Revised Ownership Reports Due to FCC By July 8

Attention station owners: The new revised ownership
reporting form for commercial stations is now available at the FCC's Web site.

The new filing deadline for biennial ownership reports (Form
323) is July 8, though the FCC is "strongly encouraging" stations to
file well before that. The form needs to reflect ownership status as of Nov. 1,
2009.

 The old deadline of Jan. 11 was postponed while the
FCC made some "technical improvements" to the form, including being
able to accept machine-readible data rather than requiring broadcasters to key
in the data.

The commission is collecting more information on the form
partly as a way to better track minority ownership by requiring owners of
smaller stakes in broadcast properties to report them.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.