Plans won final approval during the same meeting last week to change the make-up of the Arbitron Radio Advisory Council (ARAC). In the next elections this fall, there will not be a single candidate on the ballot from Clear Channel, Infinity, Cox, Entercom or ABC Radio - - that's because the top five groups will all have guaranteed seats. And elections will no longer be by format. Rather, there will be two seats each for markets 1-50, 51+ continuously measured markets, smaller market non-continuous, smaller market condensed. There will continue to be designated seats for "youth-appeal" formats, Hispanic and Urban. Those are the 16 voting seats, plus three research seats (Katz, Interep and a newly added research seat to be filled by a radio group researcher), an at-large seat traditionally filled by the President of the RAB, a group PD seat and a seat that automatically goes to the council's past chairman. Just as soon as the meeting concluded, Arbitron rushed out its own summary of the issues addressed. The ARAC highlights are interesting like point number 4: Satellite Radio-Fall 2005: Arbitron will institute an enhanced satellite radio diary credit policy.

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Arbitron Radio Advisory Council Highlights

1. Small Market Initiative Phase 1-Fall 2005: Arbitron will include the diaries from the Fall 2005 and Spring 2005 surveys when tabulating the audience estimates in 110 Condensed Markets creating "two-book average" reports, delivering two times the current sample size for audience demographics and dayparts. (This program will not be implemented in the four Condensed Markets that are embedded in larger Metro survey areas.)

2. Small Market Initiative Phase II-Spring 2007: Ratings reports will release in condensed markets quarterly (4 times per year) with the same number of diaries formerly placed during the traditional Spring and Fall survey periods spread over all 12 months of the year. Each quarterly report will add listening from diaries from the most recent quarter and drop listening from diaries from the oldest quarter.

3. Total Line-only Simulcast Reporting-Winter 2006: Beginning with the Winter 2006 survey, Arbitron's new simulcast policy will eliminate the two-station limit. In addition the new policy will: 1) Only recognize stations that simulcast all content, including commercials, 100 percent of the time stations are on the air; 2) Report estimates for simulcast partnerships through a single estimate line in all services and; 3) No longer make accessible through Arbitron's syndicated reporting services the individual estimates for radio stations that are a part of a simulcast partnership.

4. Satellite Radio-Fall 2005: Arbitron will institute an enhanced satellite radio diary credit policy whereby listening credit will be assigned to individual satellite radio channels, and individual channels will be eligible for reporting in Arbitron's reports, including the Radio Market Report, if the channel meets minimum reporting standards for that report.

5. Internet Radio Crediting Enhancements-Spring 2006: Arbitron will credit broadcast stations with listening to their Internet stream only if the online content duplicates 100% of the on-air programming, including all commercials. Those with different content than their over-the-air counterpart will be credited to total radio listening but not included with the listening to their over-the-air station counterpart.

6. Personal Race/Ethnicity-Winter 2006: Arbitron will implement enhancements to procedures for determining the race and ethnicity of individual radio survey diarykeepers based on responses to questions that will be included in the diary versus a household classification established in the preliminary interview.

7. Language Usage Weighting-Winter 2006: As previously announced, Arbitron will implement language usage weighting in 21 Hispanic controlled metros. This will be in addition to current weighting factors including age/sex, county, and race.

8. Low Power FM Diary Crediting Enhancements-Summer 2005: Arbitron will enhance its Low Power FM diary credit policy and begin publishing estimates for individual LPFM stations, which meet minimum reporting standards, by their FCC-assigned call letters (followed by the suffix "FM"). Prior to this, all low power listening within a market, to one or more LPFM stations, was reported as an aggregate under XLP-FM.

9. Minimum Reporting Standards for Maximi$er/MediaPro in Small Markets-Spring 2005: To ensure consistency between Arbitron data sets, a station will qualify for reporting in Maximi$er(r)/MediaPro data providing there is at least one diary mention to the station in the total reporting area. Previously, at least 10 diaries mentions were required for inclusion in Maximi$er.

10. Change in Broadcast Hours Used for Part-time Stations-Fall 2005: Arbitron will begin using April broadcast hours year-round in the processing of audience estimates. Previously, for each quarterly survey, Arbitron asked stations that broadcast less than 24-hours per day to submit broadcast hours for the month that typically contains the shortest broadcast day of the survey. This change will have no effect on estimates for full-time stations.

11. E-Book-Coming 2006: The E-Book, an electronic replacement for the printed Arbitron Radio Market Report book, is being readied for release to customers in 2006.

12. New Arbitron Portal and Downloader- End of 2005: In late 2005, Arbitron will debut a new customer "portal," a Web site that will become the gateway to Arbitron software applications as well as to a new Arbitron data downloader.