AWARN Alliance Elects Chair, Vice Chair, New Members Of Steering Committee

The AWARN Alliance has elected the chair and vice chair of its AWARN Steering Committee for 2022.

John Taylor, senior vice president of LG Electronics North America, will serve another term as chairman, and Jim DeChant, vice president of technology, News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting, will return as AWARN vice chair.

The AWARN Steering Committee serves as the governing body of the AWARN Alliance. Also elected to serve on the Steering Committee are:

·  Tim Bischoff, chief technology officer, Kentucky Educational Television, representing public television

·  Michael Mougey, chief revenue officer and president of broadcast, Baron Weather, representing tech partners

·  Peter Sockett, director of engineering and operations, WRAL and Capitol Broadcasting Co. in Raleigh, N.C., representing smaller broadcasters (self-defined)

Bischoff and Sockett were re-elected to another term.

Other members of the Steering Committee are:

·  Joe Di Scipio, SVP, FCC Legal & Business Affairs and Assistant General Counsel, Fox Corp.

·  John Lawson, executive director, AWARN Alliance

·  Anne Schelle, managing director, and Sterling Davis, consultant, Pearl TV

·  Yoshi Tsurimaki, producer, business development, T-NET Japan

·  So Vang, Sinclair Broadcast Group/ONE Media 3.0, VP emerging technologies

·  Kelly Williams, VP, Engineering and Technology Policy, NAB

·  Madeleine Noland, President, ATSC (ex-officio)

·  Luke Fay, ATSC TG3 Chair and Senior Manager, Technical Standards, Sony Electronics (ex-officio).

“2022 is shaping up as a year when things start coming together for AWARN. With over 60 markets on the air with ATSC 3.0 and Sinclair launching the first advanced alerting app in Washington, DC, we expect to see further progress toward development of advanced alerting and continuing emergency messaging with NextGen TV,” said AWARN Executive Director John Lawson.

“AWARN will continue to focus on the institutional and human side for the development of what we call next generation emergency messaging, or NGEM. At the end of January, we and partner organizations will co-host a roundtable discussion at KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara with TV station GM’s, news directors, local emergency managers and other alert originators from across Southern California.

“The goal of the Santa Barbara Roundtable is to explore the creation of NGEM, which is really a voluntary, interoperable ‘network of networks.’ We plan for this to be the first of several regional roundtables across the county in the coming year,” Lawson said.

AWARN will be releasing details about the Santa Barbara Roundtable in coming days, Lawson said.