK, so let's recap: Station values are plummeting. The government is
talking about new regulations. Half the industry is (or at least seems to
be) out of work. And, oh yeah, the economy overall - and thus the
short-term revenue picture for stations - is in freefall. Yet here you are
reading a Rant from a guy who says...there's hope somewhere beneath all
that?

Yes. And the basis for that optimism comes right back to the premise of
that 1999 rant: radio is magic. Or, to put it another way, paraphrasing a
certain presidential candidate who probably regrets having said it when he
did: the fundamentals are strong.

See, here's the thing - radio isn't toaster-oven manufacturing or
commercial real estate or pizza delivery. Radio - good old analog AM and
FM audio distribution over terrestrial transmitters - is still an
incredibly efficient (arguably still the most efficient) way to reach a
mass audience. It still enjoys levels of penetration that most new media
can only dream of reaching. It's incredibly simple to use - you just turn
it on - and it keeps working in emergencies when just about any other
technology you can name has run out of battery power or bandwidth.

It takes one heck of an effort to let that kind of a structural advantage
slip away - and sadly, the combination of those rising station values (and
the associated pressures on debt service and profit margins) and an almost
paralyzing fear of change have just about done the trick.

But it doesn't have to continue to be that way.

(Continued on part II)