Let’s say there was a breaking major news event like 75 people being killed by terrorists at the Ankara train station in Turkey (happened a month ago) and you wanted to use this directory to find a radio station to find live coverage in real time – what would you try?
Apparently, the navigation or concepts are too unclear – rather than feeding you an
answer, if you actually use the web site – what would be your approach, or how could I change the navigation to make it easier to find?
*** improvement round 1 ***
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Maybe not the best example – how about the 30 people blown up today in a market in Nigeria?
International news is a tough one. If I were on line and away from my TV, I would go to Sky News http://news.sky.com/watch-live – it is free, based in the UK and covers international news well, as do the BBC and several other sites. Most of the US based news channels do not let you watch on the internet unless you are a paid subscriber.
For audio only, I would go to the same sites, and also include NPR, the new Fox News Radio, and Bloomberg News. Most of the world’s countries also have their government owned news outlets that broadcast in English (former shortwave stations that moved to the internet) but they are not the most trustworthy sites in my opinion.
The question is, where would you go to hear a live call-in talk show on the news? Most of us know that Rush is live 12-3 ET M-F and that catching him any other time is not live. How about the other talk shows? When are they live?
Since you were the one that caused this thread, please attempt to respond to my question. Have you ever noticed the “Live Programs” checkbox? If not, how can I make this more obvious?
Let me try a different scenario for those playing along
Let’s say it you just heard somehow that there was a massive earthquake in California and you wanted to listen to radio stations talking about the situation. How would you approach it?
WordPress is supposed to email me when comments are held for moderation, but it isn’t working. A hint to other people – including even one URL causes your comment to be held automatically. The purpose of comments is not to talk to me or to advertise other websites.
I would think FOX News – is that even an option? I know they are on Sirius/XM.
So try to find a stream of Fox News and tell me if you can find one, and if not – how could better navigation help you?
Okay – I found FOX Sports (America loves Sports!) by typing in FOX. This appears along with any occurrence of FOX in the description – so you get Sean Hannity, Ben Maller, etc.
Searching for FOX requires you think they have a presence somewhere. Obviously they don’t. I think I would look for Live World News if there was a search engine.
You didn’t mention where you typed Fox – I’ll assume you used the Station Search. If you kept typing and got to “Fox News”, you would have found it.
If you type World, the BBC becomes choice #1
Typing News brings up CBS News and Fox News.
Parrot, what ideas do you have?
I see a couple tweaks I can do – the search still shows “dead” things like CNN Radio News and ARNN. It could also sort internet only matches first.. Off to do some coding!
Okay, that was helpful – the suggestions now sort national sources first, and then by popularity instead of alphabetical. See above image as soon as I add it
NPR has a national feed that streams 24/7 and presumably it would be the source of breaking news that their affiliates use.
Is it listed in the Streaming Guide? How would you try to find it?
In the guide itself, I tried the “Station Type” dropdown. First I tried “All News”, then each of the three NPR options but had no luck. The Public Radio option didn’t find it, nor did “Community Radio”.
Finally, I picked the “Station Type” of All Formats and did a CTRL-F to find NPR on the page. The only occurance was in the right frame under “Network News Providers” where it said there were 87 for NPR.
I clicked on the NPR and it brought me to an NPR page what lets me listen to the “NPR Hourly Newscast”. At that point, I gave up.
How about going to Station Search and typing NPR? 😉
I added a red “Start Here” to encourage people to not wander into the forest. I’m not sure that what you are searching for exists. NPR does have a 24/7 feed that was (is?) carried on Sirius XM, but because of the public radio politics, most of the programming is delayed to avoid competing with local stations.
In the events when I used to track down stations, I don’t remember an example of an NPR affiliate having local coverage. They have lots of people making $100k+ to do fundraising – on air talent trained in news, not so much. If they exist, it is to do local segments during Morning Edition. You’re more likely to find someone on the air at the college station – if they can navigate through 35 pages of rules and not “strike out”
Here is the NPR national stream that I had found years ago and still use from time to time. It is not affiliated with any over the air station and has lots of news, including breaking news.
http://www.npr.org/streams/mp3/nprlive24.pls
That seems to be this stream
http://www.npr.org/audiohelp/progstream.html
The internal politics of NPR are ugly. Local affiliates surely don’t want this publicized, which means I must do it! 😉
Ahem, on closer review, this is the same schedule already listed here as NPR. So if you want to hear 15 hour old stuff, it’s for you. I can’t speak to whether it carries breaking new as it indicates in the text. The problem with breaking news is it never appears on a schedule.
It is 3:53 am on Saturday morning. See exhibit A above.
Several of the “live programs” probably are not. C-Span might be, but only if Newt Gingrich is giving a speech on the House floor at 4 am. k-love and the classical music from WFMT in Chicago are probably voice tracking.
George Noory is live, unless he has a guest host. He’s probably on 300 stations.
Grayson is usually live from Saint Louis – he is the CBS overnight talk guy. What can he tell us about the major earthquake in California?
Cumulus Redeye Radio is not live on Saturday morning. It’s a replay of the Friday morning show.
Salem, Talk Radio Network, CRN, Radio America have no live overnight programming.
That’s it. Your local station is probably carrying one of the above or running informercials or carrying sports talk. They might have a computer randomly playing music. I can’t create programming that hasn’t existed since your childhood.
There is an obvious place to look for breaking news on radio, but I would prefer to teach fishing, not hand out fish.
Not counting simulcasts, there are 615 news / talk stations that stream [sports are a different category] Another 93 stations are Public Radio NPR affiliates that carry mostly talk programming.
Let’s say instead it’s 4:15 PM ET on a Wednesday. That’s the ocean – where will you find the fish you are looking for? and how can I build a sonar fish finder?
See Exhibit B: Limbaugh, Beck and Ingraham are not live at 4:15 PM ET, but people listen to them. Live network shows are Savage (Cumulus), Hannity (iHeart) Tom Sullivan (Fox News Radio) and Medved (Salem)
Howie Carr is a regional host based in Boston. Rick Zeoli is a local host in Philadelphia.
What’s the other 10% that you would find on the what’s on now live program page?
Syndicated hosts: Lars Larson, Phil Valentine, Todd Schnitt, Leslie Marshall (progressive), All Thimgs Considered (NPR), Dana Loesch, Bill Rodrigeuz (CRN)
Live Local take hosts listed in order by popularity – Buffalo, Minneapolis, Colfax (IL), Bakersfield CA, Milwaukee, Palm Springs, New Orleans, Syracuse, San Diego, Niles (MI), Indianapolis, San Francisco, Omaha,
…. Incomplete …
Rather than spending two hours chasing CC’s empty hook
Here is the list Choose day of week, time of day, station format. Note that if you click “live programs”, that means “live right now”, not at 4 PM on Wednesday.
There is a filter for national only, local only, major market local only or small market local only. Given the national attention span of one sentence, how can I make any of this more useful? It’s all been there since 2005…
Thanks, Fred. It was there since 2005 but somehow I didn’t see that checkbox. Sorry for the fire drill but I am glad it highlighted a very useful feature. I will use it regularly.
It’s not for nothing 😉 I view the fact you didn’t know the option existed as a failure on my part. It’s a challenge to straddle between a usable experience for the first time user but still accommodate a power user. I take solace that as bad as I am, everyone else is worse 😉
Breaking news! This just in!
This place wants me to add my radio station to their radio directory!
http://radiovybe.com/
You don’t have to register in order to search. Anyone up for an independent critique?
lol. I checked it out and there is an “alternative rock” station called “radio-x-us” there (tying in to a recent thread here).
I also checked out the talk stations and found one in Afrikaans (my Dutch isn’t even that good). It does let you select the language in the station search.
As of now, there are not that many stations on the site, but it may become a good source for finding music streams outside the US. For searching stations within the US, it would be one of the last places I would look in 2015 or 2016.
Fire has broken out in the John Hancock tower in Chicago!
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fire-breaks-chicagos-hancock-skyscraper-35347773
Quick, what radio station?
If you look closely – one of the drop down lists is “show type” – it has “local news” and “local talk” among the choices
I made a tweak to only list station types that have schedules – your local Froggy Country probably doesn’t
WLS because if the ABCnews link, then WBBM since it is news.
Note to regular blog readers, The Blaze radio network does a below average job in covering fires. 😉
Yes, but…
I’m going to stick my neck out and guess you chose WLS and WBBM because you’re a radio guy and already knew the answer – in which case there is no benefit to a search engine. It’s like going to Google and typing in Drudge Report. If you already knew what Drudge Report is, you don”t need google to find it, other than being lazy. Asking you to pretend you know nothing about radio and trying again may not get much, but you’re encouraged to try. Oh no, there is a huge train derailment with oil tankers in Bismarck North Dakota! (Hypothetically). Can you find out the what is going on?
You’re right, it was because I know a bit about radio. I did not read your question to be how would I use the SRG to find a station. There is a bit of judgement as a huge event in a small town will have out-of-town stations covering it and sending reporters. Something of importance to only the local people will not.
For the Bismark example, I would ideally like to know stations close to Bismark by format. Not finding an easy way to do that, I’d start with a list of ND stations.
NJ is an interesting example because its major media coverage is from out-of-state. The Wilmington, DE, Philladelphia, PA, Allentown, PA and New York, NY stations provide the best coverage to pieces of one of the smallest states that is roughly 60 miles wide by 150 miles long… and less than 12 miles from Connecticut at its closest point.
Turkey has deliberately shot down a Russian military aircraft over Syria.
What radio station is carrying the start of WW 3?
The Station search is even smarter now – it will search citynames and keywords and descriptions. If it doesn’t find what you want, it doesn’t exist