Welcome to Football Season – We Love Sports! ™
I made a change to how sports are reported to make it simpler if you aren’t “into” sports. The details are at the end – first I need to describe the process since it is a bit complex just due to how sports on radio works.
If you are planning to help with testing on weekends, there is just no way around the fact that probably half of all news/talk radio stations carry some sports at some time during every weekend. It’s the nature of talk radio- sports pays the bills that pay the woman at 6 am on Sunday mornings to interview the mayor about the pothole problems.
The “Report Broken Stream” and “Fix Wrong Program” things go out of their way to warn you about sports preemptions. Reporting a stream as down or changing the schedule to say Clark Howard is streaming during a baseball game is disruptive and ends up taking more or my time than the volunteer testing is saving.
If you think you have the skills to do testing on weekends, you MUST use the Report Sports (the baseball with the red ? in it)… The really hard part about reporting sports is that you are reporting what you aren’t hearing (because most sports do not allow streaming) Of course, if you did hear the sport streaming (usually NASCAR, high school sports or minor league baseball) it is much simpler to identify what you are hearing.
When you click on Report Sports, you’ll receive a list of sports teams that are KNOWN to air their games on this station. That list is probably 95% accurate. Once you select the most likely sports team, the schedule for the team should appear and it reminds you of the date and the local time zone of that station so you can find the date in the schedule. If your guess was wrong, back up and try another team.
Once you confirm which team you’re not hearing, you are given a list of options:
Dead Air (default) – stream connects but there is no sound
Event is Streaming! – You’re hearing the game/event in progress – it is helpful (but not required) if you ID the team that home team is playing
Pre/Postgame show – You’re hearing talk before/after the game/event
(Some stations air the pre/post game show, but not the actual event)
Server Down – you get an error because they bring down the server
Normal Programming – You wouldn’t normally be here for this 🙂
Alternate Programming – a canned tape of some program that won’t sound old (Clark Howard, Dave Ramsey, maybe a rerun of the local morning show) – it would be helpful to indicate which show
Other – something else that doesn’t apply
Making things more complicated, there are syndicated sporting events – NCAA College Football game of the week, Monday Night Football, USA Sports Network – where the team changes every week depending on the national schedule. The biggest clue is when both teams are nowhere near the radio station. If you’re listening to a station in Texas and you hear Georgia vs Boise (Idaho) State, it’s not likely the station is an affiliate of either team. Reporting Texas as an Boise State as an affiliate of a station in Texas is incorrect – look for the “team” being one of the syndicated shows.
If you can’t tolerate listening to sports or don’t feel you know enough, then it is more helpful to focus on reporting the things that are working rather than to try to fix broken things on the weekends.
The Change
The “list of likely suspects” you are given on the first page is now day aware – meaning that it knows which sports are most likely active today even if you don’t – High school football on Friday, College football on Saturday, NASCAR on Saturday and Sunday, etc… The sports that are normally active on the current day sort to the top and are bolded.
You could still be hearing a high school game on a Saturday, or college football on Sunday, but that’s the exception – usually caused by a station having multiple sports on the same day and having to air one of them the next day. Of course, holidays are full of special sporting events that are “one off” – they only occur once a year on that holiday.
Tip: When listening to baseball, high school, American Legion, and college teams use metal bats, not wood. Minor League Baseball and Major League use wood bats. So if you hear the “Ding” of a metal bat, you can be sure it is not a professional baseball team.
I’m frustrated today.
I’ve been battling one “fix” after another from people who didn’t read this or didn’t understand it. Due to football season, I’ve disabled the ability to fix programs for now until I figure out how to make this work better.
Probably what I’ll do is change it so that if is likely to be sports (the right day, the station has an affiliate and the time of day is right), I won’t like people update the schedule, just add a note.
The process already warns people not to make updates unless they’re REALLY sure. Another possibility is to limit making changes until someone has been doing testing for a while and knows what to expect.
The top 10 of who has been reporting sports:
The list of who has not been reporting sports (Ratio is Working:Sports – out of every nnn working reports, how often are sports being reported instead.
My next tweak, short of turning this off completely…. now if there is a known sports affiliation for the station and its a day that sports is active, I no longer show the list of “Generic” shows like local talk, infomercial as an option. More often than not, that’s what people hear and then change the schedule to. Because sporting events don’t occur at the same time each day, the “regular” show may or may not be on the air next week.