Radio One Flips to Jack-FM in Columbus, but Keeps Joyner on in Mornings

Radio One flipped to free-form “Jack-FM” in Columbus, OH, but kept Tom Joyner on in mornings. They’re playing Rolling Stones/Satisfaction now. Other artists include Nirvana, Gin Blossoms, and Young MC. I wonder if another owner would have kept TJ on in mornings with this format. If history is any guide, the answer is, “no.” (Although Radio One is hurting right now and so probably couldn’t afford to breach the contract with TJ.)

STEM and Play: What the Old Geeks’ Network Doesn’t Want You to Know

“There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.” - Maria, from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927)

“Do what you love and success will follow.”  That is standard advice in any number of self-help books.  But too few students are inspired to love science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM”).  These students end up pursuing liberal arts credentials that many employers scoff at if they are not combined with real-world experience.  

In both STEM and non-STEM fields, the best jobs are going to the grads who are most prepared, whether through college level work alone or internships.  Unpaid internships are a backstop for liberal arts graduates unable to find work in a job market that demands STEM skills.  Under this arrangement, employers get free labor and, in exchange, they offer college graduates training in additional skills newbies would otherwise not be able to acquire working at the local mall.  But unpaid internships are fine for college graduates with families who can sustain them.  For liberal arts graduates from poorer families, unpaid internships are much less of an option. 

On the other hand, college preparation alone has provided STEM grads with a sufficient foundation for entry-level work.  Some peg entry level earnings for top-flight STEM grads at close to or above six-figures.  Glassdoor, a site that crowdsources data on different companies’ working conditions, reports that the average starting salary for software engineers in Silicon Valley is $98,000.  For Google, the starting rate for software engineers can be upwards of $151,000.  

The Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Commerce reported earlier this week that America’s poverty rate is increasing at an alarming rate.  The overall poverty rate jumped from 14.3 percent in 2009 to 15.1 percent in 2010.  But a whopping 27.4 percent of Blacks and 26.6 percent of Hispanics are now living below the poverty line, compared to just 9.9 percent of Whites.

But many African-Americans and Hispanics are choosing not to go to college at all or, if they do decide to attend college, do not major in STEM fields.  Another report released by the Department of Commerce this week shows that, in 2009, just 22 percent of non-Hispanic Blacks and 14 percent of Hispanics have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 54 percent of Asians and 35 percent of non-Hispanic Whites.  Of these, just 17 percent of Black, non-Hispanic and 21 percent of Hispanic college graduates majored in STEM disciplines, compared to 22 percent of White, non-Hispanic graduates and 43 percent of Asian, non-Hispanic graduates.

These facts underscore the need to improve STEM education in low-income school districts, which are disproportionately comprised of African-Americans and Latinos.  But improving STEM, to the exclusion of liberal arts education, evokes the classic dystopian scenario in which some people are relegated to performing manual labor, while those at the top do comparatively little, enjoying what Clay Shirkey famously described as the “cognitive surplus”— the amount of time freed up by the Internet which allows the most fortunate among us to spend less time working and more time playing.

In his book “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives,” Steven Levy describes a corporate culture that celebrates practiced quantitative geniuses, while at the same time pushes employees to be creative and inventive.  Levy depicts Google co-founder Sergey Brin as quantitatively brilliant, but as being more interested in taking courses in swimming and gymnastics, than in earning a Ph.D. in computer science.  Levy also describes Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Location and Local Services, who, before entering Stanford, in addition to being a computer whiz, was also an accomplished ballerina.  Even today, Mayer says that, although she is a technologist, she did not want to lose herself in her profession.  That is why she remains interested in art, dance, clothes and travel.  The Los Angeles Times reports that Mayer once paid $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta and, despite her busy schedule, has found time to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and go snorkeling in Iceland.

Daniel Pink pointed to this trend in his book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.”  Pink asserts that no longer will modern workers be able to rely on purely mechanical skills.  Pink says that, in order to become innovators, workers will need to master the “right-brained” skills of design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.  Pink is careful to point out that this does not mean that technical skills are no longer important.  What it does mean, however, is that modern workers must master both technical, “left-brained” skills and conceptual, “right-brained” skills in order to thrive in the modern workplace.

But many public schools in America are pursuing the exact opposite agenda.   By simultaneously “teaching to the test,” so that teachers and students will conform to the rigorous testing benchmarks mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and drastically reducing arts education, these schools are effectively teaching students to fill purely utilitarian roles.  The jobs these students are being prepared for are precisely those that are most easily commoditized and most susceptible to outsourcing. 

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reported earlier this year that it is minority students who have been hit hardest by cuts to arts education.   The NEA report revealed that only 26 percent of African-Americans between 18 and 24 reported receiving any arts education during childhood.  This reflects an extremely sharp decline from 51 percent seen in 1982.  For Hispanics, the percentage of respondents who received any arts education during childhood plummeted from 47 percent in 1982 to 28 percent in 2008.  On the other hand, the number of Whites reporting that they received arts education dropped only slightly from 59.2 percent in 1982 to 57.9 percent in 2008.

To prepare African-American and Hispanic students for the jobs of the future, it is simply not acceptable for policy makers to focus solely on improving STEM education.  Students not interested in STEM fields by default should be encouraged to actualize their creative interests through science and technology.  Visual artists can be taught to design video games and modeling applications.  Students interested in education can be taught how to create and produce technologies to facilitate collaboration in the classroom.  Business majors who are highly skilled in mathematics are incredibly valuable in an extremely volatile world economy that needs as much certainty as possible.  At the same time, students who are only interested in STEM should not be considered low-risk.  To permit these students to become deficient in the liberal arts would do them a tremendous disservice. 

Students of color can also be mountain climbers, but that is not the message we are sending.  What we are doing is making life even easier for the students at the top of the pecking order.

This is Inner City …

“[T]he market shapes programming to a tremendous extent. Members of minority groups who own licenses might be thought, like other owners, to seek to broadcast programs that will attract and retain audiences, rather than programs that reflect the owner’s tastes and preferences.”  -  From Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Dissenting Opinion in Metro Broadcasting Inc. v. FCC, 497 U.S. 547 (1990) 

“Don’t take away the music.  It’s the only thing I’ve got.  It’s my piece of the rock.” - From the lyrics of Don’t Take Away the Music by Tavares.

When the walls started shaking at the Joint Center’s offices during Tuesday’s earthquake, I was faced with one question: leave the building or stay inside?  Similarly, the seismic transformation of the broadcasting industry brought on by mobile devices, personal computers, and digital video recorders has presented new problems for broadcasters.  But Black-owned radio stations targeting African-American audiences are faced with their own fight or flight question:  Can they stay profitable by offering black-only programming?  What is the tipping point at which diversifying their programming will begin to alienate their listener base?

Earlier this week, Inner City Media Corporation’s creditors filed an involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition against it. Inner City Media Corporation is the holding company of Inner City Broadcasting, one of the nation’s leading black-owned broadcasters and owner of WBLS-FM/WLIB-AM in New York City.  Inner City’s creditors claim that it owes some $254 million.

Inner City Broadcasting is rooted in the civil rights movement.  The late Percy Sutton, former attorney to Malcolm X and a former Manhattan Borough President; and Clarence Jones, former publisher of The New York Amsterdam News, one of the oldest black-owned newspapers in the United States, founded the company in 1970.  WBLS has been home to legendary black radio personalities like Hal Jackson, Frankie Crocker, Wendy Williams and DJ Red Alert.  WLIB has changed formats many times over the years, but it too has featured notable personalities including Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow; and Rev. Al Sharpton.  Inner City owns 15 other stations in San Francisco, CA, Columbia, SC, and Jackson, MS.

Inner City’s failure to repay its debt could be attributed to any number of causes, such as poor financial management.   But saying that poor financial management is the sole culprit, and leaving it there, does little to address the issue of why Inner City’s stations have failed to generate enough revenue to pay the bills. 

Let’s take WBLS as an example.

WBLS’ Glass Ceiling

WBLS has hit a glass ceiling.  Barring a complete revamping of its format to include more mainstream content, it appears that WBLS has attained the highest ranking possible with an urban adult contemporary (Urban AC) format in New York.  According to Arbitron, the Urban AC format is the most popular format among African-Americans.  It features music by artists such as Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly, Earth, Wind & Fire Marvin Gaye, R. Kelly, Alicia Keys, Eric Benet, Ne-Yo and Usher.  The “average quarter hour” (AQH) rating of a radio station is the average percentage of a population being measured listening to a radio station for at least five minutes during a 15-minute period.  With a 3.6% AQH overall rating, WBLS is the number one station in New York targeting a predominantly black audience.  It also ranks #8 among all radio stations in the New York metro area.  WLIB, WBLS’ sister station, ranks 34^th, with a .4 AQH rating. 

WBLS’ closest competitor, Emmis Communications’ WRKS-FM (98.7 Kiss FM)—the only other Urban AC station in the market—is ranked at a distant #16 overall.  But Kiss is half of Emmis’ combo which includes WQHT-FM (Hot 97), an urban station that skews toward the 18-34 demographic with hip-hop and r&b artists.  Hot 97 posted a 3.3% AQH rating in July, placing it at #12 in the overall rankings.  But with the ratings of Kiss and Hot 97 combined, Emmis is actually pulling a 6.2% AQH overall rating, compared to a 4.0 combined rating for Inner City’s WBLS/WLIB combo.

Further, Inner City has been hauled into bankruptcy, while its publically traded counterpart is carrying a similar long-term debt load without repercussions.  The $254 million that Inner City owes to Yucaipa Cos. and others does not appear to be that unusual.  Not taking into account other liabilities, Inner City’s debt-per-station based on the $254 million alone is $14.9 million. At the end of 2Q’11, Emmis held long term debt obligations of $327.2 million.  Spread across Emmis’ 22-station portfolio, its debt-per-station is $14.8 million, just $100,000 shy of the amount of Inner City’s obligation.

Should WBLS Change Formats to Increase Inner City’s Revenue?

Radio stations change formats all the time.  If a particular format is not working, most station owners are generally not averse to abruptly switching formats.  For example, the radio station at 101.9 FM in the New York Metro area, also owned by Emmis, has changed formats four times over the past seven years.  In 2004, the station switched from Smooth Jazz (Kenny G, Sade, Yellowjackets, Anita Baker) to an electronic/ambient music format (Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation).  It switched back to Smooth Jazz in 2005 and, in 2008, flipped to Rock (Kings of Leon, Pearl Jam, Black Crowes, Blink 182).  Finally, on August 12^th of this year, the station changed formats yet again, switching to an all-News format.

Inner City is no stranger to programming formats targeting non-African-American audiences.  Among Inner City’s 15 other stations, only 6 target African-Americans specifically.  Inner City’s station portfolio also includes progressive talk, rock, classic rock (Allman Brothers, Rolling Stones, The Beatles, the Yardbirds), oldies (Elvis Presley, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, The Four Seasons, and Sam Cooke), Chinese-language, Vietnamese-language, and two sports talk, ESPN Radio affiliates.

But what is often a business-as-usual decision to change formats carries an additional layer of complexity for black-oriented stations.  As in the case of WBLS, radio stations targeting a predominantly African-American audience are often intimately tied to the very heritage of the communities they serve.  In our communities, having the ability to listen to black music, on radio stations owned by people who look like us, with credible air personalities we can relate to, is often about much more than entertainment.  In an era of high unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, disproportionate incarceration rates, and widening achievement gaps in education, listening to black-oriented radio has a cathartic effect.

WBLS could change formats, but why should it?  Arbitron reports a .5 percent increase in the number of African-Americans who listen to Adult Contemporary radio stations (Eric Clapton, Whitney Houston, Chicago, and Christopher Cross) since Fall of 2009.  It also reports an increase in the number of Blacks who listen to Pop Contemporary Hits (Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Pink, Black Eyed Peas).  But this is far from a death-knell for black radio.  Radio stations targeting mainstream audiences have diversified their playlists, but black-oriented radio stations have not. 

Those African-Americans that listen to both black-oriented stations and mainstream stations are signaling a desire for more diverse content.  Their behavior indicates an impulse to seek out contexts that communicate—as Pepper Miller of the Hunter-Miller group describes it—“a universal situation … living parallel to mainstream” rather than isolated in a silo with no mass appeal relevance.  This does not require black-oriented stations to change formats completely.  But what it does require is learning a lot more about black listeners who are less loyal to Urban AC formats, and addressing some of their programming needs.  If Inner City doesn’t do it, someone else will, and it is starting to look more and more like that may very well be the scenario. 

Blacks and Latinos in “Mad Men”: Art or Artifice?

I have a thing for New York City nostalgia.  That is why I was excited to learn a couple of weeks ago that Netflix began streaming all four seasons of Mad Men, which I still had not seen.  I had heard testimonials of its keen story line, exquisite production, and distinguished cast.  I could not wait to see what the hoopla was about.  After watching just one episode, now I know.

The opening scene of the first episode is a bar filled with executives laughing, drinking and smoking during happy hour.  Ever the creative genius, the show’s protagonist, ad man Don Draper, is doodling something on his beverage napkin.  Just then, Sam the bartender appears with Draper’s drink.  Sam is African-American and in his 60s.  Sam looks tired, like he is working a double shift for the third time this week.  A conversation ensues between Draper and Sam and the head bartender, who is white, immediately interrupts them to ask Draper if Sam is “bothering” him.  Draper waves off the head bartender and, ostensibly trying to determine how to get people like Sam to smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes—one of Draper’s clients—he begins to quiz Sam on why he is loyal to Old Gold, a competing brand.

Ah, the good old days … But, for whom? 

I am usually skeptical about period pieces featuring an all-White cast.  I usually assume the subtext is that things were much better the way they used to be, when people of color were subjugated by enforced discrimination—either through Jim Crow laws, or by things like refusing to hire and promote anyone in New York City’s storied corridors of industry, unless they lived in its surrounding suburbs.  Provided that you lived in places like Ossining, NY, or at least summered in the Hamptons growing up, you were part of the “in” crowd—it just made the day go by faster when you had people around who could relate to the old neighborhood. 

I have not seen a demographic breakdown of Mad Men’s audience—this information is usually proprietary and limited to television networks with millions to spend on ratings service subscriptions.  Still, there is no question that Mad Men is very popular, at least within the television industry itself.  According to the show’s website, Mad Men, which will enter its fifth season of production next year, has been nominated for 19 Emmy Awards this year alone.  It has already won thirteen Emmys and four Golden Globes.

Normally, television shows do not achieve that kind of notoriety unless they are successful in reaching the audience advertisers value most—consumers with disposable income.  That category excluded people beset by inequality in 1960, and it continues to exclude people beset by inequality today, unless something cheap is for sale that dulls the senses, like cigarettes. 

But the show’s earnings have been less than impressive by industry standards, as mainstream advertisers have been slow to take to the show, in its broadcast form, when it airs on AMC.  Mad Men’s current advertisers are often luxury brands, such as BMW, but the show only generated $1.98 million in advertising revenues in 2009—the latest year for which numbers are available. 

Some have argued that Mad Men’s subpar financial performance can be attributed to the increased popularity of time-shifted entertainment and on-line television viewing.  These are reasonable conclusions for expanding Mad Men to new platforms, like Netflix.  But from a broader perspective, it is difficult to conclude that these trends do not signal America’s changing demographics and the state of the economy.  Given America’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity, it is possible that more Americans are skeptical, before giving Mad Men a chance, concluding that it is yet another example of the past being repackaged to perpetuate old value systems.  They avoid what they perceive to be revisionist interpretations of the past.  But it could also be another indicator that America’s growing inequality has resulted in a scenario where there are simply too few viewers with disposable income left.  And that is truly something to be mad about. 

What Happens When You Offend the Wrong People

It took a hacking scandal across the pond for the U.S. government to investigate News Corporation—a company that has repeatedly skirted past U.S. media ownership rules and unapologetically fueled hatred against every person of color under the sun. 

The News Corporation hacking scandal comes on the heels of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ July 7^th decision in Prometheus Project v. FCC (Prometheus II).   In that case, the court chastised the Federal Communications Commission for relaxing its newspaper/broadcast cross ownership (NOBCO) rule before the Commission provided adequate notice to the public.  The NOBCO rule is a ban against owning a newspaper and either a tv or radio station in the same market.  The court also vacated an “eligible entities” framework for promoting minority and female media ownership, reasoning that the “eligible entities” definition was too vague.  The decision left intact the Commission’s tv/radio cross-ownership rules as well as its rules governing local competition between television and radio stations.  But it is not as though Rupert Murdoch & Co. was ever really subject to these, or any, media ownership rules. 

The FCC has allowed Rupert Murdoch to colonize the nation’s broadcast airwaves which has resulted in an apartheid of ideas hiding behind popular, innocuous tv shows such as American Idol.  Back in 1993, the FCC granted News Corporation a waiver of the NBCO rule because it thought that Rupert Murdoch was the only person on earth who could save the ailing New York Post.  In 1995, the Commission granted Rupert Murdoch, who is Australian, a waiver of the general policy against foreign ownership because it felt that Murdoch’s ownership of stations in the United States would promote the public interest.   

Rupert Murdoch promotes the public interest?

While the number of stations owned by people of color cannot be established—since the FCC has done little to generate data on ownership of broadcast stations by people of color—the latest research pins the number of broadcast stations owned by people of color at around 3%, even though the population of Americans reporting that they are a race other than “white alone” stands at nearly 45%.  Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch leveraged the capital he generated as a result of the initial waivers he got for his broadcast stations to launch Fox News.  But rather than upholding notions of basic journalistic integrity—such as objectivity—Fox News has served as an instrument of one political ideology and of hate groups that are once again flourishing throughout the country. 

Back in May, New York Magazine columnist Gabriel Sherman published an article outlining the intricate web weaved by Fox News head Roger Ailes, and people within the Republican establishment, to operate Fox News as an instrument of the GOP.  Is it in the public interest for broadcast journalists to be so vehemently in favor of a single political party?   

For several years, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) has asked the Federal Communications Commission and other federal agencies to investigate links between hate speech and hate crime, but the federal government has sat on its hands.  NHMC has painstakingly kept a running list of hate speech and hate crimes occurring in the United States.  In one example, a suspect who got into a 15-minute shoot out with California Highway patrol, said that it was Glenn Beck and right-wing internet conspiracist and frequent Fox News commentator Alex Jones, who inspired him to pursue his “revolution.” 

Which public interest are we talking about here?  

In November of 2008, in response to the still-pending Prometheus II case, Austin Schlick, General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote to the court that the FCC was “already working hard to reexamine” several media ownership rules.  This is hard to believe, since Schlick wrote his letter just three months after the FCC released the first of 30 National Broadband Plan public notices, and just shy of a month after it announced the commencement of what was fated to become a fourteen-month-long open internet proceeding.  Let’s face it: The FCC was not working hard on much of anything at the end of 2008 other than the national broadband plan and net neutrality.  

The FBI has launched an investigation into News Corp, however.  The law enforcement agency plans to look into whether News Corp hacked into the cell phones of 9/11 victims.  Whether that investigation will be expanded to examine ties between News Corporation officials and hate crime offenders remains to be seen.  If history is any guide, it will not. 

Would the FBI investigation have been initiated were it not for the highly publicized hacking scandal in the U.K.?  As in the media’s national obsession with white children who are harmed, while children of color perish unknown beyond their local communities, would the hacking scandal have reached such a fever pitch if Milly Dowler had been black?

NBCU to Handle NHL Ad Sales

NHL will never have to worry that Comcast will pull NBC’s signal during a retransmission consent impasse—Comcast owns the broadcast network and NBCU has some skin in the game.  No other other broadcast network has this kind of leverage.    However, I doubt other MVPDs would be satisfied with self-regulation in lieu of an entire revamping of the retransmission consent rules— unless, of course, they started buying up broadcast networks themselves.

Esquire Magazine Loves Governor Wallace (Anyway)

Really @esquiremag? There’s a reason why George Wallace makes it “Good to Be an American Man?” See http://t.co/VEN2F4S at #34.