{"id":2581,"date":"2011-09-04T13:49:43","date_gmt":"2011-09-04T17:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=2581"},"modified":"2011-09-05T15:38:06","modified_gmt":"2011-09-05T19:38:06","slug":"easier-sports-reporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=2581","title":{"rendered":"Easier Sports reporting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to Football Season <\/span>– We Love Sports! ™<\/p>\n

I made a change to how sports are reported to make it simpler if you aren’t “into” sports.\u00a0\u00a0 The details are at the end<\/span> – first I need to describe the process since it is a bit complex just due to how sports on radio works.<\/p>\n

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<\/span><\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The “Report Broken Stream<\/strong>” and “Fix Wrong Program<\/strong>” things go out of their way to warn you about sports preemptions<\/span>.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

If you think you have the skills to do testing on weekends, you MUST use the Report Sports\u00a0 (the baseball with the red ? in it)… <\/strong><\/span>The really hard part about reporting sports is that you are reporting what you aren’t hearing<\/span> (because most sports do not allow streaming<\/span>) \u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

When you click on Report Sports, you’ll receive a list of sports teams that are KNOWN to air their games on this station.\u00a0\u00a0 That list is probably 95% accurate.\u00a0\u00a0 Once you select the most likely sports team, the schedule for the team should appear<\/span> and it reminds you of the date and the local time zone of that station so you can find the date in the schedule.\u00a0\u00a0 If your guess was wrong, back up and try another team.<\/p>\n

Once you confirm which team you’re not hearing<\/span>, you are given a list of options:<\/p>\n

Dead Air <\/strong>(default) – stream connects but there is no sound
\nEvent is Streaming!<\/strong> – You’re hearing the game\/event in progress – it is helpful (but not required) if you ID the team that home team is playing
\nPre\/Postgame <\/strong>show – You’re hearing talk before\/after the game\/event
\n(Some stations air the pre\/post game show, but not the actual event)
\nServer Down<\/strong> –\u00a0\u00a0 you get an error because they bring down the server
\nNormal Programming – You wouldn’t normally be here for this \ud83d\ude42
\nAlternate Programming <\/strong>– a canned tape of some program that\u00a0 won’t sound old (Clark Howard, Dave Ramsey, maybe a rerun of the local morning show) – it would be helpful to indicate which show
\nOther<\/strong> – something else that doesn’t apply<\/p>\n

Making things more complicated, there are syndicated sporting events <\/span>– NCAA College Football game of the week, Monday Night Football, USA Sports Network<\/strong><\/em> – where the team changes every week depending on the national schedule.\u00a0\u00a0 The biggest clue is when both teams are nowhere near the radio station.<\/span> If you’re listening to a station in Texas and you hear\u00a0\u00a0 Georgia vs Boise (Idaho) State, it’s not likely the station is an affiliate of either team.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/span> rather than to try to fix broken things on the weekends.<\/p>\n

The Change<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The “list of likely suspects” you are given on the first page is now day aware<\/em> – <\/strong>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…\u00a0\u00a0 The sports that are normally active on the current day sort to the top and are bolded<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, holidays are full of special sporting events that are “one off” – they only occur once a year on that holiday.<\/p>\n

Tip:\u00a0\u00a0 When listening to baseball, high school, American Legion, and college teams use metal bats<\/span>, not wood.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Minor League Baseball and Major League use wood bats.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So if you hear the “Ding” of a metal bat, you can be sure it is not a professional baseball team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0\u00a0 The details are at the end – first I need to describe the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-the-guide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2581"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2583,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581\/revisions\/2583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}