Disappointed By Old Reliable

This has come up before. I'm going to say it again. When important news, especially important emergency news, happens, radio has to be there for listeners every single time. Decades of fine service can be wiped out in listeners' minds in a few seconds if you're not there for them when they need you.

Last Saturday, I heard about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting about an hour after the first news of the incident moved across the wires. I was away from home and I saw tweets about it on my phone. I wanted to find out what was going on. My first impulse was probably the same as many people in Pittsburgh would feel: Turn on the radio, go to the heritage news-talk station, get the latest. With streaming, that's easy from anywhere. I launched the stream and got...

A travel show. I heard a guy from AAA tout cruise packages. And that went on for a while until the host, clearly thrown off his game, stammered something about the shootings and awkwardly threw it to a simulcast of the audio from a local TV station, which was in the middle of wall-to-wall coverage. Again, this was about an hour after the first word of a shooting reached the national wire and well more than an hour after it would have been all over the police scanner.

Now, I understand that this was Saturday morning. I understand that it's expensive to staff a newsroom 24/7 (really, relatively, it's not, but I get that all radio companies are trying to squeeze every penny out of their operations). I understand that, sometimes, stations are caught off guard, that nobody's expecting an international incident to break out on their watch. I understand, really, I do.

Yet the radio industry wants the public to think of it as indispensable, as a critical news source in emergencies. We tout, rightly so, the service many stations offered in cases like Hurricane Michael (although the less said about the company that bailed on its stations and isn't rebuilding, the better). We spent a lot of time and effort and capital to pursue getting FM chips in smartphones activated, and emergency service was a primary reason offered for doing that. And then an entire neighborhood is on lockdown, someone's shooting innocent people, police are swarming a large part of a large city, and the radio's selling cruise packages, then, eventually, slapping on TV audio (which immediately went to "as you can see..." material, quite unhelpful when you're listening to the radio and can't see whatever they're pointing out).

That's failure. And it only takes one of those to convince people that, in their time of need, they shouldn't turn to you for information. Worse, they'll leave and won't come back later; I'm sure the station in question eventually got around to fine coverage, but by then, I was gone and did not return. Why would I? When the news was breaking, they didn't give me what I needed from them. They had one chance to earn my trust. It's not my job as a listener to give them another chance.

Yeah, it's a dilemma, for sure. Wall Street doesn't care about your fine public service or whether you have the news position in your market or whether you're really serving your audience when it counts rather than just through the obligatory holiday fundraisers. Spending money, even a small amount, to have at least one person in the newsroom at all times keeping an ear on the police scanner and an eye on the wires is an expense that leads the list of "stuff you can cross out" on the budget. Here's the thing: If you're doing news-talk or all-news radio, it's your product. It's what you do. You HAVE to be on the air with current and accurate information at any time anyone tunes in for it. It's not optional. And if it's an emergency in your own city, you can't outsource it to your network or just slap on TV coverage. You have to own the coverage. You have to be there for your audience. You just do.

The moral of this story, I suppose, is this: When you're making your plans for emergency preparedness, it's not just about preparing for weather emergencies. You can often see the storms coming, but some emergencies will hit you out of the blue. If there's a tragedy in your backyard, and it happens at a time that's inconvenient to your normal operations like a weekend morning or overnight, will you be ready? Is there always someone on duty who will know what to do, who will be able to make the call to go to coverage and get it on the air right away? Is there a phone or text tree to call in personnel to help with coverage? Are you ready to serve your audience at all times?

Again, I know, the answer often has to come from someone higher up in the chain of command than the local management. Corporate has to understand the importance to their bottom line of every station's image in their communities. If the product you're selling is the heritage, go-to radio news source in your market, it requires people and it requires autonomy. Cheaping out on that will not end well. It'll end with your station failing to be there when customers -- listeners -- need it, and those customers moving on to other sources. They won't tell you that, they'll just move on to social media and TV and other news sources. And when you implore them to think of radio as their companion, their public service paragon, they'll tune you -- and us -- out.

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I'm not feeling like putting a joke here to close things out. Just feeling like we should all hug our families as much as possible. So go do that and maybe we'll be in a better mood next week. Tuesday will probably have a lot to do with that either way....

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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