I’m at the thinking stage about a total revamp of the way people report problems. This is partly motivated by the upcoming week when nobody in radio is working, and we’ll have a week of “holiday” music on most stations.
Some people feel a need to report that, and it would be nice to suppress the regular listings.
The rough outline of how I see this working is, there would be a generic “Report A Problem” link, which would give you a list of types of problems people feel a need to report.
It’s painfully apparent there is no solution to dealing with sports preemptions. They’re a fact of life in radio, especially news/talk radio, and there are about only two people who even make an effort to use the current sports reporting functions.
The general idea is that people will be able to
– “suppress” a listing for a day for the reasons that tend to only last one day
– “suppress” the listing until I fix something (hard 404 error, schedule has changed, station has changed format…)
– and a few that you can report and I’ll read, but not suppress the listing automatically (the things that inexperienced people using get confused by)
--------------------------------------------------------+
| Local Emergency | The station is currently broadcasting emergency
coverage - weather, fire, airplane crash, explosion |
| Special Event | Station is covering some local event like
election coverage, a parade, the county fair, a fund raiser, etc... |
| Sporting Event | Station has a sporting event on the air
and on the stream |
| Wrong Time | I'm hearing the right program,
but you have the Start and/or End times wrong! |
| Clark Howard | I'm hearing Clark Howard, but he
isn't on the station schedule or your schedule |
| Dave Ramsey | I'm hearing Dave Ramsey, but
he isn't on the station schedule or your schedule |
| Unexpected Program | The program I'm hearing is neither what
this guide says or what the station schedule says |
| Wrong Program | What I'm hearing matches what I found
on the station's schedule, and it is different than
what this guide says |
| Hard Error | 401 (Not available), 403 (Not allowed),
404 (Not Found), Server not Found |
| Holiday Music | It's beginning to look a bit like the ice festival
celebration and the station is playing Holy Day music for some reason |
| Quality Problem | 2 streams playing at the same time, volume extremely low,
buffering
[if you use dialup or cell phone, this is probably your problem!], very low quality audio |
+--------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Serious comments are welcome 🙂
There have been two situations I’ve encountered a few times each.
The first situation was when Laura Ingraham replaced Mark Davis’ weekday morning talk show on WBAP. The substitution was not announced ahead of time, was for only one day, and was not acknowledged after the fact (puzzling). I reported the change the first time I encountered it, but chose not to do so thereafter, and it turned out each subsequent time the random substitution was also only for one day.
The second situation was when I found a local program was scheduled and present for just one day a week, when the other days of the week the national talk host scheduled for that time slot, was as reported by StreamingRadioGuide for the day the local host was scheduled and present (Roger Hedgecock as I recall). If I had reported StreamingRadioGuide’s entry, that Hedgecock was scheduled that day and time, was wrong, that would have been misleading as Hedgecock was the correct host for the rest of the week. My feelings were: listing the local program wouldn’t have been appropriate anywhere on StreamingRadioGuide; there was no way to communicate what the scheduling situation was using the existing reporting system; and communicating what actual program was present was not an available choice using the existing reporting system. One possible solution would be to provide a way to enter a comment as part of the reporting system, but I understand why you might not want to do that.
I don’t think either of the above situations need to be accommodated in the reporting system, but am pointing them out in case you think differently.
You’re the guy in the trenches.
There are many situations that are similar to those you mention. It’s most of why I disabled the ability to change the schedule for novices.
Other examples:
– when KOA in Denver is required to carry a daytime baseball game, Rush Limbaugh is moved to a different station for the day.
– Friday nights during football season tend to have high school football, but only from Sept 1st to Thanksgiving… Then you have one-off state tournaments only as long as the local team is still winning
– one day a week (usually Monday) local sports shows that preempt the first hour of a show and/or push the schedule back an hour
– suppression of programming by the station – this is less common now that it is harder to do – but if a show is on delay and the station management head about something on the show, that may fake having “technical problems” and substitute a recorded program
– confusing a guest host with a programming schedule change
My general rule, which you probably picked up on – is to just delete problematic schedule items if the schedule isn’t predictable and uniform – unless that program is fairly hard to find at that time of day.
The above change won’t preclude the existing tools
The risk to making it easy to suppress a listing for a day is some people in the radio business are schmucks… But so far there hasn’t been a problem with malicious things – just confusion or someone new trying to feel good by “testing” 30 things in their first hour
Art, one thing I’d like to see is a simple short narrative option that permits a brief description of unusual problems. I think something along the lines a Tweet would work.
That’s what “Report issues” already is…. the difference is that adding a note doesn’t stop the listing from appearing – it sends me an email, and is visible to someone who tries to report the same issue/problem so they (hopefully) don’t report the same issue again.
Another pesky problem is the AM station that only streams their local programming and then turns the stream over to the FM station for the rest of the day – making it look like the News Talk station is playing music (unless you visit the web site)