Radio is in BIG trouble

[PTBoardOp94]

Nope...it's valid. Anyone can also own a radio facility. But you have to be licensed to operate it. Then again, not much point owning something if you can't operate it, no?

Point conceded.

 

[Holland Cooke]

Analogy, Metaphor

Good morning from Las Vegas, where the NAB convention begins tomorrow.

Like radio, this city is now once-fabulous.

If you're a first-timer here now, you're probably just giddy.
But to-the-trained-eye, it's quiet...at times sadly so.
Last time I was here was for the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Since then, several major construction projects seem to remain halted.
Cranes over half-built palaces sit idle.

Debt-fueled zeal collides with rececession.
'Sound familiar?

NAB notes to follow, here, at www.HollandCooke.com, and in Talkers.

HC

 

[gr8oldies]

My little part of the world experienced an event this past Monday that has caused me to think over all the logic, pro and con, about a media's relationship to a civilization, and what if any responsibility do they have to be "of service".

Last Friday night we had serious storms and tornado sightings. The big heady-duty station in Gainesville, GA was doing what we dream of radio being able to do when the rain let up enough for us to dash from the restaurant to our car. They brought in one of their top morning personalities and they cleared the boards, including a minor-league baseball game and they were taking calls from the public, from police departments, making calls to public agencies and giving us a play-by-play from their weather radar. Mucho Atta-boy's to WDUN.

Monday morning I slept in, got up sometime after 8 and gathered in the newspaper. Dreary. Cloudy. Nothing spectacular that I could see. An hour later might lights blinked. and again. and again. And then about 9:30 they went out. They came back on at 6:30 P.M. for an hour, and then went out for another two hours.

Picture this: I am sitting in a dark house. No TV. No Internet. I go to the radio. The big boys in Gainesville are running their morning Talk Show. At Noon they are running Rush followed by Hannity.
No weather, No news about power.
I switch to the Atlanta's heavy-duty WSB, 50KW, 750 on the dial. We're running talk, talk, talk, talk. I don't care how many helicopters, newsmobiles or whatever, no news about power being out.

My sister calls from Alabama wanting to know how bad the storm is. What storm. There is no storm here. My power is out is my only problem. She says: NO, I'm looking at your lake on The Weather Channel. Docks breaking loose. Overturned. You are having a storm and I can see it on TV.

And I tell here they must be showing scenes from Friday night because I "don't got no stinkin storm!"

Turns out within 10 miles of my house there were apparently "straight winds" of 50 to 70 mph. Docks are breaking loose and blowing away. Boats are overturn. Trees are down on power lines.

I live in a county of 160,000 people and I don't have a radio station that can quit nursing from the Talk Satellite long enough to tell me why my power is out, and what hope I have that it will return in this lifetime.

Mr. Boortz, the big talker on WSB in Atlanta who is syndicated across the country like to make the point that broadcasting has changed. The broadcasters have paid a fee to the government and now the BROADCASTER owns the channel, it no longer belongs to the PUBLIC. Broadcasters no longer are trustees and caretakers of a publicly owned bandwidth as we used to express it.

So. When floods come to Fargo, When blizzards come to southwestern Kansas, when tornadoes come to North Georgia, does civilization have any claim that the radio broadcast frequencies require some kind of stewardship by the occupants of that frequency? Is the station a licensee or is the station an OWNER, free to make maximum economic use of the frequency with no consideration due to the people living in the shadow of that tower?



P.S. I have a weather radio and it never beeped during this entire ordeal! So much for the idea that maybe we should have a government operated station to take care of emergency information. After all, we wouldn't want to inconvenience the talk addicts. ;D

When we had the aftermath of Hurricane Ike as far north as Ohio with sustained 70 mile an hour winds, our news/taker WHIO and WLW did an excellent job, once it was apparent damage was occurring One problem was, although there was a high wind warning, there have been plenty of high wind warnings where the winds didn't knock out power for a week. No one thought to do wall-to-wall weather panic at the start of the warning. Sometimes weather and other situations has a way of sneaking up on us. When tornado warnings occurred in rural Indiana in the fringes of the Cincinnati market a month or so ago, viewers were upset that the final rounds of a major golf tournament were interrupted by wall to wall "my Doppler is bigger than yours" coverage when a crawl would have done. Chances are, WSB would not have mentioned your power outage especially if it was isolated to a couple of neighborhoods.

The Fargo stations did an excellent job with the flood coverage..one station that is 50kW day and 440 watts night stayed on higher power (and were criticized on Radio-Info for it!) and did wall to wall flood co and blizzard coverage.

My point is..trying to come up with regulations that can cover every situation is impossible. if we are going to have a federal rergualation that says every licensed station must go wall to wall weather panic mode everytime the wind blows, suffice it to say it isn't always neccesary.

The EAS system was criticized in the aftermath of 9/11. Why wasnt it activated in New York and across the U.S.? In New York there wouldn't have been time to warn of the second plane, and if there were to have been an EAS activation in Dayton, OH, what would we have been instructed to do? Go to a fallout shelter? When was the last time we had duck and cover drills to even know where a fallout shelter was?

 

[Silkie]

Re: Analogy, Metaphor

Good morning from Las Vegas, where the NAB convention begins tomorrow.

Like radio, this city is now once-fabulous.

If you're a first-timer here now, you're probably just giddy.
But to-the-trained-eye, it's quiet...at times sadly so.
Last time I was here was for the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Since then, several major construction projects seem to remain halted.
Cranes over half-built palaces sit idle.

Debt-fueled zeal collides with rececession.
'Sound familiar?

NAB notes to follow, here, at www.HollandCooke.com, and in Talkers.

HC

With no disrespect for the professionals in the business, NAB reminds me of the radio edition of AARP - they hook you in, then start bleeding you to death until they finally have an insurance carrier collecting dues in premiums because people started telling them where they could jump off and into the lake.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Chances are, WSB would not have mentioned your power outage especially if it was isolated to a couple of neighborhoods.

Let me re-interpret part of what I was trying to say, and give you more of the picture. It wasn't "my neighborhood". It was four counties, including parts of Atlanta. The area was hard-hit enough and large enough that, if you check my first message, it was featured NATIONALLY on The Weather Channel. My sister in law called from another state to tell me that a marina less than 10 miles from my house was scattered and splattered.... it was being shown on TWC!!! There was one death attributed to this incident and it occurred about 5 miles from the WSB Studio.

I'm not picking a fight with either WSB or WDUN in Gainesville. Both are great stations with capable news staffs and access to weather radar. 'Remember, I brought a mention of Holland Cooke's observation about eventually seeing another layer of talk shows that may develop. My point was this: The more stations we have "nursing from the talk show satellite", the more stations we have who have a tough, tough call when it comes time to serve the need of their community vs. stay locked into the program that is their bread and butter. It's always easy 24 hours later to "armchair quarterback" what should have been done, what could have been done. Making the best possible choice at the time of some local event is a tough call to make.

My point is..trying to come up with regulations that can cover every situation is impossible. if we are going to have a federal rergualation that says every licensed station must go wall to wall weather panic mode everytime the wind blows, suffice it to say it isn't always neccesary.

Here again, go back and read my original post. I was NOT promoting any regulations. Though it may not have been written clearly, I was really speaking to what the industry is going to do, and what corners the industry will choose to back themselves into. Both of the stations I mentioned are very good at jumping into the fray with a lot of newsroom horsepower.... horsepower that 9 out of 10 stations DON'T EVEN HAVE. My whole point was this: When a station commits to carry Boortz or Rush, or Hannity, or Ed Schultz or Coast to Coast or NPR long from talk shows, it is awkward to break away for something local that after it is all over with may be nothing but a tempest in a teapot. The more hours per day you devote to this kind of programming, the less time you have available to let your expensive local news department put material on the air that generates revenue. We don't know the cause and effect yet, but chances are that over the 10 to 20 year period, stations that carry hours and hours of satellite programming that is hard to interrupt possibly will find eventually there is no justification to keep the expense of a news department.

So. If News-Talkers, eventually three stations deep in every market, eventually find it more profitable to just be Talkers, and if Music stations find from the PPM devices that having news is the kiss-of-death for tune-outs, Who will be left to be the johnny-on-the-spot radio station when the sky ruptures and all hell comes tumbling out?

I'm not talking about regulations. I'm talking about the market place. Tell me what genre of broadcaster will find it beneficial to have newspeople, station owned vehicles with equipment to beam reports to the station, and anyone on staff who has a roll-o-dex of... no, make that a Blackberry full of phone numbers that will get you to the people in law enforcement and emergency rescue who can tell you what is going on?

 

[gr8oldies]

At least in the case of WSB's sister WHIO, they will interrupt syndication at the drop of a hat for breaking news, weather or traffic. They blew off 2 days of syndication during the windstorm aftermath.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

At least in the case of WSB's sister WHIO, they will interrupt syndication at the drop of a hat for breaking news, weather or traffic. They blew off 2 days of syndication during the windstorm aftermath.

To be fair, I must point out that there are times when WSB will also break in. When you consider the huge billings they take in, it has to be a tougher call to break in here than it is in Dayton.

Again, I don't mean to pick on WSB. I continue to raise the question: what happens when more and more and more stations are carrying satellite programming. Who will then pick up the slack and flotsam that is of interest to us Appalachians living in the hills?