I was completely disappointed in WBAP's coverage. I left work at the stroke of 5 and turned on 'BAP to get the latest (I had already heard about the shootings). I couldn't believe that they ceded their programming to ABC News (didn't they used to have commercials talking about how they were so local they had a very small national hole?). This story is in their backyard and from 5-6 (the only hour I listed), Alan Scaia (a very capable, IMHO, anchor) pretty much did the top/bottom of the hour reports and the rest was ABC. (I did hear Jim Ryan on the ABC national broadcast, but never on 'BAP's local coverage in the time frame I had it on, but I switched to KRLD and KLUV briefly, so maybe I just missed it).
I thought KRLD did a much better job (critique elsewhere here is accurate) getting interviews from people in Killeen and in Dallas-Fort Worth. WBAP got its tail kicked by KRLD in the breaking news from Fort Hood. And that's a sentiment I rarely have in the KRLD/WBAP war. (BTW, when griping about 'BAP's coverage, a friend asked me what I would have done differently. Simple: Without a news team apparently in a position to cover it live, I would have gotten Mark Davis back to the station ASAP and had him on the air taking calls, doing interviews (Kay Bailey Hutchison/John Cornyn/Rick Perry were all over the airwaves), reporting stuff from Twitter, etc. and let Alan Scaia do the heavy breaking news. It would have been a much better coverage scenario than delivering stuff from the network. And it would have been a local personality covering what was in a lot of ways a local story making national news). And don't tell me he wasn't available. That's never an excuse. Shoot, I bet Mark (or Hal Jay) would have made themselves available for that kind of coverage.
As for Mike's original question, I did catch a brief mention on KLUV about the shooting (I had it on for all of about 5 minutes). Their afternoon drive time guy (whose name escapes me at the moment) had a quick update on the shooting, then touted the continuous coverage on KRLD. I thought that was a good way to handle it. For CBS or Citadel, use your FM stations to bring updates on this kind of story regularly (quarter/half hour updates, or otherwise as appropriate) and then tout your News/Talk station for whatever continuous coverage they're doing.
And one final gripe about BOTH KRLD and WBAP before I get off my soap box (the view is nice from up here): The traffic reporters seemed to have no sense that they're delivering traffic reports on a station with horrible news breaking on either side of the traffic report. I can't believe I heard (from both Michael Scott on 'BAP and the KRLD people whose names I don't forget), "Well, good news in ___________ where ____________ is clear..." Seriously? You balance the bad news out of Fort Hood with "good news" that the precious commuting crowd isn't having to be stuck in traffic?? And this wasn't once, it was on almost every traffic report I heard on the drive home. How about some producer somewhere say, "hey, it's a bad news day - get in, do your traffic, get out and can the happy talk for another day"? Some professionals (our thread's originator among them) seemed to understand these type things when called in to do traffic in between bad breaking news (as if there's such thing as good breaking news).
Ahem. Off my soapbox for the moment.
