Proposed Elimination of Newspaper Notice for Broadcast Applications Broadly Supported

The newspaper notice requirement is “an archaic relic from the Cold War and has been made obsolete by existing resources now available today including the Commission’s own website,” said low-power FM entity Rec Networks. The proposed changes "would reduce unnecessary and costly burdens on broadcasters and increase access to application information for consumers,” said a joint filing from broadcasters, including Beasley Media, Cumulus, Entercom and WNET.

Though the rule changes were broadly supported, many commenters suggested tweaks to the FCC proposal. Broadcasters providing online notice of upcoming applications shouldn’t be required to post the entire text of the application on their website homepage, NAB said. “This proposal would be inconsistent with well-established standards for website design and user expectations and would detract from important editorial content on station home pages and the user experience,” NAB said.

Public interest groups said the agency should require broadcasters to provide more detailed and specific information in online and on-air notices. Such notices “should contain sufficient information for the public to understand an application’s purpose and the public’s ability to file comments and petitions,” said a joint filing from the United Church of Christ, the Benton Institute, Common Cause, Free Press and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. “It is not necessary or appropriate for the notice to include additional material in the notice that will be apparent from reviewing the application and/or the station’s online public file,” NAB said.

NAB also opposed requiring broadcasters to include text crawls as part of their on-air announcements, or requiring notice to be posted in social media platforms. “Such requirements would interfere with broadcasters’ editorial discretion, impede innovation on new platforms and raise First Amendment issues,” NAB said.

Rec Networks expressed concern about the proposal’s options for stations that don’t have their own websites, such as some LPFM broadcasters. The proposal would allow notice to be provided on “locally targeted, publicly accessible websites” but finding a website that fits that bill could be problematic for LPFM broadcasters, Rec said. Posting on local government-owned websites or those run by local chambers of commerce could make stations beholden to those entities, Rec said. Broadcaster application notices are also unlikely to be very visible on such websites, Rec said.

The existing exemption from the newspaper publication rules for noncommercial educational broadcasters should be rolled over to any new online notice rules, said a joint filing from America’s Public Television Stations, PBS, NPR and CPB. Public broadcasters already are bound by more transparency requirements than commercial stations, and online notices would require allocating staff time, the joint filing said.

Online notice requirements could lead to a shorter wait time on city of license change applications, but the FCC should do more, said a joint filing from Broadcast Maximization Committee, Guest Technology, Anderson Associates and Horizon Broadcast Solutions. They want the FCC to publish such requests in the Federal Register as they come in, the filing said. The companies “urge the Commission to take steps to alleviate the unnecessary delays in processing these types of applications,” the filing said.