Today, I'm going to gripe a bit. Thursday night, a freak line of thunderstorms rolled through the Grand River Valley in north central Missouri. This storm system eventually ballooned cells to the southwest and caused considerable damage across Southern Missouri the following morning. The worst mess from this storm, however, seems to be focused on Kansas City's television stations who, instead of airing highly popular programs, opted to break away to provide wall-to-wall coverage of the storms, a solid 60 miles northeast of the downtown area, where roughly 41,000 people out of the 1.8 million in Kansas City's Designated Market Area were directly affected by the storm.
Guess what? That's the reason why they're on the air!
Now while residents in the area are more likely to tune into local radio stations like KCHI and KMZU when bad weather hits (and I personally recommend this if you're not in an area dominated by automated conglomerates, by the way), television stations are also obligated by their operating license issued by the Federal Communications Commission to broadcast pertinent weather information when the need arises to affected area. And all four counties are in the Kansas City DMA (pictured at right, counties in red;
image derived from maps at Digital Topo Maps store and Arbitron.) The other DMAs that could serve them are St. Joseph and Kirksville (both of whom have only one station, both ABC affiliates, and otherwise lucky to have enough advertising revenue to support a weekend meterologist who also reports on sports!) and Columbia. All three of these markets are in the lower half of Nielsen's rankings based on viewers aged 12+, meaning KC (with its 31 ranking) is the main television source of weather for these viewers. Which means, if anything potentially serious were to hit anywhere from Purdin, Missouri to Lone Elm, Kansas, Kansas City's television stations are expected to make a decision on whether to break away to report on it.If my guess is accurate, these decisions rely not on each stations' radar but more reasonably on trained storm spotters watching these cells from the ground, phoning in reports to the stations and the National Weather Service. And the nature of tornados are erratic, as they can drop down at any moment. Not everyone is going to have their weather radio or AM/FM radio on when severe weather hits. So guess what? TV stations also need to break in and report on it.
Across comment boards on various media outlets, viewers (most of whom have probably never been to Chillicothe, the birthplace of sliced bread) were quite negative about the coverage. Several suggested mere crawlers, placing wall-to-wall weather coverage on digital sub-channels, or simply ignoring the outer areas. Bad, bad and bad, and here's why:
Crawlers at the bottom of the screen. Sure it's there, and you can include a bite-size radar image and ominous warning beeps every two minutes. But the main focus of the viewer is still on the programming. And after awhile, the beeps will get annoying in of itself, not to mention older residents whose eyesight is going bad and who didn't grow up dodging pop-up ads and interpreting icons for instructions might not even get a glimpse of the warning. McDreamy might be dreamy, but he's not going to jump out of the TV screen and escort you to the basement if a tornado's one block away.
Placing wall-to-wall coverage on digital sub-channels. I'm not sure as to what obligations the FCC has on cable companies to carry every digital sub-channel of a television broadcaster, but I sense they'll drag their feet if such provisions aren't in place. Not to mention that while converter boxes will be common place, digital signals typically don't broadcast as far as analog, and because it's digital, it's either on or off, as opposed to intermittent static. Even in areas where digital reception is prime and cable companies are carrying digital subchannels, telling people to tune to another station to watch critical weather information is quite disingenuous. It's essentially the station saying "Hi, your life's in danger from this tornado barreling down on you. If you value your life, you'll tune to this channel. But if you would rather watch two people who don't give a rat's rump about your life tie the knot, then have fun. Don't say we didn't warn you. And now a word from Charmin." In fact, it should be the exact opposite. Put the entertainment on the digital subchannel, asking viewers to decide whether to forgo such vitial information by changing the channel away from the coverage.
Simply ignoring the other areas. One word. Elitist. Surefire way to make extremist nutcases in the boonies nuttier. You might be able to get away with doing this in radio, but that's because it doesn't cost as much to establish & maintain a radio station compared to television.
Another suggestion would be to isolate certain areas affected and send overriding broadcasts. With the technology, it could be possible, but it'll just be too unwieldy for TV broadcasters to send information to specific areas (see prior two paragraphs). Ditto for cable companies. To make it remotely cost-efficient, they'd have to pool resources with other outstate cable companies to put together a full-time staff of 2-3 people, and hope to heck two different areas in the pool don't need coverage at the same time. And then, most critically, it wouldn't be sufficiently local. Sure, advice like "stay away from windows" and "duck and cover" are universal. But something as simple as saying "find a ditch or cellar and stay there" wouldn't work along areas where a cellar would wind up being under sea level or in a heap of permafrost, and worse, you'd have guys in North Carolina or Sacramento saying "if you're near shel-bin-uh" (as opposed to shell-BYE-nuh for Shelbina) and pretending to sound dumb by saying Mizzur-uh.
In short, if your show is pre-empted by severe weather coverage, get the damn episode off iTunes or Hulu the next day. Broadcast outlets have a paramount mission to serve the public interest of its community, not their entertainment desires.
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