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Where Was The Radio Coverage Of The Power Outages?

I'm so glad this topic came up. As I was in the bathroom taking cover with my boyfriend.. our first instinct was to grab the radio, until I grabbed him and said, "there's no point. It's 7pm. There's nobody there."

I learned my lesson the day of those fires. WBAP literally came on and said, "um, there's some smoke in the area... now back to Sean Hannity." I coulda shot my radio. I was driving through orange fog freaking out. I'm sorry, but in times like those, if you're in traffic, evacuating, or when your power is out, you can't rely on your tv.

I grew up in Springfield, MO, and KTTS had the best weather/traffic/breaking news reporting ever. Non-stop. And it was a country station.

It's not brain surgery. But apparently it's too expensive.

Yeah. I work in this market.
Yeah. I think radio is done.
 
7pm or not KRLD is the only station in dallas to always break regular programming. There was somebody there. you were just thinking of the wrong station to turn to.

As for me. I had the good Old police scanner. They had a lot more to say after the storms.
 
board monkey said:
If you dont like what local radio does then go buy a "weather radio" from radio shack and get your info from that. That's all beside the point that you SHOULD have an emergency radio that runs off batteries just in case your power goes out. ::)
Click to expand...

OK. I give up on local radio reporting information I need outside of normal business hours.

I have battery operated emergency radios. But the reporting of the widespread power outages, storm damage and public safety issues is not the responsibility of the National Weather Service.

Instead I will rely on amateur radio and TV (which after noon today means laptop with DTV USB tuner)...
 
board monkey said:
I will add this sctr, if you have never worked in this business you have no room to comment on what goes on inside radio doors because you have never been there done that. If you have, you must work in the music side of the business or promotions.
Click to expand...

I've been in the business for 25 years, thank you very much. I've done just about everything there is to do. None of the stations I worked for required commercial breaks during things like severe weather coverage. I guess I am fortunate enough to have worked at stations who took their obligation of serving the public, seriously. Every one of them found ways to compensate for the extra workload. In most cases, part-timers got a little more money, and full timers usually racked up the extra work as comp time they could take off at a later time. Advertisers who lost the air time were usually offered options for the loss of spots not airing, like refunds or free extended airplay. The world still turns...

Really... some of you must not be familiar with the term "toughing it out".
 
cowboyup said:
As posted I was in the building and everybody was told be ready at a seconds notice if something MAJOR happens during a commerical break. Anchors NEVER left their post, board op never left the room, producer was taking in calls left and right and KRLD was ready to go to on the air during every commercial break if something needed to be reported. All were instructed that cutting out of a commercial break is a possibility. Fine Fox 4 can do it. Why are you comparing a tv station to a radio station anyway?

If the station doesn't earn a few $ how do you think CBS should pay all those employees risking their life?
Click to expand...

Lame, lame and more lame. I answered most of your questions in my prior post. It doesn't matter that this is a TV vs. Radio issue, because both have an obligation to serve the public, especially when it comes to providing life saving information.
 
undrcvr said:
I'm so glad this topic came up. As I was in the bathroom taking cover with my boyfriend.. our first instinct was to grab the radio, until I grabbed him and said, "there's no point. It's 7pm. There's nobody there."

I learned my lesson the day of those fires. WBAP literally came on and said, "um, there's some smoke in the area... now back to Sean Hannity." I coulda shot my radio. I was driving through orange fog freaking out. I'm sorry, but in times like those, if you're in traffic, evacuating, or when your power is out, you can't rely on your tv.

I grew up in Springfield, MO, and KTTS had the best weather/traffic/breaking news reporting ever. Non-stop. And it was a country station.

It's not brain surgery. But apparently it's too expensive.

Yeah. I work in this market.
Yeah. I think radio is done.
Click to expand...

Bless you!!! You are one of the few posters who actually gets it. Thank you for sharing your experience during the storms. Hopefully this is a wake-up call for the ignorant posters.
 
I was driving through orange fog freaking out. I'm sorry, but in times like those, if you're in traffic, evacuating, or when your power is out, you can't rely on your tv.

I grew up in Springfield, MO, and KTTS had the best weather/traffic/breaking news reporting ever. Non-stop. And it was a country station.

It's not brain surgery. But apparently it's too expensive.

Yeah. I work in this market.
Yeah. I think radio is done.
[/quote]

I too work in this market. I've watched this business deteriorate drastically for the last few years...and it was Wednesday's storm coverage- or lack thereof- that made me truly understand how sad the situation is. Sad. Your life could be in danger and you can't count on the only communication you might have with the outside world- your radio. Sad.
 
Oh for pete's sake cut it out with the straw men. Both of you have valid points but the overriding argument is that in Market #5 there was ONE station that was covering the weather situation. ONE. I used to be adamantly against the satcasters getting local access to major metro areas but if this is what we can count on from the terrestrial kids going forward, I say let the satcasters finish them off.

It's downright fscking sad that terrestrial radio can be counted on to deliver a whole lot of nothing during an emergency.
 
You're right NealH. Both posters have good points. The equipment at most major market stations has changed over the years. So have the public service commitments of stations. People and the requirements of journalism have not changed. Radio is still the most immediate and accessible of media, so shame on any news stations that didn't come through in this week's emergencies. C'mon, about a-quarter million people were without power at some point.It's at times such as these that stations build trust and credibility -- or lose it.
 
The frustrating thing is that while radio is dying, people still try to tune to it during emergency situations. If the moronic bean-counters who run these stations thought about it a bit, they'd be darn sure they had good coverage during such events. Even if you run commercials (as KRLD did) it is better than anything TV can offer while you are driving (and you can't really watch TV in your car) or cowering in your bathroom. MANY of the people who tune in during such events don't normally tune in at other times. Perhaps after having given them some life-saving information, they might be more inclined to check out your station at other times.

And by the way, with the switch to DTV today, most of the little battery powered TVs don't work anymore. A futher advantage to radio.

On the other hand, if people keep trying to tune in during emergency situations and don't hear anything useful, they will eventually quit trying and have no reason to even own a radio.
 
Had there been tornadoes on the ground, I don't think KRLD would have stopped for commercials. Likewise, WBAP probably would have gone live with storm coverage. Still, any programmer that didn't see the storms coming and get his or her people and policies in place just doesn't 'get it'.
Some of the storm commentary was a little over the top; I don't think lives were at stake... and I almost expected the weather-announcer to tell me, that if my car got ruined I could get a replacement at Autoflex...

g
 
Although I'm just nothing more than a typical listener, I do agree with scrtr84 when he says that people in the radio business have become greedy and unprofessional. Granted, they're suffering some severe losses due to the lack of ad revenue, but you have to take into consideration how much the program directors, station managers, regional managers, vice-presidents, etc., get paid on a regular basis. I think executive over-compensation has done more to kill radio than anything else out there.

By the way, if you guys were not lucky enough to get KETR-FM out of Commerce, you missed out on some GREAT weather coverage. Regular programming was either cancelled or pre-empted while the three people that were in the studio kept everyone listening informed on what was going on. They even gave phone numbers out to listeners so that they could call and give their eye-witness reports on what kind of damage the storm did in their neighborhoods. They even had a fourth person out driving around, checking out the storm damage from his car; and as you can imagine, there were plenty of storm damage reports coming in from near and far. As it is a public radio station, there were no commercials interrupting the continuous storm coverage (like you had on KRLD).
 
Interesting discussion. And it does seem to nicely sum up one of the reasons why radio is slowly dying -- you make your on-air product irrelevant to your audience, and they'll quit turning to you. That seems to be obvious to everyone...except the corporate bean counters who don't understand that a sense of public obligation is also good business over the long run.

And regarding the changes in radio -- in this context, those changes are irrelevant. Whether a company owns one station or one thousand, and whether a station has a deejay in a studio spinning vinyl from a turntable or is running from Enco or one of the other automation systems, the need to be relevant to your audience doesn't change.

And let's be blunt -- when 80 mph winds are blowing through the area, streets are flooding, and a large chunk of the market is without power, you need to be keeping your listeners informed about what is going on if you want to be relevant.

I'd have some sympathy for the area radio stations if this were a small market where there is little money to support too many stations -- but we're sitting in a top five market where the resources should exist, except that the money has been drained off to corporate headquarters in San Antonio, NYC, or where ever. The level and quality of both the service and the overall programming in DFW is low enough that much of what goes out over the air here would have once been considered unprofessional and low budget in...say...Wichita Falls. That's just sad.
 
LibertyNT said:
7pm or not KRLD is the only station in dallas to always break regular programming. There was somebody there. you were just thinking of the wrong station to turn to.

As for me. I had the good Old police scanner. They had a lot more to say after the storms.
Click to expand...

..real quick:
Tried KRLD too, the day of the fires. Nothing. Only people who were on it? Fox 4 news. It was strange that I was watching them tell people to evacuate certain counties.. thinking: "umm, power may very well be out in those counties". Ugh.
 
I'd say the one who dropped the ball was Oncor. Granted, they pulled in a lot of out-of-state contractors & got the lights back on in 4 days for 500,000 - but they did nothing to inform the public beyond "your issue has been reported & we are working to resolve." For 4 days it seemed every radio station had a different number of customers without power, if reported at all. I have seen other power companies show power restoration progress on their websites, like Houston & Galveston after Ike. You could actually see the sections of cities being restored. For DFW I was only told larger outage areas would get power restored first. I wasn't (only 30 or 40 down my street lost power) so we waited & waited without knowing if or when it would be restored. The fact a downed bare power line for my neighborhood was laying in my back yard for 3 days didn't seem to bother them.

It wouldn't have hurt to show some kind of progress on the Oncor website which could have been seen with cellphones like iPhone or Blackberry. Or at least stations could have used their site info to give a consistent hourly number instead of different ones.
 
My grandfather used to work for the now defunct company Texas Power & Light.

I'd suspect a downed power line in the backyard, under the massive outage situation, would have been dead. Not that I'd avise people to go out and touch them, but if your entire neighborhood was out, there's not much need for concern about the line.
 
Yeah figured it was, just didn't want it becoming "live" from an adjacent pole being repaired.

Not only a shock but a fire hazard sparking on a 95 degree day.
 
In the Westpoint section of far west Fort Worth, 80 mile an hour straight line winds peeled back my roof, no electricity, KRLD came in on a portable radio with heavy static, though listenable, with continuous local weather coverage. WBAP came in strong, but carried Mark Levin. Shameful.
 
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