A provision in the FCC’s incubator program order that allows broadcasters to receive ownership waivers in markets comparable to the one in which they incubate a new broadcast owner “threatens to destroy” the entire program, said members of the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment, in a call with Matthew Berry, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s chief of staff. “The notion that a market with fewer than 350,000 people and 63 stations is in any sense ‘comparable’ to a market of over 19,000,000 people with 153 stations is new to communications law,” said Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Senior Adviser David Honig and National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters President James Winston in the filing. Honig and Winston said they called Berry on behalf of fellow committee members DuJuan McCoy, CEO of Bayou City Broadcasting, and former FCC Commissioner Henry Rivera, now with Wiley Rein. No notice was provided during the proceeding of the FCC’s definition of a comparable market, and the definition “was not a logical outgrowth of any earlier proceeding,” the filing said. “The incubation proposal would suddenly have been converted into little more than an engine of large market consolidation."

The FCC should eliminate rules requiring broadcasters to provide public notice of license applications, NAB said last week in docket 17-264. Such notice is “superfluous,” NAB said: If the agency doesn’t eliminate notice requirements, it should get rid of rules requiring that notice be published in newspapers, and instead allow broadcasters to make on-air announcements. Stations that don’t have the capability to create and broadcast on-air notices still shouldn’t be required to buy newspaper ads, the group said. “Such stations could be permitted to purchase an online equivalent of a newspaper notice, such as an advertisement on a website associated with a local newspaper, TV or radio station.” The FCC already has gathered comments on an NPRM that included proposals to relax notice rules but hasn't moved further (see 1801020044).

Gray Television will sell CBS affiliate WSWG Valdosta, Georgia, to Marquee Broadcasting, the seller announced Thursday. It's one of the divestitures Gray in connection with Gray's proposed buy of Raycom (see 1806250057). Marquee plans to combine WSWG with another Georgia station it's seeking to buy, WSST-TV Cordele, to expand service to southwestern Georgia, the release said. The deal will close when Gray’s transaction with Raycom is complete, predicted to be Q4, the release said.

Dickey Broadcasting Co. reached an $8,000 settlement over unauthorized changes of control in the transfer of the company’s Georgia AM stations to an inheritance trust without notifying the FCC, said an order and consent decree in Thursday’s Daily Digest. The “failure to accurately report” DBC’s ownership structure after the transfers in 2000, 2010 and 2013 was “inadvertent” and due to controlling shareholder Lewis Dickey Sr.’s “complicated estate planning,” the consent decree said. Though DBC filed applications in 2018 revealing the transfers and seeking permission after the fact, the Media Bureau declined to make the applications retroactive.

DOJ withdrew its request the FCC defer acting on Hemisphere Media’s petition to allow it to be owned by a foreign entity, “with the concurrence” of the Department of Homeland Security and DOD, said a letter posted in commission docket 18-134 Thursday. The Media Bureau in 2017 approved Hemisphere's request to be up to 49.9 percent foreign owned by a Mexican-controlled trust, and the current request seeks permission for another company based in Mexico, Cinema Aeropuerto, to own the same percentage (see 1805040037).

Public broadcasting programmer Public Radio International and media/podcast company PRX are combining and receiving a $10 million investment from WGBH Boston, PRX said Wednesday.

E.W. Scripps will sell its remaining 19 radio stations in four markets to SummitMedia for $47 million, the seller said Wednesday. This is the fourth and final deal in Scripps’ plan to sell its complete stable of 34 radio stations. “This is a significant milestone toward executing our strategy to divest of non-core assets,” Scripps said. The deals will total $83.5 million when finished, it said. The SummitMedia deal includes stations in Wichita, Kansas; Springfield, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; and Knoxville, Tennessee and is expected to close in Q4.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai circulated a draft NPRM on interference protection for Class A AM stations, he said in a speech to the Michigan Association of Broadcasters, show remarks posted Tuesday. The Society of Broadcast Engineers made such proposals in docket 13-249 (see 1603220054). “They are based in large part on comments we received from experienced broadcast engineers,” Pai said of the proposals. SBE said then that the FCC needs to address the interference created by unlicensed devices and commit to reduce the levels of man-made noise in the band. “Our rules should reflect the reality of the current noise floor and appropriately balance the interests of Americans who want to listen to smaller local stations in their communities with those who enjoy listening to Class A stations,” Pai said now. Though the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters and other commenters urged the FCC to reduce nighttime interference protection for Class A stations, SBE dismissed that as short term and unlikely to help the AM band.

Evidence received by the FCC suggested some of divestitures proposed in Sinclair buying Tribune “would have allowed Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law,” said Chairman Ajit Pai in an Aug. 3 reply posted Friday to a July letter from Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois. Sinclair/Tribune was later withdrawn (see 1808090042), and Sinclair -- with Enforcement Bureau blessing -- asked the administrative law judge to terminate the proceeding (see 1808100026). Durbin commended Pai’s designating the deal for hearing, and condemned Sinclair’s response seeking to further amend the takeover. “Sinclair's recent announcement to submit yet another amended proposal serves as not only acknowledgment that their previous proposals failed to comply with the law, but also as a deliberate attempt to avoid having to defend these sham purchase agreements before a judge,” Durbin said.

The BBC is working with American startup Spritz to experiment with “how science and speed-reading technologies” can help consumers better cope with the inundation of emails, text messages and online news stories, blogged Cyrus Saihan, BBC head of digital partnerships, Friday. “The average UK adult now spends more time online and consuming media each day than they do sleeping,” said Saihan. “We wanted to see what new technologies could be applied to make this overload of information easier for our audiences to manage.” The standard way of reading text is “moving your eyes across a page as you read each sentence from left to right,” he said. “It is thought that the eye movement required when you move your eyes across a line in a sentence can take up as much as 80% of your time spent reading.” In the BBC experiment with Spritz, each word shown on a screen “has one letter that is highlighted red, to draw your attention to that point in the word,” he said. “That letter is the optimal recognition point in the word and helps your brain quickly process the word, with as little eye movement as possible.” Consumers are “reading more and more on mobile phones, but the screen sizes and text sizes of mobiles are smaller than what we have traditionally been used to with books and magazines,” said Saihan. “Technologies such as this therefore have the potential to make it much easier for us to read on mobile phones. This way of reading could also possibly be useful on devices such as smart watches, which have even smaller screen sizes.”