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G-20 coverage

P

Parttimer

KDKA did an excellent job this afternoon with people all over the city. I listened to them for almost two hours (picked them up just south of Erie) and they were right on top of everything.

Clear Channel, which of course uses news readers in Cleveland, had no local presence whatsoever.
 
COULD NOT DISAGREE WITH YOU MORE! i thought today's coverage was weak and overhyped on both kdka radio and especially on channel 11. my god, there were 5 times more incidents following the super bowl and stanley cup victories...(and that's a great thing)....but, words like "CHAOS"..."DANGEROUS"... and "OUT OF CONTROL ANARHISTS" were a bit over the top. we live in pittsburgh! it's difficult enough for us natives to make it around this city....imagine a pimply faced wanna be bigshot from so cal trying to organize a riot in this town? YOU GOTTA BE CRAZY!!!!!!!! brilliant move by the obama administration.........now, if only he could get his own party to pass some kind of much needed health care bill!!!!! P.S. did anyone see peggy finigan's failure to identify air force one? it was hillarious.......
 
california said:
COULD NOT DISAGREE WITH YOU MORE! i thought today's coverage was weak and overhyped on both kdka radio and especially on channel 11. my god, there were 5 times more incidents following the super bowl and stanley cup victories...(and that's a great thing)....but, words like "CHAOS"..."DANGEROUS"... and "OUT OF CONTROL ANARHISTS" were a bit over the top. we live in pittsburgh! it's difficult enough for us natives to make it around this city....imagine a pimply faced wanna be bigshot from so cal trying to organize a riot in this town? YOU GOTTA BE CRAZY!!!!!!!! brilliant move by the obama administration.........now, if only he could get his own party to pass some kind of much needed health care bill!!!!! P.S. did anyone see peggy finigan's failure to identify air force one? it was hillarious.......
Click to expand...

You have me laughing California, especially since I am living in California right now (Nor Cal) and when I watched the Pittsburgh media via online, the people they are show protesting are those out of towners trying to be big shots and they look like they are native from out here in California. Anyway, enough of my views on the protesters.......I assumed KDKA AM covered the G20....did any of the other Pittsburgh radio stations cover the event or did they just insert news briefs during commercials?
 
Here is a summary of the coverage done by all other Pittsburgh radio stations:















That's it. The played music and acted like nothing was even going on. Traffic reports mentioned road closures and such. Quinn was talking about Nancy Pelosi and healthcare (guess he's a "national show" and can't be bothered with local issues). Jim & Randy on DVE at least talked about it and had guests like Sally Wiggin. But it almost seemed liek the stations shut down with the rest of local business.
 
Why would the other stations devote time to it? They're not equipped to handle news or commentary. Leave the news to KDKA and KQV, and serve the audience that doesn't want to hear about it.

At the end of the day, nothing really happened anyway. Unless someone was affected by the traffic closures, what was relevant? And since a lot of places were shut down, the closures didn't affect as many people as they would have normally.
 
Had Sean been working at DVE (which he wasn't) Thursday would havc been a great day to take extra phone calls about how people were being affected. That's good radio.

In Tampa Bay WDAE would let the sports hosts get off-topic when an event was bigger than sports. I guess ESPN would be unlikely to do so, and Ellis only briefly mentioned it in the context of holding down the crowd for the Pirate game. I realize no one's got a new department anyomre but it doesn't take much to put some callers on and connect a little bit.
 
The point is nobody was being affected. For all the warnings and all of Marty Griffin's foolishness, basically nothing happened.
 
I personally found the coverage to be one-sided, and fully a reflection of the happy-cheery Chamber of Commerce message that Dan Onorato and the boys wanted to have out there. No critical coverage or stories about locals who were fed-up with the whole thing that I could find.

Businesses in the Downtown area lost tens of millions of dollars in economic activity. Workers were given the choice of using vacation days or going unpaid (which left large numbers of them very, very angry if you bothered to walk around downtown for ten minutes and just listen). And while I have little sympathy for the sort of protesters who follow this thing around the planet, I will say that the chanting of "these are OUR streets!" hit a certain resonance with me. (especially when I was not allowed to freely walk down streets that my tax dollars paid for, because downtown had been turned into a carbon copy of the Baghdad Green Zone).

Nor do I expect much in the way of continuing coverage of the ACLU lawsuits (the last one of which should wind it's way through the courts by around, oh, 2017), or when all of these JOBS are going to land here because we were gracious enough to host them (ticking Job Count clock in Market Square, anyone?) Or any of the myriad other things that Pittsburgh taxpayers are going to be stuck holding the bag for?

And the BIG story that nobody wants to cover....just how many cities were asked and said NO to the G20 before Danny Drinktax and Young Mayor Luke were gullible enough to say Yes? Two? Three? Twenty Seven? I've heard all of those numbers... And just what do our aspiring Governor and Boy Mayor get in return?

Nah, I think local media has breathed its last about the G20.

But since KD is pretty much the lone player left in the local radio news biz, they did what they've always done...wink, nod, slap the Grant Street politicians on the back, and duly spit out the Someplace Special party line.
But hey, maybe we can get Onorato to race Larry Richert at the Meadows in a promotional clip!

Not that TV or the local print media was much better.
 
I will actually give Honsberger some credit. His discussion Friday mostly took the tone you did regarding the negative economic impact, and he had several callers who owned restaurants which were persuaded to stay open, only to lose more money than if they had just shut down.

And I've heard we were #11 on the list.
 
@Boss Radio-- Yes people were effected. They were forced to travel to other locations to work or forced to find their way into town via other routes/methods to work. Some were forced to take vacation days they didn't want to/couldn't afford to use them. No, the city didn't fall into the Allegheny and there weren't the 3,000-4,000 arrests that the FBI told everyone on backround would happen. But there were effects. To pretend otherwise is foolish.

@Parttimer-- We were #1 on the list all along even if Dan Rooney won't admit it and won't admit his part in it. The Secret Service and Homeland Security wouldn't even consider New York, Boston, Philly, DC, Chicago, Dallas or Atlanta because of security concerns which only came to light just before the confernece. Everything fit here perfectly.

Nobody outside of KQV and KDKA covered the events because nobody can. They are the only two stations in the market who have anything that even resembles a newsroom. We in radio told our listeners a long time ago "We don't care what you need. That doesn't feed your bottom line. If you want to know what's going on around you, don't depend on us. We don't care."
 
"Coverage" can mean a lot of different things... As i alluded to before, I would have loved to hear Sean just open up the phones and ask "So what are you doing today?".. people working at home, people with days off, people who couldn't get to work because anarchists were rolling dumpsters down the street, you know, basic stuff like that... and anytime police in riot gear are firing rubber bullets, SOMEBODY is affected....
 
Snafu said:
@Boss Radio-- Yes people were effected. They were forced to travel to other locations to work or forced to find their way into town via other routes/methods to work. Some were forced to take vacation days they didn't want to/couldn't afford to use them. No, the city didn't fall into the Allegheny and there weren't the 3,000-4,000 arrests that the FBI told everyone on backround would happen. But there were effects. To pretend otherwise is foolish.

@Parttimer-- We were #1 on the list all along even if Dan Rooney won't admit it and won't admit his part in it. The Secret Service and Homeland Security wouldn't even consider New York, Boston, Philly, DC, Chicago, Dallas or Atlanta because of security concerns which only came to light just before the confernece. Everything fit here perfectly.

Nobody outside of KQV and KDKA covered the events because nobody can. They are the only two stations in the market who have anything that even resembles a newsroom. We in radio told our listeners a long time ago "We don't care what you need. That doesn't feed your bottom line. If you want to know what's going on around you, don't depend on us. We don't care."
Click to expand...

Wow, people had to take alternate routes to work? So the lasting effect was the same as it would have been if another truck had gotten stuck in the tunnel. Hardly the thing that would make me break format if I were running a station that plays music. Other stations don't have newsrooms because they don't have audiences that want news from them.
 
@ Boss Radio. Not even close.

When the G-20 comes back in three years I'll make sure I have the flash cards ready.
 
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