Moneyball: Are You Ready for 2025?

Leigh Jacobs & Carolyn Gilbert, Nuvoodoo Research

With friends and colleagues and their families facing up to the devastation in parts of Southern California, it’s difficult to find a focus that doesn’t seem trivial or shallow. Perhaps it’s a reminder that stations are licensed to serve in the community interest. While many stations attract listeners primarily for a unique music mix, all stations need to be mindful of being a source for community information in the event of an emergency.

Wildfires, sadly, are a recurring event in Southern California – unthinkable in many parts of the country. Yet, potential emergencies exist everywhere, be they brought on by snow, wind, rain, flooding, and on and on. Non-weather emergencies are always present: chemical spills, explosions, widespread power outages, fires, infrastructure failures. These emergencies might impact a station’s studio or on-air chain. In an era when one engineer may serve many stations, are there redundant systems in place, alternate locations or equipment to rely on, backup power?

With fewer people covering more duties at stations, it’s easy to set a very low priority for emergency planning. The cost of being unprepared is letting down your listeners. We’re aware of stations surprised by nighttime tornadoes that kept rolling their regular pre-recorded music format during the local emergency. Station reputations – along with community service images – are won and lost in these moments.

Once you start tugging at the loose ends of what COULD go wrong, the wide range of contingency plans that need to be made starts to become clear. Who on the team would declare that there is an emergency, and that programming needs to be altered? Would that person or group of people know there was an emergency if something happened in the middle or the night or on a weekend?

What are the programming resources you’d have at your disposal? Would you want to be able to rebroadcast audio from a local TV station? The time to negotiate that clearance is before the emergency occurs, of course. Station news departments used to drive this type of planning, but few stations have a news person, never mind a news department. In case of an actual emergency, you may need everyone on the station payroll to become part of the programming team. This will require training – which is a great reason to make time to do it now.

Organizing a emergency preparedness session requires flexibility and patience, but endlessly kicking it down the road is no solution. You need participation from engineering and even sales and promotions. And the very nature of emergencies means you can’t anticipate every possible consideration. But going through a focused planning process means you’ll be far better off than you’d be if you were forced to invent emergency plans on the spot. And going through the planning process may pay other dividends. One client realized some cost savings as they worked through their emergency plans. Another ended up selling an annual ad schedule to a firm that installs home generators.

Here’s hoping your 2025 includes zero emergencies and that you and your team can spend your time and energy focused solely on creating great programming and executing brilliant promotions!