WBEN, Buffalo's news-talk leader wasn't reporting the news when power went out in the Northtowns Wednesday afternoon. The station was eerily silent through a good part of afternoon drive, on this, the last day of the Winter book and the day before the start of the all important Spring Arbitron.
The 5 kW station's carrier was on, but there was no modulation. It seemed strange to hear Tony Caligierri, the nimble and astute producer for afternoon drive talker Sandy Beach, key the mic to say "This is WBEN AM 930, we're experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by." I suspect Beach was on remote, otherwise he would have filled the void.
Still, you'd think that if there was a studio, board and mic that were functioning, Time Wenger, Greg Reid, Smokey the janitor... SOMEBODY would get on the air and say, "Here's what's going on folks, we had a power outage and we're flying by the seat of our pants..."
Maybe Reid was in the rack room, sleeves rolled up, working side by side with Entercom's harried engineering staff that worked diligently put WWKB back on the air, nurse WGR back to life and keep Entercom's FM music stations operating. Kiss, Star and The Lake seemed unaffected by the outage.
Later on Wednesday afternoon, afternoon drive newsman Tom Puckett could be heard ad-libbing (using the term loosely) through a newscast, explaining that "our Dilette system is completely down..." leaving the unitiated to ask, "what's a Dilette system?"
Puckett shouldn't be faulted for his inconsistent performance, but one is left to wonder why so few of WBEN's news staff are capable of ad-libbing as well as guys like Beach, Bauerle and Dobson.
Although I didn't listen continuously, WBEN was off for a good part of PM drive as I punched in intermittently over the course of approximately 30 minutes.
-9-
The 5 kW station's carrier was on, but there was no modulation. It seemed strange to hear Tony Caligierri, the nimble and astute producer for afternoon drive talker Sandy Beach, key the mic to say "This is WBEN AM 930, we're experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by." I suspect Beach was on remote, otherwise he would have filled the void.
Still, you'd think that if there was a studio, board and mic that were functioning, Time Wenger, Greg Reid, Smokey the janitor... SOMEBODY would get on the air and say, "Here's what's going on folks, we had a power outage and we're flying by the seat of our pants..."
Maybe Reid was in the rack room, sleeves rolled up, working side by side with Entercom's harried engineering staff that worked diligently put WWKB back on the air, nurse WGR back to life and keep Entercom's FM music stations operating. Kiss, Star and The Lake seemed unaffected by the outage.
Later on Wednesday afternoon, afternoon drive newsman Tom Puckett could be heard ad-libbing (using the term loosely) through a newscast, explaining that "our Dilette system is completely down..." leaving the unitiated to ask, "what's a Dilette system?"
Puckett shouldn't be faulted for his inconsistent performance, but one is left to wonder why so few of WBEN's news staff are capable of ad-libbing as well as guys like Beach, Bauerle and Dobson.
Although I didn't listen continuously, WBEN was off for a good part of PM drive as I punched in intermittently over the course of approximately 30 minutes.
-9-