GIFFORDS SHOOTING: WAKEUP CALL FOR RADIO NEWS

WHY RADIO NEWS, NOT POLITICS, NEEDS A HOUSE CLEANING

Today, due to the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson over the weekend, I’m preempting the usual Monday Sales Blast to provide updated coverage on the state of radio news. We’ll sell stuff again next Monday.

I live and work in Arizona. Like most residents, I’m shocked and saddened by the assassination attempt Saturday against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the mass shooting that ensued, leaving six dead. I’m a broadcast journalist, too, which means I’m also appalled by the sloppiness that characterized some of the coverage of the shooting. And of the scarcity of coverage of ANY kind on radio.

She’s Dead. No, Wait – She’s Alive

Several major national media outlets reported within hours of the Tucson shooting that Giffords was dead. A couple of others didn’t even get her name right. On them, she was “Gifford” (like Cathy Lee), not Giffords, like the Congresswoman who’s fighting for her life.  A journalist friend reminded me of the time during the hours following the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan when ABC-TV anchor Frank Reynolds snapped at his producers to get the facts straight before they gave them to him to report on the air. He was right to do so but the need should never have arisen.

My grandfather was a newspaper editor. I have newsmen on both sides of my family. So I learned early on the axiom expressed by Rudyard Kipling, the one that every journalist of every stripe ought to know and practice automatically:

I have Six Honest Serving-Men

They taught me all I knew;

Their names are What and Where and When

And Why and How and Who

Some of those famous “Six W’s” got lost in the coverage surrounding the Giffords shooting. 

How Radio News Misplayed the Giffords Shooting

Here’s how I found out about the shootings in Tucson: By hearing a phone report on my local NPR station.

Here’s how my teenaged daughter heard about it: from postings on Facebook. She attends the University of Arizona in Tucson so there was naturally quite a bit of interest from fellow Wildcats. Especially since the attack took place within miles of her dorm and Congresswoman Giffords, along with some other victims, was taken to University Hospital, about a five-minute walk away.

It's disturbing enough that this is how many people get their news. What we have to do is provide accurate, reliable information for everyone else.

From the moment the shots were fired – about 10:10 on Saturday morning – radio stations in Phoenix and Tucson scrambled to figure out how to cover the story. Most, it seems, settled for not covering it at all. When I scanned the dial around 11:00. I heard music, commercials and network programming. It wasn’t until over an hour later that a couple of stations began to offer some news. This was especially trying since the aforementioned national media – The New York Times and NPR, among others – reported initially that Giffords had died. Where was the fact checking? The attribution?

My Journalism 54 professor must be squirming in his grave with rage.

One of the aspects of radio news coverage of the shootings that I found particularly irksome was the extent to which radio talk show hosts took over coverage of the story. Several did try to get the facts straight or at least to put people on the air who could tell the story.  But in almost every case, I heard talk hosts doing their usual shtick: arguing, interrupting callers and each other and going for the sensational angle. The actual facts seemed to take second place to the usual listen-to-me-I’m-outrageous acts that are the lifeblood of many talk stations.

That may be entertaining to some listeners but it isn’t news.

We have enough issues in Arizona. The political air is already rancid at times and an ABC TV anchor wasn’t far off in referring to the climate of public debate here as “poisonous”. But this isn’t about finger-pointing and name-calling. It’s about how local radio handles breaking news – or even if it does.

Think for a moment: there are plenty of whack-jobs out there with weapons. What if a Congressman or other politician – none of whom routinely have security assistance – were gunned down in your market. If you have a news person or news staff, are call trees and other emergency coverage systems in place to jump on the story? Do your talk hosts have the good sense to ride with the story instead of their egos for a day or so? How about your deejays: can they handle sensitive breaking news intelligently if it isn’t framed by liners and format clocks?

Even more challenging in this era of network programming and voice-tracked music radio: What if something like this happened on a weekend, as it did in Tucson? Who you gonna call?

If you can’t handle a tough breaking story like the Giffords assassination attempt, listeners will find their news somewhere. Which means television. The Internet. Their cell phones. Anywhere but on your stations.

The shootings in Tucson provide a living textbook for journalism students in 2011. They should also provide a wakeup call to radio station managers that hot news, big news, can and does break at any time, even on weekends. How your stations respond can make or break you as a trusted community resource.

IS SPORTS TALK A THROWAWAY FORMAT IN YOUR CLUSTER?

HOW TO AVOID GIVING UP ON A SIGNAL AND JUST TURNING UP THE SATELLITE FADER

It’s a familiar scenario. You run a cluster; in there somewhere is that lower-powered AM at 13-something on the dial. It’s problem? Transmitter’s on but ain’t nobody home. Its format and/or signal cannot compete for audience or revenue. So you make the decision: Flip the switch and take that sad little tea kettle all-sports. Presto: No jocks, no local hosts, maybe no program director. Just 24/7 sports yak from the network. Excellent – except that you may be throwing away a valuable radio station.

There are many more stations in most markets than can ever hope to be competitive. The audience pie is sliced thin, which makes mining for revenue tougher than ever. Radio station owners and managers feel that to survive and thrive, they must concentrate their resources on their major players: the FM music stations and, occasionally, AM talk monsters that pay the bills. What to do with the “leftovers”, the anemic little stations that were included in the deals that brought the bigger, better signals into the group?

“Niche formats” are often the answer. These include Hispanic, religion, bartered programming – and all-sports. Some broadcasters decry the all-sports format but they miss an important point: It works because it provides its listeners with EXACTLY what they want to hear: all sports and access to important guests. Some listeners can actually get on the air on these national shows, which puts them on the same footing as any other listener, regardless of market size.

The major all-sports radio networks (ESPN Radio, Sporting News Radio, Fox and the others) provide solid, big-time programming at all hours of the day and night. What they DON’T provide is the only thing that truly keeps radio local, the one thing listeners can’t find on TV sports shows and the Internet, either: LOCAL CONTENT.

Addressing The Local Content Challenge

Fine, you say, that’s why we have these two funny guys in the afternoon. One goes by his first two initials and the other is called The Coach. They talk about the local stuff after Cowherd or Patrick or Rome or the others. So. Local.

Please.

Isn’t anything other than sports going on in your market? Do you seriously believe you will build an audience of any size that will attract significant revenue by talking only about point spreads on NFL games and what LeBron could have been thinking?

Or do you just want some reason to justify the transmitter's electricity bill?

The challenge is that you jumped into all-sports in order to save money. How can you provide local content without going back to a full staff again and embarking on that vicious cycle of too-much-expense and too-little-revenue?

You already have a terrific set of resources in place to help: the other stations in your group.

Rallying the Reinforcements

Let’s start with local news. You do have at least one person among your “brands” covering local news, don’t you? No, not the “giggle girl” who updates us on traffic and celebrity gossip on the morning show. An actual news person. No? Then it’s time to draft a voice from your roster to take care of news on the sports station.

That’s because the predominantly male, 35+ demographic of your all-sports audience lives in the real world of housing issues, unemployment, taxes, health matters and crime. They don’t just tune in the six o’clock TV news to watch the sports segment. They watch the whole banana. Which makes it absurd to think that just because they want to whine about Brett Favre doesn’t mean they don’t care what happens at city hall or who shot a cop on the west side last night.

And no, your local sports updates don’t count as news. They’re scores. News is news and there’s somewhere to insert it, even if only in one-minute blurbs.

Also somewhere in your jolly band of jocks is a DJ who loves sports, is incredibly knowledgeable about local sports issues and would be a great addition to your lineup, even in short segments. If you’re really lucky, that person might even be one of your female personalities.

Don’t Walk Away From Your Sports Station – Jump In!

When you add local elements such as real news and participation by personalities from your other stations, you vastly increase not only the value of your all-sports station to listeners but to advertisers. That’s because your salespeople now have something to sell that’s local and involved. Which is far more attractive to advertisers’ messages than national sports blab with a few local score and story updates.

Wouldn’t it be cool if, in 2011, your sales force could get away from calling only on sports bars and car dealers and be able to walk into almost any client or prospect with compelling reasons to buy your plucky little all-sports AM?

Why yes. I believe it would.

FRIDAY: A New Year’s Eve when a radio account executive and his client made a big difference to a lonely late-night DJ.

IT'S TIME TO BRING BACK LOCAL RADIO NEWS

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOCAL RADIO NEWS?

Local radio news has undergone an astonishing metamorphosis over the last four decades—from too much to hardly any. Where Top 40 stations once routinely aired five-minute newscasts hourly, 24/7, and twice an hour during drive-times, they now air none at all. Where every major market station worthy of the name had a news department, now only the news-talk stations bother. And where local-market stations made news their bread-and-butter, many now don’t even bother to interrupt the satellite to talk about what happened at the city council meeting last night. (Many others, to their credit, do.)

It is not only time to stop this erosion of information—it’s also possible.

Why has local news disappeared from radio in many markets? General managers and program directors offer the same two excuses:

• budget restrictions
• changing listener tastes.

Let’s laser in on these oft-cited reasons.

“It’s the budget, stupid”

When the economy sours and sales budgets nosedive, managers who are looking to lop off a quick limb here and there to cut expenses almost always zero in on news. News is an expense, not a profit center, they say. One station owner actually said to me: “It’s like the engineer. I don’t know what he does but I know I need him. Can’t say the same for news.” Good lord.

A line like that points out an issue in common between engineering and news: unlike sales and programming, engineers and news people are not temperamentally wired to “sell” themselves to management. As far as most engineers and journalists are concerned, they exist to provide a specialized service which requires solid training and expertise.

My father, a mechanical engineer, once remarked, “My name is my resume”. He could have substituted the word “work” for “name”. That’s as far as many news and engineering professionals will go to self-promote.

Programming, on the other hand, can offer ratings as proof of its reason for being. At the very least, they provide the noise that’s heard on the air all day. Sales, of course, is the most easily quantifiable department in the building. Even the office staff produces obvious output such as logs, bookkeeping and tending the phones.

News doesn’t provide any of those “proofs of performance”. It provides the who-what-when-where-why and hopefully punches them up with sound. Good news writers turn even short news updates into sparklers of information. But they don’t play music, spout bombast or sell advertising.

That makes news fair game to many cost-desperate managers.

Here’s a two-pronged fix:

1.  Go back to selling news sponsorships, which were staples of radio advertising for decades. I’m not talking about Old School fifteen-minute newscasts with three :60s plus billboards. Even rookie news people can practice tight writing and conversational delivery while making room for a :30 within a three-minute news update. Or a :15 in a two-minute ‘cast. They can, that is, if you give them the opportunity.

News sponsorships aren’t hard to sell if you make up your mind that you’re going to consistently do so. When you do sell them, you’ve monetized your local news!

2.  View news as a loss leader.  You can also look at local news the way retailers view certain items: as “loss leaders” or “doorbusters” that lure shoppers inside, where they will presumably buy more stuff. Same with your local news: listeners tune in to find out what’s happening in their world and how it relates to them. If you’re the only station in town that actually provides that information—not who won Dancing With the Stars last night but actual news—then they’ve sampled your product and can stay for your entertainment offerings.

“Our listeners don’t want it, dude”

Forget the news-talk stations—focus only on the music stations in your market or nearby. What do they offer as news content? If they bother at all, you can bet it will come from the “morning show sidekick” (often a giggly female) spouting celebrity and entertainment shtick. Yes, Letterman had a funny monolog last night. Oh boy, that Charlie Sheen!

But why is my water bill skyrocketing? Why can’t I get a cop when I need one? Wait, they’re cutting the fire department’s budget?

If all politics is local, so is all news. Almost every national and world event has a local corollary—if you have a local newsperson to work the story. Most of your listeners live with at least one foot in the real world. They have jobs or are looking for them. They have relationships. They have money but not enough. They’re subject to local laws, regulations and taxes.

Their lives are about more than Lindsay Lohan’s rehab.

And here’s a shocker for some radio managers: Every listener does not acquire information from social media and word-of-mouth. Many, many of them want more. Where will they get it if you don’t provide it? The newspaper? Get serious. Social media for local news? Come on.

Here’s another bulletin: Every listener is not 22 years old (or 17). It’s hard for an adult to take seriously some local and cable TV news anchors who are essentially pretty people who sound like they’re 16 years old. You can uniquely provide information within your format that your core listeners will appreciate.

Unlike the younger crowd, these people listen to radio. A lot. In the car, at work, everywhere. As an industry, we've dug up piles of statistics that prove it beyond doubt. So what do you have to offer them in addition to yak about the latest YouTube video that’s gone viral?

When you approach news as something you can actually sell—and as a valuable commodity even if it isn’t entirely monetized—it becomes an attractive business investment.

When you present meaningful information—not entertainment updates disguised as news—it makes a positive contribution to any format and jumps you way over the competition as a valued medium.