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In one
of the biggest (and saddest) news stories in Chicago radio history,
Chicagoans were held spellbound to their radios yesterday afternoon
as news reports on  WGN
Radio about a midair crash of two private airplanes over Zion, IL
took a dramatic on-air turn when it became apparent than one of
the crash's victims was possibly much-loved WGN morning personality
Bob Collins.
Collins, 57, had been the market-leading morning man on WGN since
replacing Wally Phillips in 1986, and had just signed a new five-year
contract with the station last fall.
However, during
the hours in which Collins's fate was unclear -- it was his airplane,
 but
was he in it? -- and even for hours thereafter, the WGN Radio
website contained only its usual mix of content.
By comparison, by late evening, the main page of the Chicago Tribune's
website offered over a dozen pieces of audio and video relating
to the story, including a link to WGN's audio stream with a warning
that the server was overwhelmed.
The Tribune's Tokyo correspondent, Mike Lev, told RAIN that "it
was interesting to see that I tried but failed to get onto WGN several
times today to listen in to the aftermath of Bob Collins' death.
Each time the server was full. I wonder how many people were listening,
what the capacity of the server is and how many times it has experienced
this kind of traffic."
By this morning, however, the WGN site had been updated to
include a memorial comment by VP/GM Steve Carver and some appropriate
supplemental material. Visit the site here.
This does bring up the following point: You may have a crisis
plan for your on-air programming...but do you have one for your
website as well? If your listeners are hungry for information, it's
the first place that thousands of them will go to. And if your server
is overwhelmed in terms of its audio, then visual content
on the site will be the only way you can give your website visitors
any information.
Collins: "Ingenuity
gives rise to better plane"
From the WGN Radio website: "Editor's Note: Bob Collins
wrote a weekly column for the Daily Herald, and frequently talked
about his love of flying. The following is a piece he wrote just
over a year ago, on Jan. 29, 1999. The plane involved in Tuesday's
crash was a Zlin Z242L.
"I've been flying small airplanes for a little more than 20
years now. It's one of the things I love most in life; it's right
up there with radio and motorcycles. The planes I've been flying
have changed very little from the plane Lindy flew over the Atlantic
in 1927..." Click here
for the full column.
From R&R Online: "Beginning in this week’s newspaper,
R&R will unveil six new charts that track the online popularity
of songs and albums... The E-Charts reflect airplay activity at
many of the popular Internet-only streaming sites, such as Spinner.com,
 NetRadio.com
and Discjockey.com, and also include e-commerce sales of CDs at
Amazon.com, CDNow.com and Barnesandnoble.com, among other sites.
The charts are presented in conjunction with Online Today Inc.,
producers of The Net Music Countdown With David Lawrence..."
Read Radio & Records here
(subscription requried).
Road trip to Los Angeles
More
RAIN, reporting from Los Angeles, tomorrow.
For more today, including a revised "Who's
Who in Internet Radio," check the menu at top left.
Also, to see a proposed new "Vendor Guide" page redesign,
click here.
Part
Two: 
Radio
stations listed above
include three of the top radio station Webcasts (in terms of different
statistics) in the recent Arbitron InfoStream report -- top-cuming
KPIG/Monterey, top Time-Spent-Tuning station Smooth Jazz WJZW/Washington,
DC, and the apparent top AQH Webcast, ABC's Tom Joyner Morning
Show.
Links are also provided above to two stations that lost their broadcast
status due to format changes but have since been revived as Internet-only
stations -- Groove Radio and KNAC.
BN Radio, Lycos Radio, and Salon Radio are multi-format
operations programmed by third parties. CNET Radio is the station
currently being carried by AMFM's KNEW-AM/San Francisco and
scheduled for a national rollout later this year.
More
to follow.
(Suggest
possible additions here.)
Part
One:
Click on the
logos above to visit various Webcasters. For some screenshots
of various audio players, click here.
For a sample full-page view (about WWW.com), click here.
Department
of Viral Marketing:
If you have
friends or colleagues that you believe might enjoy reading this
newsletter, please click here
and we'll help you them about us. Thanks! |
Lots of Internet sessions planned for RAB 2000 later
this month
Follow-up story on the Hiwire audio tuner/player
Also, more on this story.
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