WTOP GM Jim Farley: Chalk one up for 'old media' during snowmageddon

When we woke up to more than a foot of snow in Alexandria, Va. Saturday, we discovered the cable was out. We had power, but no cable. Ironically, I had just spent all day Thursday listening to Comcast and NBC Universal make repeated committments to localism. So I turned to the one local medium I knew wouldn't fail me: radio. It wasn't until early evening that Comcast got the cable up, but by then I didn't care. WTOP-FM, Bonneville International's News station in Washington, D.C. covered all the bases and more. Jim Farley, WTOP's general manager shot me an email about his station's coverage of "Snowmageden." Here is what he had to say:
On Friday, some of the TV stations in town (ABC 7 was the first) went into wall-to-wall snow coverage. By Saturday morning, 4, 5, 7 and 9 were all doing it.  So I told my folks here to concentrate on serving the needs of listeners who had no choice but to drive in the snow (doctors, nurses, firefighters, cops, power company employees, reporters).  Then, as the power and cable outtages grew, we had a whole new audience to serve and we made "The WTOP Pledge" to stay after the power companies until everybody, all our listeners, got their power back. The unintended consequence: it turned our newsroom into something like a suicide hotline with hundreds of cold, tired and teary listeners calling to tell us their tales of woe.  Here's the irony: people with power (and cable) at home over the weekend watched TV and cable news. People in the dark (hundreds of thousands at some points) listened to WTOP. And we are NOT likely to see a ratings bonanaza. Why?  Those Arbitron Portable People Meters (PPM's) have to be plugged into a dock connected to both a power outlet and a phone jack for the data to be reported to Arbitron for the ratings. And we had tons of people around here without power for 3, 4 and even 5 days. Ah, well!  We still feel good about it. Tons of e-mails from listener saying (literally) they huddled in the cold and dark listening  to WTOP. One lady even told us we were her mental flashlight. Not bad for "old" media, huh?

— Posted by Katy Bachman