COURT DISSMESS WEAA WHISTLE BLOWER LAWSUIT • DC & BALTIMORE SEPTEMBER PPM RATINGS

Michele Williams

Last Monday (9/30/19) a federal judge dismissed a wrongful termination lawsuit filed in April 2018 by Michele Williams, a former Director Broadcast Operations at WEAA-FM in Baltimore. 

The suit was against against Morgan State University (MSU), the licensee of WEAA, and DeWayne Wickham, Dean of the School of Global Journalism and Communication, who oversees the station for MSU.

Williams claimed in her lawsuit that MSU misreported WEAA’s finances in reports to CPB in attempt to increase WEAA’s CPB funding.

 Williams claimed that her termination was wrongful and that it violated Maryland’s public employee policy guidelines and several whistle blower protection laws. 

According to the Baltimore Sun [link], Williams alleged that MSU fired her after she spoke out about MSU “cooking the books.” 

Williams was seeking $2 million in the suit.

She was hired by MSU in 2014 and she was fired in 2017.

Morgan State reported operating expenses for WEAA of more than $1.9 million for 2014, 2015 and 2016. Williams began to speak out when she learned that MSU was not using internal information from the station that was much lower than the numbers MSU reported to CPB.

WEAA's expenses for FY 2018 dropped to around $1.1 million according transparency documents on WEAA’s website [link].

William’s lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge George Russell III because it lacked “specific details” to justify William’s claims.

NIELSEN RELEASES AVERAGE TIME PER DAY THAT LISTENERS SPEND ‘MEASURED MEDIA”

This week Nielsen Audio posted new information about the duration listeners, 18 and older, spend with nine media platforms. The chart on the right provides the topline data.

Overall, in 2019 so far, listeners spent 11-hours and 45-minutes daily with “measured media.” This was over 10% higher than 2018 during the same time period.

Radio time-spent-listening stayed about the same. In 2019 when the average respondent listened to 1-hour and 42-minutes of radio each day. That was slightly down from 2018 when the average survey respondent spent 1-hour and 45-minutes daily listening to radio.

NIELSEN AUDIO SEPTEMBER PPM RATINGS

According to Nielsen Audio's September PPM ratings for Baltimore, WEAA continues to have a significant audience. 

WEAA’s Jazz format attracted 93,400 estimated weekly listeners. 

WEAA has the second highest total for noncommercial stations in the Baltimore metro.

The BIG story in Baltimore is the terrific ratings performance by NPR News/Talk WYPR. Not only was WYPR the top noncom station in the market, WYPR is now the number one source of radio news in Baltimore.

WYPR beat Hearst’s flagship commercial station WBAL in both AQH share and estimated weekly listeners for the first time. 

Someone at Hearst is probably “having a cow” right now because WBAL has been led the market leader since Lee de Forest sold his first vacuum tube.

Meanwhile in our nation’s capital, WAMU and commercial WTOP traded places again in AQH shares. 

WTOP typically has more estimated weekly listeners than WAMU because ‘TOP features quick-in-out traffic and weather.

Also in Washington, DC, live and hyper-local CCM station WGTS is blowing away the canned automated programming on K-Love repeater WLVW.

Here are the monthly AQH share trends for WAMU and WTOP since March 2019.