Re: All-News Radio Format

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Stephen Pickford wrote:
>and has been met with a number of less-than-pleased commentaries in The
>Montreal Mirror, on radiodigest.com, etc.<snip>

        I'm curious: What are the main criticisms being made of the station?


>My question is the following:  Is it common for all-news stations to
>advertise as being "24-hours, constantly-updated"...then run a taped
>newscast overnights (i.e. between Midnight and 5AM or so)...time checks are
>edited out (i.e. rather than 940NEWS time is... the tape runs saying simply
>940NEWS (pause...no bother to compress after the edit)...and on and on it
>goes)....
<snip>

        Well, I won't try to set my watch to CIQC late at night <g>.
        All the U.S. all-news stations I am aware of are either big-market
stations that are live 24 hours a day, or small stations that use the AP
all-news service (can be IDed by the liner: "this is the news station"),
which runs 24 hours.
        Comparisons to WBZ have to take into account that it is not an
all-news station. It's a hybrid. It's really news 14 hours a day (5a-7p)
and talk 10 hours. Also, unlike most all-news stations in the U.S., it
carries some sports play-by-play (Bruins) as well as doing sports talk
shows.
        I would go as far as to say that what CIQC is doing, based on your
description, is both misleading and amateurish. It sounds like the
production work is not so good. And, for one thing, in the long run,
they'll have a problem some night when something huge happens at 2 a.m.
(plane crash, etc.).
        I don't know about the availability of talk shows as an alternative
in Canada, as I can't think off the top of my head of a syndicated U.S.
talk show that would really fit in well. But if the station doesn't want to
pay to do live all-news on the overnight, it ought to find an alternative.
Then it could use taped hourly newscasts, on the overnight, which a lot of
stations use (including WBZ, although I don't know whether they're doing
that at the moment or not; they certainly have in the recent past). If it
had a 6-minute taped newscast at the top and 3 minutes at the bottom, let's
say, and some sort of news-oriented talk show on the overnight, it
certainly would be able to support the label of all-news.
        It could even easily have headlines or a teaser dropping in every
time the talk show had a break--bringing back the station's news voice
every 10 minutes or so. And all that could be taped earlier, although there
ought to be someone in the building who can do those inserts live if
something serious starts happening and, if it's big enough, to break in and
get started until the troops can be called out.
        In the computer age, there are other possibilities. The station
could string together in taped packages the timeless features and news
reports from the previous day that are certain not to be outdated 12 hours
later. Then it could use a live anchor on the overnight to fill in between
those pieces. Each taped package could be repeated at least a couple times
on the overnight, so you wouldn't need that many. You wouldn't try to make
this programming follow the same hourly-clock pattern as the rest of the
day, so you'd dress it up with some promo title for the overnight period.
Promote it as a roundup of the last 24 hours, or something. Lemonade from
lemons.
        If you had the reporters and anchors all follow certain wording
guidelines when they did the original pieces, you could minimize the
problems of having the pieces sound outdated or the content being
misleading. You could even help fill the need for this content by keeping
it in mind when you did feature story selection, etc., in the first place.
The overnight would then be partial taped rerun/partial live, but would
take less resources than producing a fully live all-news output for those
five hours.