Category: Odds & Ends

My feeling of uneasiness during severe weather quickly upgrades to full blown nervousness when tornadoes become a real possibility. I’ve had a fear for tornadoes since sitting through my first tornado drill as a kindergartener, not fully understanding why we were seated Indian style in the hallway and being told to cover our heads while listening to a scary sounding siren in the background.

For as unsettling as a tornado siren can be, I can’t imagine watching live storm coverage on my local newscast and witnessing the sheer panic as the weather guy and the other anchors run off the set to take cover from an approaching tornado.

That’s exactly what viewers saw on Sunday afternoon while watching KSN-TV in Wichita, KS. Simply surreal and terrifying at the same time.

The devastation that Mother Nature has unleashed in recent days is absolutely horrific. I found it difficult to get too upset after last night’s Blackhawks loss while thinking about the people impacted by those storms, especially in Moore City, OK and how terrorizing it must have been for those students taking cover in their school’s hallways.

While the national media is all over the storm’s aftermath, you can also get a more local perspective from various Oklahoma City media outlets, including KTOK-AM and KWTV-DT (which is streaming their live television broadcast online).

Putting any hard feelings from the NHL lockout aside, I have to admit that the late start of this year’s regular season and subsequent late start for the playoffs has been kind of nice.

Think back to the Chicago Blackhawks 24 game streak and the amount of positive press both the team and the league got. Would they have gotten the same amount of buzz if the regular season had begun in early October instead of early January?

In October, you have the on-going NFL regular season, the entire MLB post-season which is soon followed by the start of the NBA regular season. This year’s NHL start happened in the midst of college basketball, a two month old NBA season and weekend NFL playoff games. Still, that seems like a lot less clutter then in October.

What if it was like this each year? You start the NHL season on New Year’s Day with the Winter Classic. The playoffs begin in mid-June, just after the conclusion of the NBA Finals.

By summer, baseball is on the verge of becoming boring to many people. Also, the week of the MLB All-Star Game, which is typically deemed the most boring sports week of the year, is now occupied by the added excitement of post-season hockey (except on that Tuesday)!

If this worked as well as I suggest, television ratings increase, league attendance increases and the NHL becomes healthier. Again, all this assuming that people are willing to watch hockey when its 95 degrees outside. I would like to think that if the hockey is that good, then the people will watch.

Does any of this seem plausible or am I just absolutely crazy and should never blog about hockey again?

Odds & Ends

– Speaking of hockey, the entire NHL post-season is covered television wise thanks to the NBC Sports Group. The first round of the NHL playoffs will air on the NBC Sports Network, CNBC and the NHL Network.

The caveat… NBC apparently has decided to do this on the cheap. Awful Announcing recaps how last night’s Sharks and Canucks game on NBCSN (NBC Sports Network) was not a true national broadcast. Instead, NBCSN aired the local CSN Bay Area broadcast, meaning the national audience got to hear the Sharks’ home team announcers.

At this very moment, I have CNBC on which is televising the Senators and Canadiens game courtesy of CBC (a television network out of Canada).

NBC and parent company Comcast are far from poor. There is no excuse for NBC to not have put 100% effort into their post-season games, even if it only is the first round. This is rather disappointing on the part of NBC.

– The local SportsCenter anchors on WMVP-AM/ESPN 1000 in Chicago are now opening their updates by saying “Live from the ESPN Chicago newsroom,” before introducing themselves. The new scripted opening sounds awkward and is unnecessary. It doesn’t make the update or the station seem anymore more impressive. While the opening script won’t do anything to further damage the station, it just is one more odd decision coming from ESPN 1000 management.

– While on the topic of sports update openings, WSCR-AM/670 The Score has been beginning their Scoreboard Updates with the anchor saying “From the Chicago Wolves update studio,” before introducing his or herself, followed by a brief snippet about Wolves tickets being affordable. The Wolves have been sponsoring those openings for a long time now — well over a year.

I’ve always wondered how this is working for them. Usually once the sponsored reading is over, there’s no further mention of the Wolves in the update — never a score or injury news. I suppose if they continue to pay for this sponsorship, they must be getting something out of it. If you would have asked me a year ago though, I would have predicted “waste of money.”

Last night on the ChicagolandRadioandMedia.com message board (the original board), a user posted the question about Twitter and whether it is controlling radio. The poster was also frazzled by the amount of re-tweets and the concept of getting “likes” — or in the case of Twitter, “follows.”  I was pleased with my response, so I thought I’d also post it here. You can also view the original thread here.

My response to the question of whether Twitter

Twitter is the absolute best method for delivering news and information. The user has to work harder and be smarter to filter through what he/she thinks is nonsense.

When my wife texted me several months back telling me her school was on lockdown, there was nothing on the local town’s news website to indicate why. When I went on Twitter and searched the name of the town, I found after 20 seconds there was a bank robbery in that same subdivision. Several people nearby were tweeting about it before the news could get their hands on it.

There was a lot of nonsense going around on Twitter and sites like Reddit in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings. You know who else screwed up just days after? John King and CNN. Fox News and the Associated Press followed. The New York Post made a callous mistake that you would have thought was done by a citizen journalist.

You can get duplicitous information via a HAM radio.

So to answer your question, Twitter isn’t just controlling the radio, it is a valuable component of today’s media environment.

The original poster submitted a follow-up question, asking how to be sure you can trust what you’re reading. This poster is worried about lazy journalism and the rush to be first in breaking a story.

My follow-up response:

Speaking in terms of news via Twitter, you follow who you are willing to trust.

Do you trust anyone specific on the radio or television? You can chose to only follow those people on Twitter. If you happen, for example, to highly trust Pete Williams of NBC News, you can chose to follow him, and trust that if he re-tweets anything, it will only be because he has confidence or knows that the content is somehow useful.

You can enjoy a Garry Meier on the radio, for example, but find his Twitter useless because the staffer who runs his account is likely to tweet silly, stupid news things that I am not interested in (some of those things, I find funny when Meier is talking about them — but not via his Twitter).

That’s at least how I see it. On my personal Twitter, I recently found there was too much junk so I started un-following a bunch of people. This probably sounds silly, especially to someone who is new to social networking — but I trimmed a lot of the fat, and it greatly enhanced the experience.

I’ve been on Twitter for three of four years now, and probably only began to appreciate it when following baseball’s hot stove news and rumors. Since starting a separate Twitter specifically for this blog and by primarily following only individuals or outlets involved with media, my appreciation for it is even higher (and I’ve only been using that account for one week).

On one particular morning, sometime in the late 1990s, I was listening to B96 while getting ready for school. At some point, I heard a pre-recorded announcement that mentioned the station’s call letters, WBBM-FM Chicago. It was the first time I had ever noticed such a thing — what those in the radio industry refer to as the legal ID. I was immediately intrigued that B96 shared the same call letters as the all-news station over on the AM dial. Imagine my state of shock when I later found that Channel 2 also shared the  same call letters!

Not exactly a fascination a junior high kid is  supposed to think about, especially when getting ready for school.

While some people have a passive interest towards a particular segment of broadcasting or journalism related issues, it is not typical for people to be overly passionate about media.

I happen to be one of the few people. I absolutely love it.

For the few individuals in my life that have any remote interest in a media related topic or issue (i.e. a favorite radio station or why their newspaper keeps getting smaller and smaller), I know I have a limit as to how much I can discuss before that person tunes me out (it’s happened).

I’ve been posting for years as Blowtorch at the Chicagoland Radio and Media Message Board. The CRM board has given me an outlet that I otherwise would not have had. And yet, even with that forum, there has always been something missing. I’ve always wanted a little more. After contemplating on and off for a couple of years, I’ve decided to start my own media blog.

I realize that the very idea of starting my own blog is by default, narcissistic. What makes my blog so special when there are far more qualified individuals out there already discussing media for a living? I can only hope that a lifetime interest of mine will mean I can occasionally write something that may be of interest to someone out there. Again, I hope.

With that in consideration, my feeling about starting a blog is more in line with Clark Griswold, from “Christmas Vacation,” as he prepares to deck his house with a lump sump of Christmas lights. Griswold beams with excitement saying “I’ve always wanted to do this!”

I would like to think this can be a fun, simple hobby. I’m excited to have my own platform where I can “geek out” when the moment strikes.

Stay tuned.