A privately held licensee of broadcast radio stations found across the Show-Me State is largely to thank for the end of the FCC’s TV “Top-Four Prohibition,” as it successfully sued the Commission in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2025. Now, the company has written to the Commission to outright eliminate its local radio restrictions.
The call to quickly make the rule change comes courtesy of John Zimmer, President of Zimmer Radio of Mid Missouri in the college town of Columbia, Mo.
For the owner of 10 radio stations across six Missouri markets, Mr. Zimmer recalled how his father acquired his family’s first radio property in 1956. Since then, “we have witnessed momentous shifts in the media and advertising markets.”
That led Zimmer Radio in 2019 to seek FCC rule “modernization” and now supports the complete removal “of the outdated local radio ownership caps, as the National
Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and many radio station owners, including small and mid-sized ones, have urged” as the FCC has opened itself up for comments as part of its newest quadrennial review of its broadcast ownership rules.
For Mr. Zimmer, “radio broadcasters must be allowed to achieve greater economies of scale to survive in a marketplace with vastly increased numbers of competitors for both listeners and advertisers.”
It’s a refrain shared by the NAB and many of its key members, and is being aggressively pushed by Connoisseur Media, which seeks to obtain waivers giving it ownership of every commercially licensed radio station in Lincoln, Neb.
Like the NAB and President/CEO Curtis LeGeyt, Mr. Zimmer uses the argument that audio and advertising markets of 2026 bear little resemblance to those of 1996. “Radio broadcasters compete with streaming music platforms and podcasters that didn’t exist then and that now reach audiences anywhere and everywhere through smart phones and other digital devices that no one had in the last century,” he wrote in an ex parte letter submitted to the FCC this week. “Giant digital advertising platforms that didn’t exist in 1996 dominate today’s local ad markets. As a result, local radio stations have lost and continue to lose large portions of their advertising revenues to digital competitors.”
Furthermore, Mr. Zimmer asserts that “due to the limited advertising bases available in mid-sized and small markets, stations in those markets earn only a fraction of the ad revenues earned by stations in the largest markets – yet those smaller market stations still must purchase equipment, pay electricity bills, create or buy programming, and pay employees. When station revenues decline, the impact falls most on staffing. Because cutting staff hurts stations’ ability to serve their local communities, Zimmer Radio tries to retain jobs, but that is increasingly difficult.”
Even in markets where live and local radio results in top ratings, the challenge of attracting audiences remains. In the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York, Pamal Broadcasting’s WSPK “K104.7” in Poughkeepsie is regularly ranked at or near the top of the ratings. The same can be said for sibling WHUD in Westchester County, to the south. Yet, with little in the way of outdoor advertising, superserving the audience that knows the respective stations has become the chief way to keep the lights on and the ad dollars flowing. In interactions last week across Ulster County, only Sirius XM channels were consumed while with teens and their fortysomething parents as “lots of commercials” proved to be a key refrain — regardless of whether or not it was an accurate statement for all of broadcast stations available to them.
One way to combat satellite radio, audio streaming choices galore and even YouTube radio is to own more radio stations in a market, erase duplicative formats, and in essence offer more variety. That’s what Zimmer Radio would like to do.
“If permitted under FCC rules, Zimmer Radio would invest in more stations, which would allow us to spread the costs of news and other programming across more outlets and to offer a greater variety of programming in our local markets, thereby attracting larger audiences and additional advertisers,” Mr. Zimmer argues. “This result would benefit
consumers and lead to more sustainable local radio operations.”
That philosophy doesn’t always pan out. On Maui, which was devastated by COVID-19 and then the Lahaina fire emergency, Larry Fuss-led Akamai Broadcasting of Hawaii entered the marketplace with bravado, changing formats and bringing new programming to the island via repurposed FM translators. The result? Akamai operates eight audio brands in a marketplace where George Hochman’s H Hawaii Media operates for full-power FMs and market leader Pacific Media Group has four FMs, two AMs, the Maui Now news-focused website, airport advertising in Kahului, a Maui travel guide and the Maui Visitor Channel. While Maui today has more format diversity than markets such as Miami or even New York, the fight for ad dollars has become fiercer than ever with more choices for local listeners requiring more ad avails to be filled.
Zimmer Media strongly feels otherwise, and warns, “The same competitive forces that have already devastated local newspapers now seriously threaten broadcasters and their services to local communities. Removing artificial restrictions placed on local radio stations – but not on any of our competitors – would enable Zimmer Radio and other broadcasters to continue to serve local audiences with news, weather, emergency information, sports and other valued entertainment programming, all available over-the-air and free to the public.”
