Broadcasting (Oct - Dec 1950)

1935 (Continued from page 91) pulling out of ASCAP because they were not satisfied with the $340,000 a year they were getting of the Society's $3 million income from radio and wanted at least $1 million which the ASCAP board refused to allow. ASCAP made no concession in its rates to compensate for the loss of this sizeable part of its repertoire, so inost broadcasters waited to see what would happen, less than 100 of the country's 620 stations signing new ASCAP license forms up to November when Warner Brothers reaffirmed its intention of leaving ASCAP, adding that it was going to issue its own licenses to broadcasters. In December, with the deadline nearing, NAB polled its board members and, on the strength of a ten-tonine vote, wired stations to renew their ASCAP licenses. No sooner had the wires gone off than two board members changed their votes to reverse the decision by an eleven-to-eight verdict, so NAB sent out a second wire contradicting the first one with the result that more confusion was added to a situation sufficiently confused before. ASCAP Issues Blanket Extension of Licenses On Dec. 30 ASCAP issued a blanket extension of its station licenses at the same terms for a Warner-less catalog, giving the industry a breathing spell. Warners, at the solicitation of NAB, had offered stations temporary 90-day licenses for a flat fee of four times the highest quarter-hour rate and by the end of the year about 150 stations had taken these licenses, although NBC and CBS refused to do so. Meanwhile, the State of Washington had declared ASCAP illegal and restrained the state's broadcasters from making any payments to ASCAP, whose appeal the Federal District Court had refused to hear on the grounds that it was a state and not a federal affair. Leo J. Fitzpatrick, general manager, WJR Detroit, was elected NAB president at the July convention. James W. Baldwin, former secretary of the Radio Commission, who had been executive officer of the Broadcasting Code Authority during NRA, was named managing director, succeeding Mr. Loucks, who received an ovation from the membership for his five years' service, during which time the NAB membership had risen from under 100 to 385. The convention also approved establishing an agency recognition bureau which Mr. Baldwin promised to do as soon as he had 120 subscriptions at $125 each to pay Mr. Fitzpatrick the estimated costs of the first year's operation. (He never did and the project was eventually abandoned.) National Independent Broadcasters, proposed earlier in the year by Edward A. Allen, WLVA Lynchburg, Va., was organized during the NAB convention by some 40 operators of stations not affiliated with the networks, who elected Mr. Allen president. In November, he announced that a sales office would be established in New York for NIB member stations, under the direction of James O'Shaughnessy, former executive secretary of the AAAA. Clsor Channel Group Confisiues Covemge Study Also meeting during the NAB sessions was the group of 14 clear channel station operators, which the year before had initiated a study of their present rural coverage and how it might be improved. The group voted to continue the study, collecting new data to supplement those now being analyzed by the FCC engineering department, with the purpose of building up a sufficient quantity of proof of the value of clear channel service to prevent FCC action to break up those channels. Mr. Loucks, in private law practice since leaving NAB, was retained as coordinator. In the fall the group also secured the services of J. C. McNary, who was granted a leave from his post as technical director of NAB, to study the engineering phases of clear channel operation and the potentialities of superpower such as the experimental operation of WLW Cincinnati with 500 kw whose success has led to expectations that grants of similar power might be made to other clear channel stations. In November Dr. Irvin Stewart, chairman of the FCC Telegraph Division, asked the Broadcast Division for a report on the advisibility of adopting special regulations for network broadcasting. He had noted, he said, that of the 40 clear channels, 26 were assigned to NBC affiliates, 12 to CBS, three to MBS and only one to a station not affiliated with any network (KNX Los Angeles). Transradio Press Service, which for nearly a year had flourished as the only national news organization supplying news to radio stations on a basis permitting them to broadcast it under commercial sponsorship, got some competition in April when United Press and International News Service decided to make their news available for broadcasting also without any restrictions on sponsorship. The Press Radio Bureau continued its operations, liberalized to permit broadcasting up to an hour of news a day but on a sustaining basis only, and UP and INS continued to make their news available to the Bureau along with Associated Press, but the newspaper battle to prevent sponsored newscasts was over. AP informed its member papers that, for a 5% increase in their assessments, they could make up their own radio reports, but it kept to the hour a day maximum and also retained a strict prohibition on sponsorship. By fa.ll nearly 300 stations were getting news from a source other than the Bureau: Transradio and its subsidiary. Radio News Assn., which distributed news to stations via shortwave radio, had 173 station clients, INS had 80 and UP had 64, not counting the local station-newspaper arrangements. NBC and CBS, while retaining the Press Radio Bureau service for their network newscasts, signed with UP for news service for their owned and managed stations. Transradio Press filed a $1 million damage suit against ANPA, the three press associations and NBC and CBS, charging violation of the Clayton, Sherman and Communications Acts. And, in December, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed the decision of the District Court in Seattle that once news has been published it could freely be used on the air by ruling that newscasts are competition with newspapers as they provide stations with revenue both directly and indirectly and can cause newspapers to lose both circulation and advertising. The court issued a temporary injunction I'estraining KVOS Bellingham. Wash., from using AP news on the air. Scripp--Ho"'ard Bids For Three Stations Scripps-Howard Newspapers applied for stations in Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo as the first step in a plan reportedly designed eventually to secure "^o^ V-f^ newsi^aper chain radio station ownership or affiliations in all the 24 cities in which it published newspapers. The year ended with about 140 newspaper owned or corporately affiliated stations and at least 50 applications from publishers in the FCC's pending file. "The onrush of newspaper applicants for new radio stations was one of the marked trends of 1935," Broadcasting commented in its Jan. 1, 1936 issue. American Broadcasting System, which in the fall of 1933 had established a network running from the East Coast to St. Louis, ran into financial difficulties early in 1934 and, after having terminated its $13,000-a-month lease on WMCA New York and switched to WNEW for program originations, ceased operations in March. WMCA, once more being operated by its licensee, Donald Flamm, set up a program exchange with WIP Philadelphia via a fulltime permanent line connection. During the year the line was extended to Washington and to Mr. Flamm New England and by late fall the Intercity Group had 13 clients using a total of 18 hours and 40 minutes on from two to eight stations. Mutual Broadcasting System began to exchange more sustaining as well as commercial programs and engaged 16-hour-a-day AT&T lines. Fred Weber, formerly of NBC and ABS, joined the network as coordinator of programs, and sales offices were established in New York and Chicago. NBC and CBS issue Rate Adjustments NBC and CBS started off the new year with rate a^'juslrn^nts, raising the network rates of some stations and lowering others, both networks showing slight overall increases and both explaining that the cost per thousand homes was less than when the old rates were established. NBC also altered its station compensation plan from the flat $50 an hour paid stations for commercial programs and the flat $1,500 a month charged them for sustaining service to a new formula eliminating the sustaining dollar payment and taking four hours of evening time a week from the stations instead, with payment for other network commercials carried by the stations on a sliding scale from 22 to 50% of card rate, depending on the number of hours sold. The chief station complaint about the new NBC arrangement was that it guaranteed its affiliates only a half-hour of evening time for local programs on weekdays (7:30-8 p.m.) and an hour on Sunday evening. CBS made no change in its station contracts, which still had three and a half yeai's to run. Radio put on one of its spectacularly successful public service-news achievements in June at McCook, Neb., where two members of the CBS Chicago engineering staff, Charles Warriner and Edward Malcolm, were vacationing when a late spring flood isolated the town from the rest of the country and cut off its power supply. Mr. Warriner found the best amateur set in town and rebuilt it for battery operation while Mr. Malcolm collected all of the automobile batteries he could find, and eventually made contact with Denver which notified CBS Chicago. Frank Falknor, chief engineer of the CBS Western Division; Bob Kaufman, special events director, and Allan Hale, announcer, flew to Omaha and drove as far as Oxford, another flood-struck town which had been occupied by the National Guard, where they put on a broadcast from a garage turned into an emergency i-elief station, getting it to the network over one of the three phone lines that were Oxford's sole connection with the outside world. Finally reaching McCook by chartered plane, they put on a broadcast from there. Mr. Warriner by that time was McCook's favorite citizen as he had persuaded someone in Denver to fly in a 5-kw o-e^eTp.tnv which pro(Coniinued on page 9i) Page 92 • October 16, 1950 BROADCASTING • Telecasting