Today at noon ET, radio (and streaming) Evil Empire iHeart Media launched Black Information News, a 24/7 all-news network aimed at Black audiences, on stations in 15 cities, the HD subchannels on iHM stations in other markets and as news providers for iHM's 91 Black-oriented stations (not to mention streaming on iheartradio.com, the dominant audio streamer). Although there are some conventional ads, iHM has put together a group of "Founding Partners" that will present feature segments on the network that may contain ad content. The companies include Bank of America, CVS Health, GEICO, Lowe’s, McDonald’s USA, Sony, 23andMe and Verizon:
https://radioinsight.com/headlines/189803/fifteen-iheartmedia-stations-stunting-ahead-of-new-network-launch/ There will probably be some unhappy people, especially since yesterday the OTA founding stations of BIN were stunting with speech excerpts from various Black leaders and the announcement "Our Voices Will Be Heard--listen tomorrow at noon." Two stations in Atlanta and Seattle were rightwing talk (although neither one, as far as I can tell, carried iHM's Rush Limbaugh), five stations are sports talkers (a format that has been dead during the pandemic) and three alternative rock stations, a format with a loyal white audience that gets pissed when the format goes away, especially if replaced by Jesus radio or formats for minorities. I've been listening to the network for about an hour now and it sounds very professional and smooth, with a good mix of hard news and features that sound comparable to any commercial all-news station (and iHM's OTA stations include local break-ins, including their Total Traffic Network). It does sound a little canned, though--I wouldn't mind the anchors doing some one-handed time checks every so often to prove they're live. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/c6a125b2-485b-434a-a894-8ef7c90666feo%40googlegroups.com.
