Posted by Bud on March 31, 2010 at 20:42:58:
WLEY-FM 107.9 aka La Ley, one of Chicago's popular Regional Mexican-formated radio stations, has stopped encoding its signal to be picked up by Arbitron's PPM devices. This is just another shot fired in the on-going war between La Ley's parent company, the Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS) and the Arbitron ratings service.
Last year, SBS stopped encoding transmissions for their radio stations in the major markets that used Arbitron's PPM service. SBS is among the companies that feel Arbitron is not being fair with its ratings system, especially to minorities and minority-targeted radio stations. They exercised what they felt was their right to do by their interpretation of their contract with Arbitron, and stopped anything to do with Arbitron. Encoding was stopped and they no longer wanted to receive or pay for data from Arbitron. In February, Arbitron sued SBS and won. New York Supreme Court Judge Shirley Kornreich ordered SBS to begin encoding again and follow Arbitron's interpretation of the contract. SBS immediately complied.
Yesterday, the same Judge reversed her decision. She felt that while the legal battle between the two companies is still ongoing, SBS did not have encode its radio signals. Within minutes of Judge Kornreich's decision, SBS pulled the proverbial plug on the encoded signal for WLEY and all of their major market radio stations.
For the first time in a long time, there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the ongoing struggle between SBS and Arbitron. This week, the two companies agreed to mediation to help settle the disputes. The agreed-upon mediator will be John Feerick, a former Dean of NY's Fordham University School of Law. The mediation is expected to happen in late April.
The Spanish Broadcasting System owns Chicago's WLEY and 20 other radio stations in the United States and Puerto Rico. They also own one television station in Chicago, Mega 13/WOCK-TV.