WASHINGTON—John Lawson, longtime broadcast alerting advocate and founder of the AWARN Alliance, said he is stepping down as its executive director to work full-time in his position as co-founder of America’s Emergency Network LLC, which uses satellite and the ATSC 3.0 core network to interconnect alerting authorities to NextGen TV stations. Dave Arland, founder and president of PR firm Arland Communications, has been tapped as the new executive director, taking over when Lawson steps down at the end of the year.
AWARN (Advanced Warning and Response Network)—a coalition of broadcasters, device manufacturers and emergency management agencies tasked with developing advanced emergency alerting technology for ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV)—was founded in 2015 with Lawson as its first executive director. Lawson is also president of his own consulting firm Convergence Services, a strategic consulting firm focused on spectrum, resilience and next-generation broadcasting business model.
Although Lawson has been a strong advocate for emergency alerting, he has recently expressed frustration and skepticism about the broadcast industry’s transition to ATSC 3.0, calling out broadcasters for not doing enough to advance the technology.
“By and large, the broadcasters have not lived up to the promises that many of them made to the FCC in 2017 to stand up advanced alerting if the commission approved a voluntary transition to ATSC 3.0,” he told TV Tech last year.
His frustration grew after meetings with the FCC and local broadcasters, Lawson told TV Tech recently. Last spring, in an op-ed published on TVNewsCheck, he advocated for a government program that would provide discounts for 3.0 converter boxes, similar to the converter box coupon program in the transition from analog to ATSC 1.0 several decades ago.
Then he met with the FCC.
“Senior staff at the FCC told me that the broadcast industry had made it clear from the beginning, in their opinion, that the 3.0 transition was unlike the transition from analog to digital, and that it would be a purely market-driven approach,” he said. “And then I went out on the road so to speak to the Michigan Broadcast Engineering Conference I really got a dose of reality,” adding that no one raised their hand when he asked attendees if the 3.0 transition was “on the right track.”
“I’m proud of the work of the AWARN Alliance to foster the use of ATSC 3.0 for advanced emergency messaging, which creates a powerful use case for NextGen TV,” Lawson said, thanking the AWARN Alliance’s core group of commercial and public broadcasters and technology companies that “grasp the life-saving power of NextGen TV alerting.”
Arland brings decades of industry experience and expertise in lobbying, communications and strategy to his new role at the AWARN Alliance. He continues to lead his consulting firm, Arland Communications, and serves as executive director of the Indiana Broadcasters Association.
“The AWARN Alliance itself is John Lawson’s legacy, and all of us owe him an enormous debt of gratitude,” AWARN Alliance Chairman John I. Taylor said. “Similarly, we are very fortunate to have the well-respected and talented Dave Arland to lead us into the future.”
