This is for anyone thinking about sticking their neck out – to give you a sense of what is involved. The actual screens may be trimmed down – these were tools designed for me that have lots of things you probably wouldn’t want to get involved with. WordPress makes it hard to put screenshot images into comments, so expect a series of posts on this subject.
Let’s start with the “list of things we know are probably wrong”
(Click on the image to make it full screen)
Things to notice along the way:
(1) There are over 250 stations flagged for review that haven’t been visited in > 400 days
The list is sorted by largest to smallest city – the first one in the list is for market #153
(2) This is the area where you take various one click actions – note this is only a picture of the screen – clicking on this picture won’t do a thing 🙂
(3) The problem is in red (with the timestamp of when it was last visited
So what kinds of problems are there and how do they get fixed?
The first station (KKLD-FM) automatically redirects people to their facebook page. The station comment already has a note saying that’s what they do. If you click on the station link (on the left side) and it sends you to their facebook page, there is nothing to change and you would just “Clear” the error assuming the page is current and the format is still Classic Rock/Hits or something reasonably close
The next station (WOSP-FM) was (is?) a classical music station of Ohio State University. The scanner got a 404 error when it tried to pull up the home page
The orange E pulls up the editor for more intense scrutiny. It could be just that they reworked their web site and there is a new URL – but it also could be this station is now carrying NPR news/talk instead of Classical music. This will require a “deep dive” into the Ohio State Public Radio web site to see what this station is actually doing. This is where “interest in a genre” comes in – if you’re a big fan of public radio or Classical music, you are likely more motivated to dig for the correct answer.
This is the station editor – if you click on the station call sign at the top, you’ll see that the scanner was right – you get a 404 error. Not good. The error(s) are repeated on this page, and if you click the CLEAR link, it will mark the issue as resolved and say the web site was reviewed.
The problem I’ve had in the past is eager fresh volunteers think the object is to “clear” as much as fast as possible – and would just go to each line and click Clear, Clear, Clear, Clear and in an hour the entire backlogs is Cleared! (Usually while I’m asleep!) – but nothing was been fixed, and now we don’t know what needs to be rereviews. Don’t do that. That hour of “help” can cost me an entire day to undo. This isn’t an assembly line of Lucille and Ethel packing chocolates. After about the six time different people did that, I surrendered and stopped looking for volunteers.
So the editor says WOSP-FM is a simulcast of WOSA-FM, the OSU Classical music station. That may or may not still be true – we’ll have to look around on their web site for a list of station frequencies and hopefully it will tell us something useful. Since it is a simulcast, the WOSA-FM page also has the same error.
If you look at the URL, you’ll notice it contains “2012” – that was the 2012 version of the web page. The actual web page is now
http://wosu.org/classical101/
But is this station still part of that simulcast? If you go to the “About Classical 101” page, it describes the format, but doesn’t mention a simulcast. If you wander down in the Frequent Questions, you’ll eventually find this:
So the next to last item says that the programming is simulcast on 91.5 in Portsmouth, which matches up with the database – so the only issue here is that the URL was out of date.
One change I can see right away is giving you an “Ignore” link to make the item go away for you (but not for other people) if you aren’t interested in or don’t have the confidence that you know what what to do – but not have to see those stations again and again.
The third one is a 404 error because Cumulus renamed the home page from home.php to index.php
The forth one (WSEG-AM) is the first really substantive problem – star1400 web site no longer exists – in this case, it pulls up something that will look famliar – a Network Solutions Place Holder – matching the error that we believe the domain expired. At least in this case, we didn’t get a hacker web site in Ukraine – just the entity run by the CIA/NSA pretending to be a for profit business with access to your private encryption keys 🙂
So what do we do with this? It had been an Oldies formatted AM station (probably Adult Standards by the new definition). It’s research time – one place to look is Wikipedia. They often have useful information – but it should never be trusted as being accurate without double checking their sources.
Wikipedia says the station is now an ESPN Sports station, with an FM translator – that seems plausible, but there is no web site link at Wikipedia to use to confirm. Reading the Wikipedia, this is clearly a troubled radio station that would be better off if someone just turned off the power. 1400 kHz is one of the frequencies used for low power (Class C) AM radio that is only intended to reach out a few miles to cover a small town.
The station broadcasts mostly to “all the ships at sea” and Hilton Head South Carolina, hence the original music format for “Rich Old White People” 🙂
Radio Locator has a link that is apparently the new web site
http://espncoastal.com/
Going there are looking for AM 1400 in Savannah finds this:
That’s as close as complete confirmation as is possible – other than listening for the “Top of the Hour” Station ID, which will list the simulcast call letters. If you were a maniac, you might try to track down the other 2 AM stations and see if they also are set to ESPN Sports stations – clicking on the owner name at the far right will show you the list of all stations the FCC says they own. (they are already set to ESPN)
This gets easier with experience and starting to understand more about how radio works, but it’s never like a walk in McArthur Park. You may have to deal with the green icing flowing down from time to time.