1-30-14
This question posed by Radio Television Digital News Association Chairman Chris Carl in his blog Thursday. In an age when everyone receives information via e-mail or text, is it really necessary for radio stations to air school closings? How many of us have worked at radio stations and spent hours answering the phone from every kid and parent that could get through? "Is my school open today?" If you eliminate them, are you removing an essential piece of the local puzzle. They are making an effort to connect with you.
Carl, who is also the news director at WDEL-AM in Wilmington, writes, "We?ve debated the merits of continuing to include the schools. Some feel that information is readily available elsewhere (including on OUR website and via a text sent by us), so we should concentrate on organizations that don?t have the infrastructure to get a message out to a wide audience."
Read Carl's blog HERE and leave your comments below. What are you doing?
(1/31/2014 9:10:32 PM)
I've been in small markets for 37 years, 29 in my current one, and we still read school closings. Yes, they're available on-line and by text, and the phone doesn't ring like it once did with sleepy mothers and kids asking, "is there school today?" But information is what we do, and it only takes a minute or two. We read other announcements too on bad weather days. The only ones that bother me are business' that won't advertise but want you to read that they'll be closed.
(1/31/2014 12:44:20 PM)
If you believe that school closings fall under critical local information, then the answer to this question is obvious. And if School Closings wouldn't qualify as about as LOCAL one can get..then please educate me. What public information would be more topical and relavent than school closings!
(1/31/2014 9:15:24 AM)
Sure..eliminate school closings..give people yet another reason to not need us. You already shortened local news to a less-than-headlines joke, edited weather forecasts to be meaningless "Partly cloudy 66" (what happens tonight?) dropped obits, have no business news, in short, yielded to odd programmers who aren't normal people anyway just to get back to music.
Local TV runs the closings..all of them in crawlers, gives in-depth weather..all the things radio used to do.
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