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Weather Cancellations..I don't get it

R

Ray Ross

So, it's snowing like crazy here, and I listen to some of the local stations, and they're telling me to go to their websites for
all of the closings and community cancellations. Now, I understand the efficiency of all that, and that driving traffic to
websites is important to sales. But as a listener, I want the information now. I don't want to fire up the computer to discover
what's going on. And more importantly, when did a website increase my quarter hours? We drive traffic to the website and
away from our station. At the least, couldn't we do both??
 
Good question, Ray. In the Buffalo market, where snow is as common as chicken wings, programmers and air talent in music formats and news-talk grapple with this issue constantly. Seems it gets more difficult every year, regardless of format. News-Talk radio excels when the weather gets nasty, as listeners "know where to go to get what they need."

Closings and cancellations on the radio are an important element and news-talkers usually get a well-deserved bounce in the book. I've seen news-talk stations gain as much as two shares in a "bad weather book." Music stations, unless they have a news-talk AM clustermate, are often ill-equipped to deal with weather emergencies and get forced to decide "how much and when." The conventional wisdom is "morning drive is over by 8:30 so play the hits" to maximize "at work" listening. There's a well-measured medium somewhere between wall-to-wall music and overdosing on closings.

These days, TV is competing (and sometimes beating) radio at its own game, giving viewers (and listeners) constant updates using crawlers, sidebars and audio. I've done promos/voiceovers for a few TV stations using the line "Everything you need to know before you leave home in the morning" (which is simply a modification of the WGR Newsradio 55 line "Everything you need to know at home and on the road.")

Even more evident is the way local TV morning morning shows more closely resemble market leading morning drive shows on radio. Traffic, news, weather and a dusting of sports when and where necesary. The competition comes not only from the web, cell phones and Tweets, but TV as well.

It's pretty hard to look at a computer screen while you're driving, especially in bad weather and cell phone use in NY state while driving is limited to hands free applications, so closings and cancellations have value on radio and should win the in-car battle hands down. By extension, news-talk has its advantages over Tammy and Tim and ten-in-a-row morning shows.
 
Radio programming decision makers are having to grapple with the impact of technology. Technology changes make it possible for radio people to "take in/ingest" data and information we only dreamed of years ago. Technology changes make it possible for radio listeners to access what they want to know without waiting for the current song or the current five minute stop-set of commercials to finish.

More people now live in larger and larger population centers. Back when cities were smaller, and people lived in isolated rural areas, there was a small number of schools, meetings, etc to talk about. You would hear schedule changes for factories or schools or meetings that affected you. Today every little church related school withing 87 miles of the station that has a student body of 78 pupils wants their announcement on the air. You've never heard of the school.... you have no idea where the town is that contains the school and after 15 of these in a row, you turn off the radio in frustration.

So radio progrmming decision makers continue to grapple with the importance or lack of importance of weather cancellations.
 
"But as a listener, I want the information now. I don't want to fire up the computer to discover
what's going on. And more importantly, when did a website increase my quarter hours? We drive traffic to the website and
away from our station. At the least, couldn't we do both??"

Makes you wish you could have the immediacy and relevancy of local radio as it was back in the 60's when every student woke up, saw snow out their bedroom window, and turned on the Big E to listen to Lee Vernon run through all the school closings. He would announce the closings right after the network news at :00. He usually ran through a stopset once before the news at :25, and right after the news at :30. If Lee didn't mention your school, you were going to class.
 
Something that could aid the "endless parade" of listings referenced above would be if stations (yes, competing and in-cluster) got together and agreed to only do closings in the county that contains the city of license. The above poster was correct in saying about a school 87 miles away is of no interest to most listeners. This would have the effect of shortening the list and making it more palatable for the listener. By nature some less listened-to stations would increase while dominant regional FM's would suffer a very minor ding (if at all) in ratings while a closing situation were happening. TV, texting, internet and the auto dialer things that most school districts have have really taken the wind out of radio's sails with closings....if the listings weren't quite so daunting to get through it might do some good to make our medium easier to consume for the listener.

Ben Smith
WGMF
 
A case could be made for doing closings for schools only and those only within the station's MSA. If you own a business, there's a reasonable fee to advertise that your business is closed or inform your employees not to report for second shift. Years ago while driving through Kansas, I heard the railroad schedule on the radio. I thought it strange, until I realized it was a paid commercial directed at railroad employees as much as passengers and farmers who might be expecting a shipment or rail cars to ship their goods. Doing closings for Little Brats Day Care in East Deershyt, which isn't in the MSA and barely in the TSA, doesn't make much sense, especially as far as the Arbitron diary is concerned. These days, every morsel of radio programming is analyzed to determine how it plays with Mr. Arbitron, whether it's the diary or PPM. Many school systems use email, automated phone blasts, text messaging and tweets to notify students and parents about closings. School closings on the radio may no longer be a viable radio broadcast service.
 
Now, I understand the efficiency of all that, and that driving traffic to websites is important to sales. But as a listener, I want the information now. I don't want to fire up the computer to discover what's going on.
Click to expand...

It's not just about driving traffic to websites, it's about getting snow announcements off the air...where they eat up a LOT of valuable time that could be billable ads instead...and to the website, where they cost nothing.

As for you wanting the info "now" as a listener...I have little evidence to support this theory, but I think listeners DO want the info "now", and thus they go to a website where they can immediately find out whether their school is closed or not. This as opposed to sitting and waiting for minutes (sometimes dozens of minutes) for the station to finally get around to reading the list of school closings, and then waiting for your school to be mentioned, and then wondering if you missed your school being mentioned or not.

Radio, and arguably TV, are a very inefficient way to distribute school closing info. For many years they were the ONLY way to realistically do it. Quite literally the only other way would be for officials to manually call every parent and hope they're home (since answering machines were not common until the 1980's). It'd take forever and have a high error rate, so radio & TV made sense.

But in today's age of widely available internet and ubiquitus cellphones and mass texting systems, suddenly radio/TV are the "call every parent manually" method; slow, inefficient, and prone to "error".
 
When it snows, the first thing my kids do is go online and check the radio station's snow-closing page. How many times did you just finish reading the closings and delays and then you get several calls asking if "such & such" school is closed? The younger generation is now conditioned to go to a website and get the information even before it has a chance to scroll on TV.
 
This is yet another example of how legacy media failed to protect themselves from the changes brought on by new technologies.

This shoulda been simple.

1. Create a cooperative among all the radio stations in a market (or radio and TV stations, if you like).
2. Set up software to allow schools to issue cancellations to the entire market's media with one phone call, including cell-phone and e-mail notifications (hell, maybe even a reverse-911 style home calling system) to listeners/viewers.
3. Sell the closings sponsorships in bulk for the biggest bucks you can get and split the revenues according to an agreed-upon formula, minus system costs.

Everyone gets closings information at the same time. Schools streamline their closings process down to a single call and have no incentive to spend taxpayer money on their own cell notification systems. Stations derive revenue from the system.

Instead, doing business as if nothing was changing has caused severe disruption to radio. TV has taken control of local closings, but schools are splitting off because no one's serving their localized audiences directly.
 
Go into a relationship with a local TV station and link to their closings. That's happening in many markets all around the country. School Closings, due to technology and other sources, are one of those services that radio need not provide today on air. It really is clutter.
 
I have kids in school and itgives me an idea of what is going on. My cellphone rings at 4-5 am with the the school district supervisor telling me that school is either delayed or closed. My kids get it from texts on their phones. It is now commoon for schools to have either auto dialers and or texting. This generation has a VERY high percentage of kids that have cells. The technology now has internet ready devices in hand. Cell phones regularly have internet capability and it's the go to thing for kids in school. Personally, I mentioned that most schools are closed in the area if you have any questions go to the wesite for further confirmation. If it is a smaller list of schools I will go through that list. Radio is now not the first word of closings for a larger percentage of school kids. It's secondhand at best.
 
So what is the game plan for kids and families that either can't afford cellfone with texting and/or Internet and families that choose to not spend money on cell phones?
 
What stations locally are the ones NOT airing the closings and delays? I know we do them at WLTB, and being on 'old-school' guy, (no pun intended) I will sometimes listen for cancellations on WNBF on my crappy little Sony "Dream Machine" on my night stand.

While I agree that it can clutter the morning show running cancellations on air, I think a balance can be found by running relevant cancellations with reasonable frequency, and also plugging the website for updates.

It's a generational thing on which I will probably not budge, and for PRACTICAL reasons. With the radio, I can leave my lazy butt in bed and reach over and flick it on... I don't need to go haul myself to the computer and look it up.

Similarly, I've been told that newspapers will be a thing of the past, as online services will take over in delivering up to date news. Sadly, I agree that this will be the fate... Gone will be the days when I can enjoy my coffee at the diner while reading the day's news on actual printed paper. Soon I will be forced to carry the laptop, iphone or other annoying device in order to read the news... a device that's subject to theft, damage from being dropped, or coffee spills, etc. When I spill coffee on my newspaper, I'm only out 50 cents! Sometimes old technology has its advantages.
 
There are some good comments here, but the intent of my post is that, as broadcasters, we tell listeners to go somewhere else for information they need to know.

What is the problem with relevant information now?

I accept the fact that listeners have other options for instant information.

Radio is one of those options. And we tell people to go away.

We say get the weather from our website, and while you're there, read about our new contest, and check out the late breaking news.

Yes, we have to embrace the new technologies, but why do we go overboard?

Sorry, I still don't get it.
 
Radio needs to continue to push their web sites for listening, getting info, and the such for one major reason:

Each year, more and more people are listening to (call letters) audio entertainment on their computer.

It's becoming the preferred method of distribution.

And stations better get with it as far as I Phone and Driod apps are concerned. That thing that you use to make calls on is becoming even more and more of an entertainment medium. Everyone's phone is becoming a "transistor radio" for those old enough to remember them.

Once internet comes to cars (and it has in some upper end models). match point.

AM/FM radios are fast becoming a thing of the past.
 
The contributors to this thread have presented us with a lot of excellent ideas.... some of which challenge "conventional wisdom".

There is no doubt that traditional old radio as we have known it is under a lot of pressure to maintain it's audience and to maintain it's influence with people. (Influence with people determines whether it remains a vehicle for persuasive advertising or not.)

For those of you who have already decided that cell-phone delivery of audio, and Internet-in-the-car have already won the battle and all that remains is to mop up the battlefield, let me suggest as the new census figures are released over the next 12 to 24 months that you immerse yourself in them along with some information about income levels that may have to come from other government sources.

There is indeed and "unwired, unplugged" minority in our culture today. My guess that it is heavily biased toward two groups: Those who are reasonably affluent, and those who are young enough to not have come face to face with the cost of diapers, day care and mortgage or rent payments for enough space to house a family.

If you are going to be a success in the media business for the next generation, maybe you should review the history of how Walmart became such a giant dominator in the retailing world. They built their success by serving those who are income-challenged and are living through grinding challenges of the pocketbook. Today Walmart thrives because they have not abandoned their first market while fleshing out larger and larger stores where they can also serve the needs of those with more adequate income levels.
 
Debt wins. Good points GRC. Especially for those of us who work in radio, it helps to live within our means and avoid the (overwhelming) debt trap. There is no free lunch. Well, except maybe if you run a multi-national bank or a large media corporation. I'll stop here, to avoid having this moved to the trench that we know as Take It Outside. Cheers!
 
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