July 7, 2011
by Carl Magnuson
As an unprecedented amount of water moved down the Missouri river toward Sioux City, Iowa, Powell Broadcasting?s cluster of stations activated a digital asset and married the strengths of broadcast and online to super serve their community during their flooding crisis. I spoke with Grant Wittstruck, the creative director at Powell?s internal Interactive/NTR division they call iCast. Grant details how the Powell stations went into Super-serve mode for the local community. The first thing they did was keep listeners OFF their station website.
?This was a weird flood" Grant (pictured left) said. "We knew 2 weeks in advance from the Army Corps of Engineers that this was coming so we had time to prepare. After the announcement our PD?s and news department sat down and said, ?With all the rumors and misinformation spreading around town we really need to find a way to help the community stay accurately informed. That is how the idea for http://floodinginsiouxland.com was formed.?
Why did you decide to create a separate website rather than having your station sites host the information?
?We felt that it would serve our community best if there was a single resource all our stations could direct listeners to for information. We wanted it to be clean and easy to navigate and we decided early on to leave the ads out. There?s nothing worse than trying to get important news and having to navigate through lots pages and pop-up ads. Plus we didn?t want to be seen as capitalizing in any way from this.?
How did that strategy work?
?Community response has been great. We got more traffic in the first week the site was live than all our station sites get in an average month combined. We?ve really emerged as the news leader in the region beating out the TV stations and local newspapers. Listeners have been very vocal in thanking us for our in depth and accurate coverage.?
What kind of coverage have your stations been able to provide?
?Every kind we can. A maxim for us at Powell Broadcasting is, ?Combining media for maximum results,? and that was in full effect on floodinginsouixland.com. Beyond just posting news reports we sent our news team out to record interviews with incident commanders, emergency officials and people in the community. Our jocks hit the street when they weren?t on the air to do reporting and interviews. I have professional photography experience and I got some really impressive images of the flooding and the emergency response. We also asked listeners to send photos in and we posted those as well.?
You also streamed live footage of the flood from an airplane using your iPhone. That seems like great radio to me when some might argue that isn?t radio at all. How did you make that happen?
?One of the station jocks has a friend who owns a plane. I really wanted to get some aerial footage of the city because there hadn?t been any to that point. The TV stations don?t have helicopters in a market this size. So using the uStream app for my iPhone we were able to tell our listeners on-air that if they wanted to see live aerial footage of the flooding that they could go to the website right now.? (SEE VIDEO BELOW)
Why do you think your flood coverage and response was so successful?
?Because we have a great team here and we were able to give it everything we had. Also we?ve built a trusted long term relationship with our listeners and they really do care and depend on us. Then working for a company like Powell we have the freedom and resources to do what will serve the community best whether that is on-air or online or on the street. That?s how it?s done."
Have a question or two on how Powell pulled off this coverage? Email Grant at grantwittstruck@powelliowa.com.
