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

Live ad reads on radio are nothing new. Why do some think they are?

I nearly fell off my chair when the headline from Ad Age (one of our competitors) hit my email: "Radio Industry Welcomes Return of Live Reads." What?? When did live reads ever go away? Live reads have been a staple of the radio business from day one. As far as I can tell, nothing has changed that, not even the death of Paul Harvey. Any good radio personality worth his/her salt does live reads. And, as the article reminds us, advertisers are willing to pay a premium to capitalize on the relationship strong personalities have with their audience. What troubles me is not that the Ad Age writer got suckered by some PR firm, but that the radio industry feels compelled to re-position live reads as something new. Guess times really are that desperate. 

—Posted by Katy Bachman

Radio remembers Michael Jackson, but some stations are left behind

In the old days of radio, not so long ago, when a major talent died, the station would break the news on the air. If it was a music station, you can bet there'd be wall-to-wall music tributes, archival interviews, on-air calls with listeners, friends, relatives and anyone who knew the deceased.
  Some of that happened on Thursday when Michael Jackson was pronounced dead. News stations such as CBS's KFWB-FM in Los Angeles was 24/7 with the news. WCBS-FM, the famous oldies stations (now called Classic Hits) in New York, went wall-to-wall with music from 7 p.m. to midnight. On Friday, the station worked with sister news station WINS-AM, which shot back interviews with people in Times Square and at the Apollo Theater. On his morning show in Philadelphia, Danny Bonaduce, who went to school with MJ, was interviewed by CBS stations in Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Seattle and other markets. In Boston, WBMX-FM set up an HD MJ channel. Many stations set up special tributes on their Web sites, such as WVGC-FM "Dave FM" in Atlanta, allowing listeners to write live comments. In Pittsburgh, WBZW-FM and WZPT-FM set up a live tribute at Melon Arena, site of the last MJ show, for Saturday. New media also followed the old radio model. AOL Radio set up a dedicated MJ channel, as did Sirius XM. MTV and BET both ran wall-to-wall videos.
  But not all radio could react. Some Clear Channel stations were hampered by corporate edict, running voice-tracked programming with no live bodies to modify the content. Those stations didn't even break to announce the news. A CC station in Minneapolis was still talking about MJ's upcoming concerts hours after he had been declared dead. Not all CC stations were hog-tied. WKTU-FM in New York went wall-to-wall music. But for those listeners who heard the voice-tracked stations stuck in some never-never land, the damage was done. They may never come back to radio if they feel it's a medium disconnected from what's happening now.

—Posted by Katy Bachman

Listener-controlled radio. Are they crazy?

Kudos to CBS on its move to launch the industry's first completely user-controlled on-air radio show next week in San Francisco. According to Mediaweek, KITS-FM will use the Jelli social-media service to allow listeners to "create the playlist, determining what is broadcast over the airwaves seconds before it plays. The community can even vote to pull a song off the air instantly." Of course, this kind of power must be rationed out in small doses—from 10 p.m. until midnight on Sunday nights. I've developed a playlist that can't fail: Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." Just the one song, played over and over. Come on, that's classic. Hear it once, and you've gotta hear it again. Who'd vote that off? My backup plan is Moby's "Southside." Who says radio's dead?

—Posted by David Gianatasio