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BAD WEATHER? FORGET RADIO

C

CaptBob92

I worked morning radio in the Midwest for over 25 years and can't remember how many Winter
storms I covered. Now I'm in Florida, the one portion of the country not hit by snow and ice this week how lucky is that?

I wondered how they are covering this latest deludge of bad weather up North. Wednesday morning I went on line to find the stream from my old station. To my surprize, it was not up and running. I tried other stations in that area, same thing.

I did find one country station there running a satelite fed morning show talking about the CMA awards, county artists etc all generic. I figured the station would offer local facts during a break at the top of the hour. They did,,a generic story that " some counties are under a state of emergency and some schools and some businesses are closed " Were I a local listener there I certainly would wonder who the " Some" counties were.

I expected a refference to the station web site for closings but no. The three story Local newscast ended with news from the Middle East and a forcast. Then a guy jumped on after a " Now LOCAL SPORTS " intro and read stories about Detroit and Cleveland teams 80 miles away. The "local" sports never materialized. He did make refference to how cold it was though.

I did find podcasts of local news, one newscast per day, on some of the station's sites I visited but discovered they were all the same newscast with different intros and outros naming the particular station. Again, three stories on these "Local" newscasts two of which weren't local.

No business or school closings, no local sports scores, no temperatures, no road reports nothing but generic stuff. In short no information the listener would need during a weather emergency,

I think that collectively, the radio industry has just walked away from being an information source in favor of all music all the time. When you hear someone say " people don't listen to the radio anymore" they arn't referring to the way radio broadcasts, AM, FM. HD etc what they are saying is we don't give them a reason to listen, no information. In my example, there are no all news stations, no talkers that dump talk for emergency information . What we do give them is something they can get from many other sorces. By the way, when we did provide all that missing information years ago we did it with one man at the station so don't tell me it''s too hard to collect.
 
CaptBob92 said:
I think that collectively, the radio industry has just walked away from being an information source in favor of all music all the time.
Click to expand...

I don't think the radio industry does anything collectively. Some stations do information, some stations don't. Depends on market size, popularity of the station, heritage of the hosts, and competition. But the fact is that lots of other media sources have entered the information business, starting with TV. When you worked morning radio, there really was no local information on morning TV. That changed. Now local TV stations are on the air with local information from 4AM. And it's true, a picture is worth a thousand words. You see cars skidding across the road, and that tells you a lot more than some guy talking about it. Just because a radio station talks about something doesn't mean anyone is listening. But there are lots of stations that run through school closing lists and road reports just like it's the 70s. You just didn't happen to find any in your old town.
 
That and I feel that lumping all radio stations into the same pot isn't fair. There are plenty of stations in major and medium sized markets all over the country that jump into wall-to-wall reporting of news and information when bad weather hits. Many times in these situations as with TV, 'weather' (and in the case of radio in larger markets, 'traffic') wins.

Not that I'm refuting your claim, because you didn't identify the market or location, but I find it strange that there are no all-news or music stations that have news within earshot covering a weather event of the magnitude you're concerned about.
 
I was (& continue to be) impressed with KRMG-AM 740, Tulsa / KRMG-FM 102.3, Sand Springs in Oklahoma. They have gone to 24/7 coverage of the storm, taking calls from listeners, talking with meteorologists, emergency management people, city officials, business owners, etc. In between the callers they're doing news / weather / traffic updates every 15 minutes. Much of the day (& some of the night) they had a "dash cam" streaming to their website from one of their mobile vehicles.

The audio stream is available live around the clock at their website: http://www.krmg.com

We haven't heard Rush, Hannity, Bortz, Savage, or Howard since this all started Monday night. I just tuned over a moment ago and they are STILL live. The announcers & producers are sleeping at a hotel half a block away, or in the studios themselves if they weren't able to get out of the parking lot.

Cox Tulsa is using KRMG's staff to provide updates for their country (K95.5FM), AC (Mix 96), & classic rock (Star 103.3) stations as well.

I've had plenty bad to say about corporate radio, about Cox, and specifically about KRMG. However, in this historic snow event, they have really stepped up to the plate and showed what made them great in decades past.

I don't know that they will... but they OUGHT to win some sort of award... maybe SEVERAL... for the extraordinary public service they are providing Tulsa, Northeastern Oklahoma, and really the entire state right now.

It sounds like your stations could take a lesson from one of ours!
 
You all have made excellent points but many of these observations come from urban areas where one station may stand out as the information source in emergencies. Or where local TV coverage is strong.

The area I'm speaking of is like most in this country namely rural. Yes, the TV stations there have had early morning local news for over 20 years, they did when I did mornings on the radio but they arn't interested in giving much coverage to viewers 50 to 60 miles away near the border of their ADI since they figure half living there are watching a station outside of it. There is also a distrust of TV news the further you get from the station especially when they have been known to flash reports of schools and roads open when they in fact are not.

Internet? As mentioned, I couldn't find much info at the local radio and newspaper sites besides, when I drive my car internet, TV, newspaper are not accessable, If I don't want to risk my life.

Since we know that radio is generally listened to the most in vehicles and since we know you can't access TV or internet in vehicles does it make sense to stop giving emergency information and cut off our largest audiance just because they can go get it elseware? During the Challenger disaster I remember watching the coverage intently on TV then driving to the store and finding absolutely nothing on any station in SW Florida!

Why giveup reporting this info just because it is available somewhere else?
 
CaptBob92 said:
Great idea so I called a friend there. She says they dumped doing local when they got a new Program Director.
Click to expand...

Who probably came from someplace else. Right?

As I said, this is a specific decision made by a specific station, and not an overall radio industry trend. Lots of stations are recognizing there are ways to make money from local weather and traffic that go beyond the air signal.
 
Reread my first post. I tried streams for all the stations serving that area , nine total, and only found one who had a stream up. Only one had anything about closings etc on their site. The one that did was running syndicated programing over the air. The other eight were split among two clusters of different owners. I'm sure the listeners to those eight stations would have liked to know what was happening.
 
I don't think you can use streams as an indication of what a station does locally. Especially in small markets. From what I've seen, radio web sites in small markets aren't too good.
 
We only stream sports pbp. Too expensive, complicated to stream normal music programming. Suspect same is true for most small market music stations.
 
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