WGIR 610 AM - unforgivable mistakes during Red Sox broadcasts...

[SteveOrdinetz]

  John J. Francini wrote:
>The past two Red Sox Baseball broadcasts on WGIR-AM 610 Manchester--Sunday 
>and tonight-- have been nothing short of a textbook on how not to do a 
>network broadcast.
>
>The problems I've heard include:
>
>o Running the broadcast on the 7-second delay used for talk shows, making 
>it impossible to use the audio as a substitute for the TV coverage.


I wouldn't necessarily consider this as an error on their part...why should 
it matter to them if you want to sync up with tv?  Once IBOC happens, get 
used to it.



>o Missing the start of local between-inning commercial breaks, and thus 
>having 30-60 seconds of dead air. And then adding insult to injury by 
>running ALL the local commercials, even though they end up cutting into 
>the broadcast by a minute or more.
>
>o Cutting AWAY from the broadcast at 10:00 PM to pick up some sort of 
>top-of-the-hour news program from some satellite network, and then the 
>start of an hour of Art Bell via satellite, and then finally realizing at 
>10:07 that they screwed up royally and returning to the ball game.
>
>o Playing local ads ON TOP OF the game audio.
>
>
>What the hell is going on over there?  Is this the sort of scintillating 
>production quality you get when Clear Channel buys a station? The fact 
>that this has gone on during more than one game means one of two possibilities:



Calm down.  First of all Clear Channel (or one of it's predecessors) has 
owned this station for at least 10 years.  Last I knew they used board ops 
for Sox games for this reason...before this year WEEI screwed up so much 
that automating a game was hit or miss...they used subaudible tones and it 
was not uncommon for their board op to send the wrong ones.  Tones also 
don't always decode properly either.  WEEI started using dedicated relay 
closures this year, and problems with automating games have largely 
vanished.  Maybe because of this WGIR decided to try automating them again.

I don't know how Prophet handles satellite automation...some systems are 
better than others, and sports programming can be difficult to automate 
because network events don't occur at fixed times like in regular 
syndicated programming.  It could be that whoever programs the automation 
is on vacation this week, and their fill-in isn't totally up to speed on 
programming it.

While I agree that this sounds bush league, I don't see the need for this 
rant.  Whether you like their programming or not, Clear Channel has a rep 
for doing a good job from a technical standpoint.  Their business # is in 
the phone book, why not call and ask for the PD?  I'm sure they want to 
know if there are problems.