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Clear Channel has fired two programming executives and disciplined several others for misconduct after an internal review of “pay for play” allegations, The New York Times reports. Clear Channel says it will provide additional training to station managers and programming personnel on the company’s policies against payola.
The move comes a little over a week after Clear Channel President/CEO Mark Mays said he did not see a “train wreck” coming on the issue of payola. At that time, Mays said that the 4-6 employees investigated in connection with the BMG consent decree were the bad actors, leaving 99.9 percent of its radio programmers doing what they should be doing.
FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein recently said the payola scandal was “the widest and most flagrant abuse of our rules in the history of American broadcasting” and that he planned “to put the fear of God” into broadcasters about obeying the FCC’s payola rules.
The payola issue hit front pages in late July when Sony BMG Music Entertainment settled an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer by paying $10 million and saying it would stop paying radio station employees to feature its artists.
Arbitron has reached a settlement with the State of New York, in a move that will resolve all claims against Arbitron that were alleged in the lawsuit filed against the company by the NY Attorney General relating to the marketing…
Google CEO Eric Schmidt wishes he could “rescue” newspapers, but he doesn’t believe that simply purchasing newspapers would solve their business problems.
In an interview with Fortune, Schmidt says the solution to the problems newspapers are facing lies in integration.…
Angered by a London bus advertisement that sent her to a website where she was told that she was going to hell, to spend all eternity in torment, comedy writer Ariane Sherine decided to launch a counter-campaign.
She began raising…
Apple’s iTunes Store is set to significantly shift its approach to selling songs online, including dropping copying protection (digital rights management, or DRM) and introducing a new pricing plan, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Rather than the standard 99 cents…
Online spending in several key categories, including Sports & Fitness and Video Games, increased and outperformed offline spending during the 2008 holiday season, while overall online and offline spending in other home and luxury-goods categories decreased across the board, according…
Walgreens December sales of $6.1 billion were an increase of 10.8% from $5.5 billion for the same month in 2007, the company announced. Same-store sales rose 4.9%, while comparable store front-end sales increased 0.4%.
Walgreens transactions in comparable stores increased…
