Headlines
FCC's Media Bureau approves foreign bankrolling of Paramount-WBD merger
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved Paramount’s request to allow indirect foreign equity ownership in the company to exceed the 25 percent benchmark normally applied to the U.S. parent companies of broadcast licensees.
BIA
ChatGPT Ads Hit One Billion
OpenAI’s ad business has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue rate after roughly 200 days, signaling that ChatGPT ads are moving quickly from experiment to ecosystem. In this Leading Local Insights Podcast episode, BIA’s Celine Matthiessen and ...
Television
NAB Reminds TV Licensees Of ‘Must Carry’ Election Deadline
There’s a big deadline looming for every commercial and noncommercial television station in the U.S.: do you want “must carry” status for your broadcast channel, or are you willing to wade into the murky waters of retransmission consent and risk a tough negotiation with a multichannel video programming distributor?
ABC Legal Filing Pushes Back On FCC Early License Renewal Order
ABC responded to the FCC‘s justification for calling in its eight owned station licenses for early renewal, arguing in a new legal filing that the agency had failed to refute “substantial evidence” of a Trump administration “retaliatory motive.”
Radio
Marketers Are Misreading What Gen Z Listens To On Radio.
Marketers may think they know what young radio listeners want, but new iHeartMedia research suggests some of their assumptions about Gen Z are badly out of sync with what the generation is actually listening to.
Local Radio News Standing Firm, RTDNA Survey Finds.
Radio stations continued to maintain relatively stable levels of news production in 2025, with the percentage of stations airing local news reaching its highest level in three years, according to the latest RTDNA/Newhouse School at Syracuse University survey.
Pay TV
Beyond the Cable Bundle: The Reinvention of Traditional Media
With their core revenue base (e.g., advertising and carriage fees) shrinking amid cord-cutting and the rise of streaming options, traditional media companies are faced with a growing challenge as the pay-TV ecosystem undergoes changes.
Media
News consumers are wary of most AI use in local news, a Chicago-based report finds
Local news providers weighing AI use in the newsroom should think twice, according to a new survey from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern.