After The Deluge
Written Jun. 19, 2008 by Sean Ross in Content + Terrestrial Radio with 5 Comments
Listened to some Iowa radio on Thursday to try and get some sense of life in that state as the flood waters recede. Cumulus' Cedar Rapids stations aren't streaming at the moment, but the Clear Channel stations in that market are; so is locally owned KZIA (Z102.9).
In Des Moines, not hit as hard, things seem to be more business-as-normal. I listened to three different music stations for 30-40 minutes each and the only possible reference to the flooding I heard was an ad for Better Basement Technologies that promised to keep water out of your basement.
In the more severly impacted Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area, the flood was more of a presence on the air -- although an intermittent one (which is to say several times an hour, not every break) on the music stations I heard. Z102.9 was broadcasting from a local movie theater to raise money for a community group and selling commemorative t-shirts that said, "Cedar Rapids: Rising Above." Those remotes were preceded, by the way, by a stager that declared, "Z102.9: Live and Local."
Clear Channel's WMT-FM (Mix 96.5) was promoting the resumption of its Uptown Friday Night concert series and make-up dates for the two shows that had been cancelled. (There were also passing references in several places to station events that were taking place in new locations, like this one.)The station was also cross-plugging its Website and the nearly 200 photos of local flooding that had been posted.
Listening from outside the market, of course, it's hard to get a full sense of what's going on. For one thing, Web stream insertion means that you're not hearing the local ads in many cases, and it's often there that you hear the insurance company ads on how to file a claim or the auto dealers advertising to people who lost cars in a natural disaster.
By and large though, a week later the flood had much more presence on the Websites of many of the stations I looked at. Classic Rock KGGO Des Moines' Web poll allowed listeners to decide which public figure had emerged as the "Flood Stud." (The candidates included the mayor, the governor, and the head of the Department of Public Works.) Mix's midday host devoted her blog entries to the flood, including posting a song by a local artist called "Water In My Eyes." And front-and-center on KDAT's home page is a FEMA logo with the words "we will rebuild."
Reader Comments
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The station you should have monitored was WMT-AM. They really shined during the entire flood period. An excellent example of what RADIO can do that your friendly neighborhood iPod cannot!
I spoke with the curator of the Meredith Willson Museum in nearby Mason City a few days ago. She had indicated that although her city had not experienced the disaster to the degree that Cedar Rapids did, water in Mason City rose slightly above curb level and water was backing up through the plumbing in area homes.
By her account (and she had seen Cedar Rapids first hand), the situation in Cedar Rapids was far worse than the media would have us believe. Yet for some odd reason, it is not getting anywhere near the coverage that the New Orleans disaster did a couple of years ago.
I couldn't agree with Jim O'Hara more -- I spent a lot of time listening to WMT-AM's coverage of the flood, and the coverage was outstanding. Hats off to PD Randy Lee (who was my PD at WMT-FM many moons ago) and the entire staff.
Our radio group did two updates each hour all through the weekend – more when necessary. We altered our web sites and put up a “splash” page (sorry) with all official flood information. We also had listeners submit photos. Within 6 hours, we had 1200 photos.
I'm sure Randy did a great job. And, for the record, even though my goal was to hear how the music stations were handling the flood's aftermath, I actually did try to listen to WMT-AM before I wrote the above entry, but the timing was such that they were in Rush Limbaugh and the Webcast was seemingly blacked out.
Beyond that, our industry has begun to think of the big News/Talk station as the one extant conduit of information during a crisis -- a time when you would hope any market would have fourteen information stations. And you would also hope that even a music station would convey a sense of life in its market during good times or bad. So that's what I was doing listening to the music stations before trying WMT-AM.
In any event, both WMT-FM and Z102.9 did pass the test of conveying a sense of life in the market to an outsider -- which was the only thing I was looking for here. It's up to residents of the market to say whether there was an appropriate level of local content at a time when lives are neither in jeopardy nor back to normal -- certainly something I couldn't do from here, and particularly when only a few music stations were streaming.
All that said, I did come away from all my listening with the larger sense that stations' Websites were serving almost AS their information arm, not an extension of it. And that's something for every radio station in every market to take a look at before disaster strikes in their backyard.