FCC Opens The Door To Broadcast Consolidation. Will Local News Be Better For It?

The FCC's decision to eliminate the national TV broadcast ownership cap marks one of the biggest regulatory shifts the local television industry has seen in decades. 

In the latest episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon welcomes TVND founder and veteran newsroom leader Kirk Varner for an in-depth conversation about what comes next. Together, they explore the economic pressures facing local broadcasters, why newsroom consolidation isn't as simple as it sounds, and whether audiences will continue to trust local television if "local" becomes increasingly centralized.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Tim Hanlon: Hey there, how are you? Welcome. You are In the Vicinity. My name is Tim Hanlon. I'm the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively advise tons of companies in and around the media and technology spaces, some of them large, some of them small, some of them very much in between.

And this is our little weekly journey into all things local media, and we thank you for finding us and putting us in your earbuds this week. And what a week this has been as we record this just a few days back, earth-shattering pieces of news. You had a whole bunch of local television broadcasters with their various quarterly earnings calls and results to Wall Street.

Obviously all of them predicting bonanza political advertising, but clearly the underpinnings of the businesses that keep these companies afloat is certainly under duress. And major changes at folks like Scripps with a bunch of layoffs and refiguring, if you will, how a local broadcast might look.

Some perhaps innovative and pioneering moves there. But of course all dwarfed by what we expected, the quote unquote, "vote" at the FCC to essentially eliminate the 39% U.S. coverage ownership cap of local television broadcasting to something along the lines of no cap with a sort of case-by-case bias to considering various M&A activities.

And that's an underhanded way of saying all bets are off. Consolidation has essentially been given a green light. But of course this being the FCC and regulatory environments these days and the political world in which we live is not the last of the story. Certainly lawsuits and court cases and fighting and all kinds of stuff are still yet to come.

That said, it is definitely a brave new world of at least implicit understanding of consolidation which broadcasters have been hoping for some time. Will it help? Will it solve all the ills that local television broadcasting has been going through over the last number of years? I'm highly doubtful, as you've heard me say before, and you will many times again.

But I couldn't think of a better guest this week to throw ideas around about what the heck is happening than my guest, Kirk Varner, who you probably know mostly from his impressive and essential newsletter called TVND. I think it's called the Top Line from TVND, but you can find it either on Substack at TVND, just search it up there, or go to tvnd.com and you can subscribe through it that way too.

It's free for now, but the observations, the analysis, you cannot beat it. That's probably one of the more sane and logical and passionate voices out there into what's going on, especially in and around the local television business. And we let the conjecture and the hot takes fly in this conversation.

So buckle up. It's a good one. Kirk is exceedingly well informed from nearly more than 30 years of local television station news direction, so he knows what he talks about and he's been around the block and then some. And we are delighted to have him here. We'll probably have him back again.

We'll hear why. Right now, as we get to our conversation from a couple days back, here's me and Kirk. Please, as always, enjoy.

The irony is not lost on me as we record this literally an hour after perhaps the most significant wrinkle in FCC policy was essentially just passed and I thought for sure that you would be a perfect guest to kinda wax I won't say nostalgic, but certainly optimistic or pessimistic or maybe both, about where we're headed now because this is a major point in in the curve.

It's certainly and by no means the end point but maybe for our audience, a little background about you first and then let's get into kinda what happened earlier this morning and what we think is gonna sorta transpire from that. 

Kirk Varner: Sure. So I'm a longtime broadcasting journalist, veteran newsroom leader.

After over 30 years of leading local newsrooms in all parts of the country, ranging from market one to 118, I think, if those counts are correct, I retired last year and started writing a Substack called TVND, short for TV News Director, obviously.

Tim Hanlon: Highly recommended. Everybody should get it quickly, and we'll promote the heck out of it before and after.

Don't you worry. 

Kirk Varner: Thank you. I appreciate that. But after reading what I thought were really good industry observations from the likes of Hank Price, Emily Barr, some longterm leaders in the business, I wanted to write from the perspective of someone who had led local TV newsrooms and had written on many occasions memos to the staff trying to explain not just what we as a station were doing, but where the industry was going.

And so I started writing that to try to answer questions for folks who would call or email me and say, "What do you think about this development or that development in the industry?" And having worked for most of the major players in the business today at some point along the way I thought my views were at least gonna be different.

I don't know if they're necessarily smarter or wiser. But I do think that local television is still an essential part of the media landscape. And even though it's continuing to go through a high-speed evolution and what one might call its third or fourth chapter along the way, I still think it's relevant.

I still think it's interesting. I still think it's a business that employs a lot of people that I know and care about, and I'm interested in its future. So that led me, I think, to show up on your radar, Tim as someone who's interested in the future of local media, and you and I started corresponding back and forth, and I think that's led us here today on this monumental day for the business, given what's happened with the Federal Communications Commission today.

Tim Hanlon: So you have a lot of credibility in newsrooms from, on the local television station side of things, right? So let's zero in on local news because presumably this is the biggest thought out there by broadcasters, the NAB, et cetera, that this is why a cap of 39% needs to be lifted because we need bigger scale in order to have better economics to then devote to saving and/or increasing our commitments to local news.

Kirk Varner: Yeah, it's the argument that Perry Sook has been championing now for quite some time in his growing of his company Nexstar, that to compete against the YouTubes, Googles, Apples, Microsofts, whomever in the media landscape of streaming in particular, that size matters. And if you're gonna compete against some of the largest corporations, not just tech corporations, but corporations period on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ, you've gotta have size.

And so his argument has been that the 39% cap was outdated and from an era when we were trying to prevent media concentration, but that's no longer relevant necessarily. 

Tim Hanlon: And having been in newsrooms most of your professional life, and seeing news production as well as ownership around you change, do you agree with that logic?

Kirk Varner: I think there's kind of two sides to the same coin, and I think the real question is going to be the economics, and the economic model is really what's driving the business of local television at this point. It is no longer the proverbial license to print money that it once was. Broadcast cash flows used to routinely, in my lifetime at least, approach 40%.

And now you would probably hear from a number of broadcasters they'd be thrilled if they were even in double digits. So, the profitability of running a local television station has changed dramatically, and that's created a consolidation fervor in the industry, and multiple companies have decided that the real way to survive and prosper is to own multiple TV stations in a single market.

That was something that was never permitted. I'm old enough to remember when the cap was raised from seven TV stations to 12, it was thought that was going to be a major change in the industry, and it's evolved. And I think from a local newsroom standpoint, I think the question is the investment that these companies make in local news is still a moving target, and I think it's still one that the economics and the dollars and cents of is a variable that continues to get tweaked because producing live television news is not a cheap proposition.

It has to be done with a certain level of expense and expertise. And so that model continues to get refined. The one place that I think it's pointed to the most is that newsrooms have become more efficient, and what used to be a two-person crew of a cameraman and a reporter have now become what we call the multimedia journalist model, where reporters carry their own small cameras and shoot and edit their own stories.

So that was a 50% reduction in the field crews that went out. There was some offset that the idea was we'll have more cameras and more journalists in the field, but we won't have these teams. The same thing happened in TV control rooms with the advent of what's called automation for production.

What used to be a control room that could take three, four, or five people is now down to one. So all of those things, those moving pieces of the resource puzzle, have changed the economic puzzle. And so broadcasters of all shapes and sizes have continued to evolve to try to make the news gathering effort more economically efficient but also continue to maintain hopefully a high standard of journalism and do the kinds of local reporting, local investigations, local consumer reporting, including weather coverage, sports coverage, all of those components that go into local newscast that's still essential.

The question is how to do it offset by advertising revenues that are continuing to decline because the audience pool has gotten smaller. Fewer and fewer eyeballs watch traditional broadcast television. And so all of those targets, those vectors, if you will, continue to converge on what the model is going to look like going forward.

And so this idea of being larger and being able to amortize those costs over a bigger pool of stations does make sense as long as the investment continues at a level to produce a product that the audience ultimately wants. 

Tim Hanlon: And I think that's kind of the inherent promise/expectation. I mean [FCC Chair Brendan] Carr said today, that he's calling the repeal of a national cap sort of what he calls essential relief for local broadcasters. Not only from the economic perspective, right? But also from a counterbalancing of that of national programmers and their respective viewpoints and stuff.

This is a quote from Ted Johnson in Deadline today, and I just could not help but quote it and post it socially with some smiley faces and laughing, rolling up, rolling on the floor laughing. He predicted that allowing broadcasters to increase scale will allow them to attract capital and boost advertising to produce news and other local programming.

Now juxtapose that with the reality of what television station newsrooms look like today across the country. We hear from many different sorts of corners of the space, right? That, some of the shall we say commitment to production that you're talking about with technological advancements and stuff.

In some respects, frankly, it has gone a bit further than I think most people would've imagined. Like hubbing of newsrooms and outsourcing, forecasts and hiring younger and greener kids out of college who are increasingly desperate to get, I don't know, $15, $20,000 offers, if you will.

Is that a living wage? And that kind of stuff. So I guess my point is, I'm trying to juxtapose the reality here of cost efficiencies, better functionality, supposedly more resources to devote to true local journalism and reporting, which is unique in this world of streaming and stuff, right?

And is worth preserving. Versus what I tend to hear is maybe decidedly less than newsroom by newsroom. Can you help us see what's really going on? 

Kirk Varner: I think that's an interesting dichotomy, to use the big word in that the problem kind of dates back even to before our current situation.

And that is that local television in the beginning of the 2000s faced an interesting crisis with the beginning of the decline of the syndicated programming market. And local TV stations that were affiliated with networks had to fill a certain number of hours every day that weren't done by the network.

If you were a CBS affiliate, once you took out the morning news, the soap operas during the day, the primetime programming, whatever was in late night, the rest of the day was the local broadcasters to fill. And typically, as local news kind of began its ascendancy in the late '70s and into the '80s there were newscasts only at 6:00 and 11:00 p.m. on the East Coast.

Then we began moving forward in the morning, added a 6:00 a.m., then a 5:00 a.m. The early afternoon started in the 4:00 block. So eventually, you got to a point where local TV stations went from producing a couple of hours of news a day to six, eight, 10. And in most cases, not all, but in most cases, there was not a huge investment of additional people to make that happen.

So what fell out of that was a fair amount of recycling of the news from hour to hour. Probably the number one complaint you hear from audiences, "I see the same news stories over and over." And on a local level, if you have a dozen or so reporters on the street, there's only so many local stories you're gonna cover in the course of a day.

So I think that idea that local news began sprouting up like weeds to some degree wasn't matched by an equally large commitment of resources, both people and money and equipment, to sustain that news. What's happened even further now, more syndication has dropped out. There are very few shows that are in syndication, and they are no longer the blockbusters like Oprah or Phil Donahue before that, that are anchor points of local TV stations' afternoons or mornings.

And so the decision has been almost a default one. We'll just put on more hours of local news. And the quality question has come into play. And so I don't want in the least to denigrate the efforts of my colleagues who are in local newsrooms around the country. They are working their proverbial tails off to fill those hours every day and do it in the best possible way they can, but they are limited in that construct, the idea that you have a company that might own 100, 200 TV stations will spread those expenses out across those TV stations, has a little bit of a merit to it, but it's still, I would argue, a bit unproven because if I happen to live in Spokane, how much do I really care about a local news story other than a feature?

The proverbial one we always point to in journalism is the water-skiing squirrels from Albany, Georgia. So local still means local, and that's where the investment has to happen. And I think depending on the operator, depending on their commitment, various levels of commitment to being in the local news business and doing it very well.

Tim Hanlon: And I guess, though the counter to that would be it seems like it stretches credulity when the temptation to further centralize as you get larger, right? To de-duplicate, to…I, again, I come back to centralize, right? It just seems like there's the temptation as one gets larger to simplify and streamline operations so that the local nodes are much more uniform, it's just gonna be so hard financially and economically to resist that. As a recovering journalist, I find it hard to believe that's going to solve or improve the situation when it's already challenging enough and that staff are not only underpaid, but they're also overworked and being asked to fill more time on their stations.

Kirk Varner: I agree with you 100%, Tim, and I think for years used the model that big groups like Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, thought of their operations almost along the lines of McDonald's, and that they were going to have outposts that were all run across the same playbook. That if you bought a hamburger in one place, it would be the same hamburger in the other.

And I've come to recently believe that was a fallacy on my part, and the better business model to compare where I think local television broadcasting is in the airline business. And I think that in major markets, major hubs, where you have airlines competing, and a lot of flight options at all times of the day, those markets are successful and make money.

But if you go to the smaller markets that have maybe one airline servicing them, or now none, with deregulation a lot of smaller places that had a couple of airlines every day that flew a couple of flights on smaller planes, those have vanished for a large part of the country. And the government now is trying to step in to encourage airlines, either startups or the established majors, to put flights back into those markets.

And I think that's the more realistic question of how large a place can support having local TV newsrooms, particularly if there are three or four of them competing for the same advertisers and the same audience dollars. And that may be ultimately the consolidation we see in the context of if you are allowed to own as many stations as you want.

And if you're allowed to own multiple stations in a market, what's that investment going to look like across the two stations? The example I'm gonna point you to is the one that just started this week. So last Saturday, August 1st, CBS moved six stations that were previously affiliated with the network that were owned by Nexstar, to being Hearst in four markets and then Forum in a couple of smaller ones.

Hearst has basically moved CBS to a digital subchannel of their primary affiliation. But the local news that is being carried now on the new CBS affiliate as a dot two, three, or four is just a straight simulcast of the news that was already in that marketplace. So there's not a growth in voices in those markets.

There's basically now two stations, network affiliates, NBC and CBS, in my former home of Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, that carry the exact same news blocks. That, to me, is the big question of what's that going to ultimately mean to the audience? 

Tim Hanlon: So that leads me to my last two questions and we're gonna have you back at some point to go deeper on all these things, because this is exactly what I expected from you, and you're delivering and then some.

The idea of national cap and ownership and stuff I think is out there, and people recognize sort of what's going on as we record this today. But as I've written and you have as well, and observed, you can't sleep on what's really going on in the local markets.

That is now the ability or the need, frankly, for owners to double up or even triple up, or even more in certain squints of cases to have duopolies, triopolies, multiple station ownerships with multiple flags. And you just actually created another conundrum. You didn't create it, but you highlight it, right?

Where now a station, not even two different signals, but one signal is now carrying two of the proverbial big four, which has always been this third rail, if you will, of no, you can't concentrate those four. You can have an independent but not two biggies. 

Kirk Varner: And even if you had two big stations, like Jacksonville, Florida has two duopolies. TEGNA owns the NBC and ABC stations there. Cox owns the Fox and CBS stations there. Now, in those four stations, they have worked to create different news products across those stations. It was not a straight simulcast of the news for Cox between CBS and Fox stations.

Those were separate TV signals, separate TV stations. Now, the new equation is we don't need two transmitters or two antennas. We can put all of this on the one digital signal, and we can basically consolidate that news operation down to one local brand that just happens to have multiple distribution points over the air, and by the way, as well, online, because those products are all streaming as well.

So it is a really fascinating time to see what these owners will do when they have real estate that can hold. I equate it to moving from a single family home to a duplex or a triplex. You're on the same piece of real estate, but you've got multiple families living in the same space. 

Tim Hanlon: That's the question I really wanted to get to, is the heart of the matter, right?

So technologically the idea of slimming down and getting rid of actual physical properties and being able to now house what formerly needed to be separate transmission, distribution operations can now be honed together with 3.0 and all that kind of stuff even more in one sort of central location, right?

But where is the line of centralization? Because when you now tip into editorial newsrooms and separations and coverage and voices, that's the key word you used before, the temptation, it's not even a temptation. It's just that the inertia frankly goes much further than operations into now news generation and reportage and all that stuff where it is all homogenized and/or centralized.

Number one, where is that line when it gets into the editorial pieces thing? And then number two, how do you, I don't know, redraw the line or pull it back, or is that just effectively where it's all going and we're just now watching it happen in slow motion? 

Kirk Varner: I don't think we know. I, as honestly as I can forecast, I think the question continues to be the one that is the proverbial question of television, and that is, "Why do you watch? What's the value proposition?" And I think for local news, that has still been that I have people who I trust, who live in my town or the next town over, if it's a large market, and I occasionally see them in public.

I see them at the state fair when the TV station has a booth or building or whatever. And so I believe and trust in them because I know my anchor people live here and know here and care about here. They're neighbors. If you remove that element, the example I would use is Byron Allen, who owns a group of smaller TV stations and The Weather Channel. He made a decision that in smaller stations, he was gonna have the weather forecasting done out of Weather Channel's headquarters in Atlanta.

That sounds like a good idea until the local weather situation turns really severe and bad, and local folks go scrambling for the television set to see, as they have since the beginning of television, somebody telling them what the heck is going on. "Is that a tornado, and is it next to my house?" And I don't think the audience will accept, ultimately, this idea that we can just produce something and call it news and put it on a local station, and they'll accept that as my local newscast.

And that, I think, is the tipping point that local broadcasters and major groups are trying to balance and walk up to, to be as efficient as possible, but not alienate that audience. And I think there have been multiple approaches to it. Scripps, in the past week, has announced that it is reimagining its business and coming up with a 24/7 newsfeed that it will put in markets.

Whether that's the answer, I don't know. I don't think so because I just feel like at the end of the day, you want to be served by a local business that's in your market. And I don't think most people know who owns the local TV stations in their market, if it's a local broadcast concern or a national one.

I live in the Twin Cities where we have two network-owned stations. CBS owns its station here. Fox owns its station here. The NBC affiliate is owned by TEGNA, and the ABC affiliate, full disclosure, where I worked before retiring, is owned by a local family, the Hubbards, who own Hubbard Broadcasting, which is a relatively small group of TV stations.

But that family is a lifelong, now fourth-generation broadcasting empire that is fully committed to being a local business and a local broadcaster. How many of those, Tim, will be around in the next five years, I think is the biggest question the industry faces. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Look, and I think sadly, that's more the exception rather than the rule, right?

And here's some of my wind-up here, and then we'll get into this in future episodes, I promise. You've talked about affiliation swaps and stuff in your recent column. You've talked about independence of certain stations, some by choice, some by happenstance.

I guess what I'm really curious to hear your opinion about is, number one, independence. Does it have maybe a new potential sheen to it going forward, given all the changing nature of stuff and maybe the need to maybe offload or centralize certain signals and stuff, and maybe there might be a shakeout where certain stations might become more truly independent, which is a big hurdle.

Because a lot of your programming goes away. But I guess secondarily, is there any kind of guardrails here that could be forced upon this amalgamation a green light to quote, unquote, ensure some level or quota or delivery or measurement of things like local news or local origination and those kinds of things?

It would seem to me that those ideas, the independence thing, and the prove that you're delivering certain elements of localness are almost I don't know conjoined or maybe even... there's a question in there somewhere. Are there any remedies to the possibilities of these things going awry? Or again, is it too late going forward? 

Kirk Varner: I don't think it's too late, but I do have concerns because I think the business is at such a crossroads, and the advancement of tech and streaming and the ability for anybody to basically grab a camera and create television, if you will, is no longer the province of only those companies that can make large multimillion-dollar investments.

You and I have both seen the studies that suggest that if you're under 30 years old, you don't watch local television news. You get your news from YouTube, influencers, TikTok, pick your social platform. What's interesting to me is that's not really a new phenomenon. The idea that younger people weren't interested in television news has always been true.

I wasn't in my late teenage years until I got employed, and maybe not until, for many of my peers, they got married and had children, and as their adulthood advanced, that watching the news or getting the news was gonna be a key part of their lives. I think I take a lot of solace, at least today, in the folks who have ventured out into the brave world of not having a network affiliation.

That's happened in places like Atlanta, where Gray lost a CBS affiliation at WANF and converted their operation to a very local news intensive TV station, producing 10, 12 hours of news a day. The one that I point to the most though, because I think it's the most interesting competitive situation, is back to Jacksonville, Florida.

So you have TEGNA with two stations, you have Cox with two stations. Those are the four networks. The previous CBS affiliate, longtime station, was WJXT, which was owned by Post Newsweek, the Washington Post company, and is now owned by Katharine Graham's son Donald. Graham Media Corporation owns WJXT, and when it lost the CBS affiliation in 2002, it made a conscious decision to become, as it bills itself, the local station.

And they produce, I believe, 12 hours of news a day, live every day, and it's a good quality product, and it wins the ratings more times than not. So it's doable. They make a nice investment in the product. They have good people working there. I think it's accomplishable. I think the history of your station matters, and how you preserve the history of that station, or what you invest to make it important and relevant and trusted by the community.

The trust word is the one we keep coming back to in newsrooms. If you do not have the trust of the audience, and let's be honest, it's lower today than it's ever been. Trust is a commodity that frankly has been maligned, shaken, whatever word you wanna use. And so the audience is more picky and gravitates more now to news that contains opinion. It's the one thing that I think should be the ultimate legacy of Roger Ailes. When you blended for Fox the idea of straight news and opinion, proverbial talking heads, as one product and called it all news, that now has changed the way people perceive and seek out news.

And I think that trust question, along with the economics question, are the two long-term rails going forward. The other fly in the ointment, I just have to say it out loud because we started off talking about the FCC, no other part of media has government regulation like broadcasting does. The Federal Communications Commission controls your business.

If Commissioner Brendan Carr wants to challenge the license of a TV station or a group of TV stations in the case of ABC, he can do so. And ultimately, the FCC can make the decision as almost unprecedented as it is to take away your license and your business ends effectively. So with all of that in the soup at this point, my question is: how does not just broadcasting survive and thrive going forward?

And I don't think size alone solves the equation. But also, how does it maintain a trust level with the audience, particularly in the age where news is questioned and called out as fake by almost anyone with little or no basis in reality? That's a conundrum that I don't think anybody has the answer to, and it's why everybody in this business is feeling their way forward day by day, trying to see what the ultimate long-term plateau, if you will, is gonna look like.

Tim Hanlon: All right, so I'm gonna use this as our hook for our next conversation because I implied in all of that is how regulation has evolved over time, right? And I don't think there's anybody, regardless of how you view this industry, what side of the political aisle you might be on or whatever, that doesn't believe that there needs to be a complete rethink of what regulatory oversight looks like across the entirety of the media landscape.

It's part of the reason why in the '90s there was a relook at the Broadcasting Act of 1934 because it was a dramatically different world, and I would argue time compressed. We're past that point now. And I think what we're talking about now, and maybe conjecturing specifically today, is short-term issues of the day.

In this case a cap, right? Which is an artificial constraint, right? But the bigger issues aren't necessarily it should ff you're bigger, it will be better, right? It's why are certain parts of the media landscape regulated and why are they, in other parts not, right? Why is there this inequity, right?

And there are various reasons and layers to all that, but it also requires a whole bunch of political will. To recognize there's a far bigger problem here than there is just simply going, lurching back and forth every four years with whoever's in charge of the FCC changing a UHF discount rule or not, right?

So believe that, but maybe a closing parting shot on that. I find it hard to believe that anybody wants to continue this crazy cockamamie system where thumbs come and go on the various scales. 

Kirk Varner: Absolutely. And I keep going back to the age-old quote that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

I was standing in the newsroom of a major metropolitan newspaper owned by Tribune in 1996, listening to the publisher and editor talk about the fact that they weren't that worried that the slight dip they had seen in classified advertising going to something called Craigslist was going to materially impact their business long term.

We all know what happened there, and we all know where newspapers are, and newspapers weren't regulated. So broadcasters have come into something of the same realization that we're losing ad dollars to digital platforms, streaming media. What does our future look like? But each one of those decisions has a very different layer when you recognize that now your content can be examined and questioned and called out as a factor in whether or not you should be allowed to operate, as the saying goes, in the public interest.

And who determines what the public interest is anymore? And I agree with you, Tim, 100%. The question going forward is going to be: What's the political will to change that going to be? And frankly, I don't think we know. I think the midterms this year will be an interesting barometer of where things stand and what the public is looking for, but I think it's going to take some time to play out.

Tim Hanlon: All right, my thanks to Kirk. Of course, we'll have him back sooner rather than later. Must get the newsletter. You can find that either at substack.com, just search up TVND there, or you can go to the website directly at tvnd.com. However you get it, just get it. It's free for now, and you will be the smartest person in the newsroom or at the station, wherever you are in the local television realm.

I promise you that. I also wanna thank, of course, as we do each and every week, the great folks at TVREV who give us the means by which to do this show for you each and every week. Of course, Melissa Hourigan and Jessika Walsten, Mike Gasbara, and Jason Damata the chief cooks and bottle washers there.

Our thanks, of course, to Madhive for their continued sponsorship and support of this show. And of course, we could not do this show without the great audio excellence of Jerry Payne in suburban Atlanta. Thank you, kind sir, for your knob twiddling and adjustments this week. And thank you for listening.

Tell your friends, tell them, tell two friends, and so on, and we'll see you here again next week In the Vicinity.