How Did Local Radio React To An Off-Hours Tragedy?
Mark Edwards Edelstein
Strategic Marketing Innovator Mastering Website Wizardry, Crafting Compelling Content, and Navigating the Digital Landscape with Expertise in Marketing Technology and Streaming/On-Demand Media.
The radio industry routinely toots their horn about how well they served their markets in times of disaster. I wonder how well the two Country radio stations in Las Vegas reacted to the horrific shootings in Las Vegas Sunday night. Both iHeartMedia and Beasley Media Group have country-formatted stations in the market. But it was 10:08 on a Sunday night, a time when most radio stations around the country don't have live people on the air, when this incident happened.
So I pose this question for not only these two companies, who happened to have stations that played the kind of music at the festival but to all the radio broadcasters in Las Vegas. How much crisis coverage did you air live after the shootings? Did you put the audio from a local TV station on your air if you didn't have a live person of your own to go on the air? The shooting happened when most local TV news operations were getting ready for their late news, so my educated guess is they were all over the event.
One thing radio has to learn is they can't talk about how wonderful they are when it's convenient. The worst mass shooting in the country's history happened late on a Sunday night, historically the "dumping ground" for many local radio stations. Las Vegas is the 30th largest market, considered a "medium market", and the kind of market where many if not most radio stations use some kind of automated programming on "off hours" like late Sunday night. In some of these markets, entire groups of radio stations have no people, or perhaps one person, responsible for all of the stations in the building.
Again I pose the question to Las Vegas Broadcasters, the always-positive National Association of Broadcasters, and those who may have listened to Las Vegas radio in the critical hour or two after the shooting, how much LIVE AND LOCAL programming did you air between 10:08PM and Midnight Sunday night?
One last thing. The Route 91 Harvest Festival, for whatever reason, had NO local radio station partner/sponsor. The event's title sponsor was Sirius/XM Satellite Radio. Something tells me they had the ability to broadcast from the event. I wonder if they used it.
Senior Software Engineer
6 年I was listening to KDWN-Las Vegas 720 online in the wee hours of the morning after the shooting. Totally syndicated/automated national "news". Absolutely nothing local. Pathetic.
Technical Director News Director at Broadcast Facility
6 年"and the band played on" (local country music radio).
I am a communicator of the spoken and written word, striving to do the next right thing and being there to help others.
6 年My friend and I were taking about this very topic this afternoon. What happened to the one lone person at the station who watched over board in the wee hours of the morning, not the same radio biz I worked in back in the day.