I see in today's news that the Federal Communications Commission voted to end the 32-yar ban on cross-ownership of media properties by newspapers. This ban would be lifted in the nation's top 20 markets.

By that, they mean daily newspapers. The common definition of a daily paper is one that publishes at least 5 days a week. (For instance, The Daily Astorian, where I once worked, publishes Monday through Friday).

I remember when this ban first went into effect. It forced the Tacoma News-Tribune, which was the longtime owner of KTNT-TV Channel 11 and KTNT-AM and FM, to sell off the broadcast properties. Channel 11 was sold to Oklahoma-based WKY-TV, which renamed 11 as KSTW. WKY later became Gaylord Broadcasting and eventually sold Channel 11 to its current owner Paramount (Viacom-CBS)

I know that when the Portland Tribune was first started, there was speculation that its owner, Dr. Bob Pamplin, wanted to grow it into a daily. But as long as he owns KPAM, that supposedly could not take place. Also, it is VERY VERY expensive to publish a large daily, and the economics likely aren't there for the Tribune to move in that direction. Furthermore, Portland is not in the top 20 markets, while Seattle is, so the lifting of the ban apparently would not apply in Portland.

More control of what we hear in the news, great.

There's an upside!

Internet news sources will be better differentiated from corporate ones. Also, those niche stations, who remain independent, have this to play off off to differentiate themselves. (and they should start today, IMHO)

It's getting fairly easy to figure out what to ignore.

If the remaining little guys can work out how to do news and add value, without breaking the bank, their offerings should stand out better than they currently do, after this has had a chance to play out.

Clearly public input means *squat* :p

When I was a youngster, I was very impressed that the Oregonian owned KOIN. And I believe that Salem's KBZY even broadcasted from the Oregon Statesman newspaper back then.

Feel free to correct me.

It ain't over til it's over. Congress may overturn this ruling, as they did a similar one in 2003.

If you don't like today's ruling you can send a message to your congresspeople and senators here. An email address is required, so you may want to use a hotmail account or something if you don't want a lot of "updates" in your regular email. I have not known this organization to send snail-mail.

I was under the impression the cross-ownership rule only came into effect if you sold to another entity. Doesn't the Chicago Tribune still own WGN(World's Greatest Newspaper)AM-TV?

I've some choice words that belong on the other side: How much longer do we have to go before everybody on the planet agrees that Sush Bucks?

IMHO, this issue runs deeper than Bush. I suspect we will have similar discussions next cycle, no matter who we get at the top.

@randy: Done!

@Don, I'm not opposed to ownership, so long as we are seeing good news / opinion diversity, and adequate coverage.

If we are to have less diversity in ownership, how then to address the other matters?

Creeping fascism

Thanks for the link, Randy. I'm not a petition kind of guy, but this issue is extremely important. This is one more step towards consolidating all media outlets into a few corporations that are more easily controlled by our government.

Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but I'm new to the boards and doing some catching up.

Just wanted to correct Don_from_Salem above. It wasn't the Oregonian that owned KOIN, it was the Oregon Journal. If I've done this coding thing right, you should be able to see a piece of vintage 1942 stationery here

And The Oregonian owned KGW and KEX for a while before KEX was sold to Westinghouse, as seen right here

I would say that the most important question is, where does news come from? While traveling last weekend, I caught the morning show on KELY (Ely, NV). There was an interview segment with a journalist in which said journalist stated that a big problem today is that there is a lot of money in helping people to find news articles (such as what google and Yahoo do), but there is very little money in originating these stories. It is common practice, he stated, for newspapers to run wire stories, and then for television and radio stations to pick up these stories out of the newspapers with little or no further research. I have heard other versions of this complaint elsewhere, and I worry that if this situation doesn't change, news will largely become a case of "garbage in, garbage out."

Seguedad: Great Stationery! I've not seen either before. Do you have any other stations we could see? I've made copies and also have sent a link to Oregon Radio Historian, Ron Kramer in Ashland.

KOIN Radio through its life was owned by three different newspapers: 1926 to 1931 by "The Portland News". 1931 to 1946 by "The Oregon Journal" and 1954 to 1977 by "The Oregonian".

And then if memory serves me right, The Oregonian ( Newhouse parent corporation?) bought the Oregon Journal, in 1976-77, which forced the sale the whole 'mess' of stations later gone to Gaylord aka KYTE ( KOIN ) AM & FM.

Thanks, Craig. Yes, I have some more interesting stuff. Found these and others in a box in the attic at KODL with correspondence, mostly about Associated/Tidewater football game hookups.

For years, I collected paper ephemera on stations — stickers, business cards, letterhead, rate cards, playlists, coverage maps — anything with a logo on it. Haven't done much in the past 20 years, but have a lot of stuff from all over. I'll scan a few of the older ones in the next few days and post them. The two above are my real prizes. I particularly like the KOIN microphone logo, and the way CBS was worked into the logo as the shading on the base of the mike. That is classic Art Deco.

Speaking of KOIN, here's the earliest I know (thanks to you) as KQP in Hood River

KOIN AM-FM were sold to Gaylord alright but not because Newhouse had just purchased the Oregon Journal. I believe they bought the Journal when I was a little kid. I'm thinking the sale had to do with the crossownership rule.

Seguedad: I don't think I've ever seen the KQP Ekko stamp before. Thanks, I've made a copy. I should give you some information in return. The call letters "KODL" were originally assigned the the vessel "Menominee". The "KQP" calls were originally used by the vessel "Parthian".

Kennewickman: S.I. Newhouse purchased "The Oregon Journal" for $8 Million in 1961.

Here's the big question: Have you ever suffered from a lack of news diversity because of co-ownership? I doubt it.
To me it seemed like a great idea for a news-centric radio station to be able to draw upon the resources of a daily newspaper. Yet it's never been done correctly - certainly not here in DC with the ill-fated and badly-executed 'Washington Post Radio.'
I remember in '73 when the Eugene Register-Guard was forced to sell KERG, its AM station at 1280. It became KBDF, one of the best small market Top 40 stations of the 70's.
Before the sale, KERG was a dump, playing automated 'beautiful music' with zero news input from the paper (I believe the station's news effort was strictly rip-n-read).
Is KPAM the Tribune on air? Hardly.
Even the nation's great exceptions to the cross-ownership rule haven't produced huge cross benefit. WNYW-TV in New York isn't the TV version of the New York Post. The closest thing to paper-radio synergy is WGN and the Chicago Tribune. Radio, TV and the paper do synergy when it makes sense, but each has its own image in Chicago.

About the time KERG was sold, I talked to a ad salesman at one of the other stations in town (small country station at the time - can't pull the call letters out of memory). He said KERG was a tough sell locally (not only because of the automated beautiful music format, which was seriously lame) but because advertisers would tell KERG salesmen that they HAD to buy their newspaper, but, by God, they had a choice when it came to radio, and they were choosing otherwise.

And Richjohnson, a good example of the Tribune synergy was today, when I got a Tribune alert in my e-mail about the explosion and fire at the mall in Waukegan. Click through to the website, there's a story, but also a link to video from WGN.

IMHO, there is some lack of news diversity.

There is a corporate slant to a lot of traditional news. If the focus is how much liberal -vs- conservative, business -vs- arts, etc... I think that's largely fine.

However, all of it leans big corporate, and that's preventing some stories from airing, and it impacts the political debate in that the overall framing has that bias, despite the secondary framing right or left.

One primary example is the Net Neutrality story. This isn't getting coverage and it's a very significant change. It can impact people, even if they are not net-centric. It's also an issue where a lot of the potential change scenarios favor established media interests. Not covering the story well inhibits competition and that's not proven to be in our best interests.

IMHO, that's a conflict of interest on their part. Having the conflict is fine. I would do the same, given the control and the position. Anybody would! So, not really their fault, or anything evil, or any other thing besides just them leveraging their business position.

They get to do that because the market is being structured in their favor. That's a mistake, IMHO as robust competition results in both new media forms evolving and existing ones improving.

Without it, we are more likely to see apathy and that's just not good for a lot of reasons.

Another one is stories critical of traditional media in general. If we had more diversity of ownership, some of the smaller ones would differentiate by playing to their strength. Part of that differentiation would be to air stories along those lines.

Here's an interesting take. Let's say we have stations leveraging the paper. Honestly, there are some nice synergies there --I'm not opposed on that basis.

What if there were more smaller / single owner outlets. Again, how would they differentiate?

Perhaps they could leverage blogs!

Given the steady rise of news consumers looking to new forms, like blogs, e-zines, mailing lists, discussion board, etc... this could make a lot of sense.

IMHO, it's also potentially very competitive and large ownership keeps the barrier high for such efforts, despite them having strong potential for greater appeal.

In a way, I think the larger scale organizations are somewhat self selecting. They want to scale and that limits the kinds of things that get done.

Smaller, more nimble organizations, have some other options on the table. If we don't have those in the marketplace, we suffer some lack of diversity period.

Is KPAM the Tribune on air? Hardly.
Although I'm not 100% sure, I've always heard that the cross-ownership ban applied to daily newspapers only. Since the Portland Tribune is technically a Tuesday/Friday only newspaper, the old ban didn't apply.

IMHO, there is some lack of news diversity.
Yeah, I think that's the reason it was there to begin with. However, you're right about the fact that only the same stories are being covered by all the major outlets - they're covering the stuff that benefits common corporate interests, with plenty of garbage and fluff to give the masses the perception they're being informed, when in reality all they're hearing is whatever happened on prime-time TV shows. Add to the fact that a lot of content comes from the same place and picked up by many outlets (like AP), and much of the rest is straight from press releases, so there isn't really that much variety or diversity in news anymore.

"Add to the fact that a lot of content comes from the same place and picked up by many outlets (like AP)"

That's the scaling bit. The more coarse ownership tends to favor these things. And I'm not saying it's bad, only that those kinds of models are not the only options.

Alternatives to this face barriers to entry, that may be higher than necessary. The result of that is less potential to innovate and with that we get less overall for our time and effort.

Want to add to that.

I hear, "let the market decide" pretty often. I actually think that's a great idea. The other options I just wrote about may or may not actually have the appeal necessary to really be viable.

We won't know unless the market is structured in a way that gets them out there to compete. Call it implied lack of diversity then, since those are not known viable options.

A "free" market, as in unconstrained to the max, gets us where we are going now. If that's failing nationally, is there any reason to believe it's not hurting radio generally?

From a big business stand point, a known revenue stream, even if not optimal, with competition suppressed to a large degree, is predictable. Doesn't work out the best for us though.

That's probably one of the better justifications for more regulation, not less.

If radio as a whole does not compete well and is replaced by other technologies, that's ok. Natural flow of things.

But is that ok, if radio is hobbled more than it needs to be? We have a pretty big investment in radios. Shame to see that return cut short.

I was once asked by a well-read blog if I was interested in writing posts/articles regarding a particular project I'm involved with. Even though the owner of the site said he didn't consider the site to be journalism or news, I turned the offer down because I felt it would be improper for someone that was involved with the project to be doing write-ups about it (even if it were in an unpaid capacity). The other reason is because people occasionally use the site in the same manner that one would use a newspaper or broadcast news source.

I've gotten the same pitch before.

It's generally not worth it. Word gets around pretty quick.

good to hear from Rich Johnson...back in 69-72...the Medford Mail Tribune owned by the Ruhl Family also owned KYJC-AM 1230(KnowYourJacksonCounty) Each afternoon they would broadcast from the paper's newsroom the latest in local news with Al Reese! The resources were their..just not utilized as they should have been. Great idea just no follow-through.

Aha! I'd never heard the Know Your Jackson County idea behind those calls. Thanks for the enlightenment.

Here's another example of Oregon radio/newspaper crossownership:

KBND and The Bend Bulletin

Dan: From the research I've done on KYJC, the calls stood for: Your Jackson County station. This was not used on air. KYJC's on air slogan was: Your Mail Tribune.

Segueded: Another great looking stationery. By 1943 KBND had switched to 1340kc after beginning on 1310kc in 1938.

KRNR was started by The Roseburg News-Review.
KUIN was started by The Grants Pass Courier.
KWIL was started by The Albany Democrat-Herald.
KFLW was started by The Klamath Falls "Herald & News".
KMCM was started by The McMinnville "Telephone-Register".