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WEEI-FM: Two, two, two shows in one.

raccoonradio

raccoonradio

Was anyone home at WEEI-FM last night? Just after 1 am I lay in bed and after having listened to Sports Hub for awhile, I tuned to 93.7 to find they were doing both a local talk show AND ESPN at the same time. Whomever was running the board apparently had both pots up and for about 5 minutes at least, maybe 10 (I gave up) it was two shows at once. I mentioned it on twitter and facebook.

There have been times during J.T. the Brick where they run both an ad or promo from Fox Sports and their own
spot at the same time and it lasts a minute or so but this ran for maybe 5-10...and I turned the radio off...
Another time I was in the Hartford area and WPOP 1410 was supposed to have a Yankees game on but it was rained out. So WPOP promptly continues to run a simulcast of WCBS 880 with news, etc. for several minutes till finally someone showed up (out for a sandwich?) and abruptly switched it to ESPN (this was before they launched the 97.9 in Windsor Locks...)
 
raccoonradio said:
Was anyone home at WEEI-FM last night? Just after 1 am I lay in bed and after having listened to Sports Hub for awhile, I tuned to 93.7 to find they were doing both a local talk show AND ESPN at the same time. Whomever was running the board apparently had both pots up and for about 5 minutes at least, maybe 10 (I gave up) it was two shows at once. I mentioned it on twitter and facebook.
Click to expand...

Clusters of stations owned by the same company located together in the same building don't necessarily have a dedicated studio board operator on duty for each and every station 24/7, especially when some of the stations are running automated network and/or pre-recorded programming.

The systems are programmed to put certain program feeds and certain pre-recorded programs on the air at certain times automatically. This may not even go through a studio board. The feeds and recordings, along with ID's, spots, bumpers, switching from local to network and back, etc... may go directly from an automation computer to the station airchain.

I've never worked at Entercom and have never even been in the premises, but I'm going to take a guess. The programming on WEEI at that time of night is all pre-recorded and/or network running from an automation system, and there may be no dedicated board operator on duty for WEEI at that time.

However, I'm guessing that there may be someone live in the premises whose job it is to oversee all their stations and correct any problems, who took care of the automation problem when aware of it, and when diagnosing how to deal with it. Or, there may be no one in the studios, but there may be an engineer with remote control of the station by computer from home.

What I'm saying is, that the days of there always being a dedicated board operator asleep at the switch in the studio when you hear a program feed problem in the middle of the night are long passed.
 
Yikes...are folks actually devoting time to discussing obvious, and common, technical screwups?

Back in the day, the WBZ news dept firing carts which hadn't been bulked and running two stories simultaneously was a lot more common than it should have been. Even so, the usual response was "woops...comebody forgot that cart machine don't have erase heads, ha ha."

Guess what...sh#t happens.

Anyone who thinks this topic is worthy of more than a millisecond of reflection needs to get out more often. This is what you get when you post by volume rather than by weight.

Regards,
TSB
 
Why don't we hold radio broadcasting to the same professional level as television? A 5-10 minute screw-up like this would be entirely unacceptable there, so why do we brush off these failures, both large and small, as inevitable?
 
When 1200 was "Boston's Progressive Talk" I used to think their automation was maybe an old Apple IIG in the back closet at Kiss 108. They would routinely run two things at once and their weekend programming was a recording of the M-F programming, complete with days-old news, weather, and traffic. I once took a roundabout way to avoid a traffic jam on Rte 128 they were reporting on a Saturday, only realizing later that the traffic jam had been two days earlier.
 
Smoke said:
Why don't we hold radio broadcasting to the same professional level as television? A 5-10 minute screw-up like this would be entirely unacceptable there, so why do we brush off these failures, both large and small, as inevitable?
Click to expand...
Hey, mistakes DO happen on occasion at any station whether it be at a WEEI-FM, WBZ, WCBS or KFYR-TV :) or whatever, from Boston to Bismarck, North Dakota. No matter how HIGH TECH it is (or LOW TECH, for that matter) stations and people do make mistakes. You learn from it and work hard to make sure it doesn't happen again. That's the way it is.
 
Why don't we hold radio broadcasting to the same professional level as television?

What level is that? Any system with a human in the loop is going to do what humans occasionally do, screw up. Radio makes the screwups that the technology allows, and television makes the screwups that their technology allows. When a television station screws up and runs, say, a control room porn loop instead of Robert Wagner pitching a reverse mortgage, do you really think that anyone says "jeepers, I've never seen a porn loop on radio, why can't television keep to those radio standards?"

As it is, what is the technical competence level of standard radio broadcast, 99.999999%?

A 5-10 minute screw-up like this would be entirely unacceptable there,

All kinds of 'unacceptable' things happen on television and cable, and sometimes not in the middle of the night, and they are either accepted or ignored, making 'unacceptable' a meaningless term because reality dictates that precious few things are really unacceptable. When the bird burps and my cable feed drops a half dozen stations for an hour or so, nobody drops the cable service because most folks are smart enough to realize that sometimes sh#t really does happen. In other words, almost nothing, except, to owners, endangering the license, is actually 'unacceptable" (meaning career-altering for those involved, which isn't a bad threshold for determining "unacceptability." )

so why do we brush off these failures, both large and small, as inevitable?

Ummmm...because we don't have cyborg technicians? Or, hows about, because in today's environment, when zero-defects bumps up against the law of marginal utility, the law of marginal utility wins. This ain't rocket surgery. Do you actually think that the originator of this thread has completely sworn off listening to 'EEI FM? I'd guess not, so that glitch was obviously 'acceptable' to him, despite his protestations. He complains because complaining is his hobby.

Regards,
TSB
 
It does happen on TV. I remember years ago watching a rerun of Saved by the Bell on UPN 38 and when the show ended they rewound the show at hyper speed on the air.

Here in Hartford one time they were having technical problems with a Simpsons rerun on FOX 61 and when they came back from a commercial break they had switched to an entirely different episode.

On a national level, Antenna TV had the rights to the 90s sitcom NewsRadio. Well one episode they kept showing the same 1st segment over and over again for the entire 1/2 hour.

And of course who can forget Prevue Guide? That thing was notorious for having 2 things going at once.
 
Here in Hartford one time they were having technical problems with a Simpsons rerun on FOX 61 and when they came back from a commercial break they had switched to an entirely different episode.

Back in the mid-70s. I used to kill a month or so every winter doing Naval Reserve active duty at Naval Air Station Bermuda. There were a couple of television stations on the island, mostly showing day-old US soaps (so the tourists could get their One Life to Live and General Hospital fixes while on vacation) and old movies. They didn't publish a viewer guide because nothing ever started on time and the shows seem to run in no particular set order. They'd be occasional dead-air if the tech had to change tapes when one of the playback machines was on the blink. For folks used to US television, even small market television, it was a hoot.

One Saturday afternoon we were knocking back a few cold ones in the club bar and watching a really awful Grade D flick on the tube. The station broke away for either a commercial or a PSA, came out of it into a musical interlude uner a Please Wait placard, and then the announcer came on and announced,

"We have determined that the rest of this film is unfit for viewing,"

and dumped out into a TV western rerun, Big Valley, IIRC. The Americans in the bar were left speechless. After gathering our thoughts, one of the guys asked the bartender, a Bermudan, if this kind of thing happened often. The bartender thought for moment and then said "usually only if the movie really, really, sucks."

Regards,
TSB
 
I've heard this same thing happen on WRKO some late nights. As Howie Carr says, "Entercomm Happens!"

But not as often as EDS happens.

Regards,
TSB
 
Granted, machines often behave badly. The downside of technology.
Sometimes, however, it is merely a lack of attention to details.
Case in point -
years ago, I was watching a movie on ch. 56. Reel 1 was fine,
reel 2 was fine. When they came back for reel 3 - all in Spanish.
They played the entire reel that way, including all of the commercials.

Ch. 38 was notorious for this kind of stuff. Very often on the weekends,
the voice tracks were out of sync. We will return for the final act of our film -
which had just ended...

Our automation systems here run on MS-DOS. It really is a beautiful thing.
It is SO SIMPLE, it is bulletproof - never goes down, never hiccups. I wish I could
say the same for some of the other machinery that vexes me every day!
 
EDS?

Entercom Derangement Syndrome

An affliction where usually sentient observers of the radio scene put their brains and sense of proportion on the back burner when discussing stations owned or controlled by Entercom. "Patient One" was conspiracy host and blogger Brian Maloney who was incensed when WRKO hired a Democrat rather than a Republican for morning drive, especially since he, Maloney, was, shall we say, between assignments and available.

Since Maloney's brain-dead SaveWRKO site cratered, his work has been carried on by his remaining acolytes who, get this, actually think Howie Carr cares about anything other than his check, and abetted by Carr himself, who's still pissed that Jason Wolfe demonstrated, in open court, that Howie was possibly the only 20th century UNC grad who couldn't read English.

That's the sordid tale in a nutshell. Don't be that guy,

Regards,
TSB
 
WLYNgm said:
Our automation systems here run on MS-DOS. It really is a beautiful thing.
It is SO SIMPLE, it is bulletproof - never goes down, never hiccups. I wish I could
say the same for some of the other machinery that vexes me every day!
Click to expand...

Our Arrakis Digilink DOS monster ran almost 7 years on both AM and FM sides before it imploded on its own. Then along came ENCO which no one had the patience for. And ENCO's manual was worse-written than Digilink's!!!! At least Arrakis sent someone to the station for a training day! We fine tuned Digilink over a few weeks of trial and error--ran beautifully with nary a glitch.

WLYNGM, what system are you using??
 
We use Enco at WVCH; when I started there in 2001, we were running the original DOS version on a 166 mHz Pentium with 256 k memory and a touch screen. Add to that Dolby AC320 audio....!
Upgraded to v.8 some years ago, running on XP Pro. Changed audio format from the headless MP2 ersatz ".WAV" to Windows PCM. A LOT of problems went away, and now we can use Audition 1.5 or Audacity to work on files before dumping them into the DAD Library.
 
890 ESPN was full of mistakes. Ads wouldn't air, you could hear Kevin Winter talking over clips, and dead air for 30 minute clips.

On TV I just don't see the same number of mistakes for an equivalent length of time as the mistakes I hear on radio. From the description of the technology it seems that radio has more things to coordinate and doesn't have the same number of people overseeing the process.
 
At WMWM entering the wrong date into automation meant it played every PSA we had in the rotation, then it fell silent.

EDS was H. Ross Perot's company wasn't it? It's a conspiracy, Larry!

At a Danvers cinema (talking about slip-ups) after the first reel of Born on the Fourth of July was shown it suddenly became a film about giant earthworms. Turned out the folks providing the film had mixed up the rest of it with the forthcoming horror movie Tremors. And since one film was 35mm and the other 70 or something, things looked really weird. Got a refund then saw ALL of the Cruise movie
a couple days later.
 
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