Today’s news (via the Tom Taylor newsletter) is that TRN’s America’s Radio News (ARN) which is now doing 15 hours a day of radio news, in cooperation with the Washington Times, is going to start feeding its own “Top/Bottom of the hour news service as an alternative to ABC /Fox / CBS / AP / IRN… beginning April 2nd.
Well this is an interesting development – talk about being at the right place at the right time… previously I mentioned that Dial Global (syndicator of most of the Progressive talk shows) is reviving the NBC Radio brand to create a top of the hour news service (in cooperation with NBC TV) – this in response to CNN announcing it is leaving the radio news business.
I had wistfully hoped that Glenn Beck would smell the opportunity to leverage The Blaze into a Conservative option for radio stations. It’s jarring to hear Beck or Savage then the hourly news is 180 degrees the opposite of what you’ve just been listening to (maybe that’s for “balance”?)
I was skeptical about ARN when it was announced, but as I’ve recently been reviewing station schedules, ARN is gaining substantial acceptance on news/talk radio stations. So the data gathering I’ve started doing over “Which radio station uses which news?” is going to become a lot more interesting to track. If I was a program director or station owner not of the Progressive persuasion, I would be looking seriously at the ARN news option.
I’m guessing the new ARN newscasts will be incorporated into their long-form news programming during those 15 hours. It’s surprising the idea didn’t occur to them sooner.
I’m thinking they will have a tough time until they get their player to work properly.
I’m sure their local affiliates would be happy if the network’s player never worked!
The ARN player has some issues. I’ve not got a reasonable solution to it.
The first is that they set up a different streaming link for each “daypart”, so one stream works from 6-9am (ET), another from 9am-noon, another from Noon-3PM, etc…. I could create each link as a seperatte “station”, (ARN1, ARN2, ARN3), but that just creates more issues.
There are cases where a station carries the last our of one segment, then continues on for the first hour of the next segment. I would not be surprised if some stations delay the broadcast, which is not clever on an all news show.
But stations do appear to be seeing the show as a reasonable altnerative to cut costs instead of the morning news guy talking to the mayor about the zoning board. Going head to head with Limbaugh, they have affiliates, but that’s a much taller order.
So far ARN seems to have avoided an advertiser boycott, but it doesn’t take much time listening to realize the Washington Times has a pretty strong political agenda just beyond “reporting the facts”.
The second problem is you have to click the > to start it.
Last time I added a note saying “Press Button to Start”, I then got probably 100 “corrections” of people wanting me to add notes to every other station. Your car doesn’t have a sign over the key that says “If you want the motor to start, insert key and turn”. I limit that comment to things where it is really really not obvious. I don’t want clutter than looks like “Warning: After cooking this pizza in your microwave, the pizza will be hot”.