Storm reports in Memphis?

[Bat Fastard]

Those of us who used to live/work in Memphis are wondering how the stations in Shelby County (and beyond) might have responded to the tornadoes. The big-box corporate owners have basically gutted the once-proud newsrooms of Memphis radio. So fill us in....how did our industry do at a time when it should have been the voice of warning, news and information? Are the people being served?

That also brings to mind another possible thread: who had the best radio News Department in the city? Who were the best news people? For my money, the best radio news around (at the time) was at WREC (circa 1977 - 1982). WREC was clearly the news leader, although WMPS and WMC-AM also had good people. WHBQ was largely cosmetic, but still managed to get the messages across.

Nowadays, the news is phoned in from...uh...where IS it thay're phoning it in from, anyway?

Your thoughts?

 

[robgrayson]

I listened to the WYPL (Library station) simulcast of channel 5 while I was out in it. I think WREC was running TV audio also (maybe channel 24?)

 

[Tynosaur]

For my money, the best radio news around (at the time) was at WREC (circa 1977 - 1982). WREC was clearly the news leader,

Engraved on my WREC Newshound Roll of Honor in that era are these names:

Harry Beadle
Dan Sears
Dan Osborne
Rick Kaucher
and the best there ever was:

Jay Boland.

Of course I might as well list a few other names from before, during and after just to say them once more:

Paul Barnett
Tys Terway
Roger Cooper
Levi Frazier
Gwen Ferris
Claudia Barr
Janice Broach
Debbie Hall (back again at the same old stand today!)
Jerry Tate

There are many, many more, but these names come most readily to my mind from the 70's. Wow, what a privilege to have lived and worked with these people.

 

[radiosaur]

I listened to the WYPL (Library station) simulcast of channel 5 while I was out in it. I think WREC was running TV audio also (maybe channel 24?)

WYPL almost killed me.

I was watching the tornado near Brunswick, trying to parallel it so I could get home since it looked at the time like it was heading that way. I was using Dave Brown's explanation of exactly where it was, but WYPL's EAS would cover him up with some warning for Bovine, Arkansas. Very annoying. TV5 needs to get that stuff on another station that isn't an EAS relay.

 

[8Balla]

Well I stopped playing music at 440 and stayed with ABC 24 until the end of the severe weather. When lives are at risk, nobody wants to hear music. Information is number one at that point.

 

[eggman961]

Not to toot my own corporate horn, but I know the Citadel stations were pretty much all over it, simulcasting TV weather audio, etc. Got a ton of emails from grateful people. Lots of across-the-hall help from all four outlets, getting the word out as fast as possible.


Eggman

 

[Grapevine]

You would think that WREC would be the defacto go-to station during a crisis. But all they did was keep Mike Fleming in the chair for a couple hours past his usual 7:00 pm departure, and brought in Forrest Goodman as his trusty sidekick.

Most of the air time was taken up by Fleming prattling on in his fingernails-on-chalkboard whine about what a tremendous community service they were providing.

After that, they just ran a simulcast of ABC24.

The dirty little secret kept from the average listener is that virtually all of WREC's local news comes from the WLW staff in Cincinnati. Yup, voice tracking from afar has found its way into the newsroom.

The gold standard in crisis coverage was set by WMC in February 1994.

After the ice storm hit, they had live and local staff on the air 24/7 for several weeks. They became the community's lifeline.

A real news/talk station would have stayed on the air with local hosts around the clock last night.

 

[mikl73]

I listened to WYPL for the TV5 simulcast during times where TV wasn't near.

I do own 2 radios with TV audio just for days like yesterday. I wonder what I will do after the digital conversion.

 

[smashedcd]

channel 3 was live on the internet. I watched it all night. I have relatives in southaven. about 1/2 mile from the tornado damage. they live off state line road.

I also listened to WSM nashville. They were doing coverage also.

 

[sjs1959]

I streamed Dave Brown from 4 PM until 8:30, when I left work in between squall lines...

WMC-TV stayed with it until the last line had moved out of the viewing area, at least 8 hours, and I am glad they did.

 

[firepoint525]

WYPL almost killed me.
I was watching the tornado near Brunswick, trying to parallel it so I could get home since it looked at the time like it was heading that way. I was using Dave Brown's explanation of exactly where it was, but WYPL's EAS would cover him up with some warning for Bovine, Arkansas. Very annoying. TV5 needs to get that stuff on another station that isn't an EAS relay.

I had a similar problem watching cable TV here in the Nashville area during an approaching storm in the Bellevue area in November 2005. I had one of the local channels on, and they were describing storms that were coming near me, but the damn cable company interrupted them to tell me about a storm watch or warning in Robertson County, nearly an hour away from me!

You would think there would be some way of at least manually overriding these types of interruptions if the information being interrupted is more pertinent than the interrupting information. I hope that made sense! :

The situation I described here was at my sister's house. Had I been here at my own home here in Pegram, I wouldn't have had that issue because I don't have cable here. The only issue would have been had there been a power interruption. That happened to me in May 1999 when a tornado came through middle Tennessee when I lived in south Nashville at the time.

 

[Tynosaur]

Being retired, I watched the local channels all afternoon up till the second wave passed my house about 10:15pm. Overall our 4 locals did a fine job, albeit with some self-serving grousing about how this was for real and not just hype they were giving out.

I'd rank Fox 13 tops overall in the coverage - to my surprise. They seemed reasoned and calm in their approach and they had reporters in the field with call-ins and video sooner than the other three. In particular, 13 had much more viewer pix and video on sooner than the other three.

I thought Channel 3 got a bit bogged down with their technical abilities, spending a fair amount of time in off-camerea instruction-giving. They could have been smoother in their handoffs, though this gave a sense of urgency and slight drama that they probably didn't intend.

Channel 24/30 did nicely, but I found myself watching the other three more and I can't say why. Their reporters were doing good work in the field, particularly with the vacant house out East that lost its roof and the nearby pickup truck rollover story.

Channel 5 also had some of the technical problems Channel 3 was having. Dave did the anchoring and the newspeople seemed in limbo for the most part. They seemed cowed by Dave's control of things and a bit hesitant in going to field reporters. Janice Broach did a fine job on the warehouse story. I guess I wanted less of Dave's pedantic style. When he started lecturing on what the terminology meant, I would click to another channel looking for live reports.

I was surprised at the Weather Channel. They had boots on the ground and live feeds early on and did a very good job. Since they were juggling the rest of the nation's weather along with the Mid-South story, they weren't on as long at a stretch, but they were the first to have video and interviews on the Arkansas side of the story, the fatalities in particular.

I never turned on my radio or did any online searching, so that's why I'm only addressing TV coverage. Again, there was good work done on all the channels and here's a tip of my hat to them all. I know when I was standing on my front porch at 10:10pm and the wind swung from the Southwest to the Northwest in 10 seconds and increased in velocity to gusts in the 45mph range, I was glad I had the information I'd been viewing to reassure me and my family that this too shall pass...and it did in less than 5 minutes. Congratulations guys and gals.

 

[Meepster]

I did mostly television. too.
I had my NOAA weather radio, my flashlight, my oil lantern, the book "Into Thin Air", and my reading glasses, all at my sides.
I watched 3, 5, and 13 mostly, with a little bit of WBBJ-Channel 7 from Jackson.
Technology-wise, while I know that the others are probably light-years ahead of WBBJ-TV; I learned the same information from them as I did any of the larger market stations. Theirs was also peppered with a few live shots from in and around Union University, and reports from people on the phone in the area.

They actually had two guys in and working and I felt it was pretty much on par with the big guys.
Between all the TV coverage, plus the weather radio, I felt I was as informed as I could be.
I was able to tell the family exactly when to expect another round.

So, hats off to the Memphis stations coverage, but let's toss a couple of kudos to Jackson's WBBJ- TV also.

(Although there were only 2 chapters left in my book, I was too engrossed to finish it then. I have now-big storm on Everest and a lot of them die) :'(

 

[Bat Fastard]

Mr. Tynes:

Thanks for the list of names. You listed most of the people I had in mind from WREC. They were the best.

What I find interesting about this entire thread is how we all seem so passive about the sad state of news affairs under such circumstances.

Eggman: Did you have real, live, local RADIO voices on the air or did you just plug in the audio feed from a T.V. station? The answer to that question will tell me just how "on top of things" you really were.

We have been subjected to the systemic evisceration of a significant portion of what used to be our strength: news and information. The strength of our industry has always been the immediacy of our product. We can - or at least, we USED ot be able to - adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Being first is great, but being right is more important.

I guess that's why we've come to rely on TV so much.

...and they never even fired a shot.

 

[DeadElvis]

I watched around quite a bit, and think all the stations did OK. But...

I think 3 did the best job. Though, they had some glitches -- like Richard Ransom wandering into the shot and looking lost a couple of times -- but, the technology was cool. The ability to actually watch the tornado live on the Hilton camera was useful and good TV. It just might have been better had they shown radar tracking at the same time, so we could have known where it was, exactly.

Channel 5 loses points for having its DTV plant go down during the storms. 'Gotta keep it on the air...

This use of technology brings up something interesting, though. As a ham, I spent time listening to the weather nets the hams were running on VHF. Years ago, they were handy. Now, not so much -- the technology the TV stations have simply moves faster than the hams with their HTs. Time marches on, I guess.

One aside... do y'all think it might be time for NWS/Memphis to pick a new mascot?

http://snarfd.com/2008/02/06/50-killed-by-memphis-weather-services-cuddly-tornado-mascot/

DE

 

[Ziggy1987]

I was driving home from work around 8pm and had a chance to listen to the radio for almost an hour during that drive. Here is what I heard...I think. It's recollection right?

WREC had Flemming with lots of weather updates and live callers. I thought they did the best.

Snap 94.1 had Brad Carson giving the mandatory update every once in a while then back to music. Snooze.

Q107.5 had updates in between every song with Chad & Heather giving traffic. Good job considering the tornado landed pretty close to them in Hickory Hood.

Rock 103 was running a feed from TV news. I punched out after twenty seconds. Makes me mad to see a radio station just turn it over to another medium. That's just lazy, in my opinion.

 

[Caller_Number_10]

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Buck Jackson. Has anyone heard how his mother is doing?

 

[JustARadioFan]

Rock 103 was running a feed from TV news. I punched out after twenty seconds. Makes me mad to see a radio station just turn it over to another medium. That's just lazy, in my opinion.

I don't know that I would call it "lazy" as much as "I'm looking out the window to report it's raining cats and dogs, cuz I don't have radar and the internet bulletins I'm reading are 10 to 15 minutes old so if you were depending on THAT you'd be dead right about now". Times, they are a'changing...........

 

[eggman961]

Bat - to answer your question, we were live and had actual warm bodies behind the microphones. The PDs were bouncing from studio to studio, helping get reports and information out. Afterwords we all joined hands and sang 'We Are The World.' I took the Cyndi Lauper part.


Eggman

 

[radiosaur]

OK. Having built WMC’s previous weather studio and their previous Doppler radar I have to jump in here.

Channel 3 getting the twister on live was huge for them, but it was simply a bit of informed luck. We tried that for years at 5, just never got one. We probably had the Germantown tornado on the Union Ave camera in 90-whatever it was, but it was raining too hard in midtown at the time. Again, just luck.

But promotions departments aside, WMC’s new radar really is light-years ahead of whoever’s in 2nd place (probably 3). These tornado signatures were some of the most defined I’ve ever seen come out of a radar, and the from my location just northwest and WAY too close to the Brunswick touchdown I can tell you that the tracking locations and timing was dead on.

You might think Dave’s pedantic, but I can tell you this. He knows how to read that radar better than anyone in the market, plus he realizes he’s not just talking to weather or broadcast folks.

From a technology and radar standpoint, if I want real-time accurate information, knowing what I know about radar and weather, I’m turning on 5 every time.

Also, DE…Isn’t WMC-DT on the Brunswick tower? By my damage plots that tower had to have been missed by just yards, and the THP towers on Macedonia were not so lucky. They are both on the ground. Did any one else on that tower go off during the strom?