It would be easy to make fun of a radio station that has a guy named Spud McConnell on the air the afternoon that Hurricane Gustav blew into town. It would also be stupid to make fun of the legendary blowtorch of WWL radio that John “Spud” McConnell is broadcasting on as I write this.
Of course, the iconic images of a storm like this are the television reporters out in the wind and rain, reporting on the weather effects of a hurricane. But for the real people living through this event, many without the electricity to power their television sets or internet connections, the primary source of live information becomes the radio. You can still get a radio that works on batteries or even one that will play just by winding up a crank for a couple of minutes. (If you don’t have one of these neat devices, you might want to make it a point to pick one up and keep it with your first aid kit. You don’t have a first aid kit? Might want to pick one of those up too–there is always another Hurricane, or some other disaster around the corner.)
In the post-consolidation world where a handful of national companies owns nearly all the radio stations in most markets across the country–and where those companies have made a fair amount of money by creating “clusters”, where a half-dozen or more stations are run out of one facility with a smaller staff, the idea of stations committed to local news has vanished in many situations.
But thankfully, most places still have one station that carries the news and information torch. Typically one of the oldest signals in a given place, a so called “heritage” station that either does a full-time news radio format or a hybrid news and talk radio one.
In The Big Easy, that station is WWL. A big 50,000 watt signal at 870am that has been joined by an FM signal, because lets face it does anyone under 50 even listen to AM radio these days? And in the face of another bad hurricane, “The Big 870” did what it did years ago when Katrina hit and went into wall to wall hurricane coverage mode.
Firing up the “WWL Hurricane Information Network” over some dozen-plus stations, the folks at WWL, and Entercom–the station’s owner–have done a magnificent job of being all over the area and covering the storm from nearly every angle for hour after hour. But even more important than the reporters on the staff, are the calls from regular folks who offer both reports on what is happening in their neighborhoods and getting good natured support from the on-air hosts who urge them to “hang on in there”. All this with no commercial interruption, so no money is being made by these folks right at the moment.
That is what you call serving the community.