The flagship station and local disasters

[johnbasalla]

Say your station is the flagship station for an NFL team, and right before the game starts, or during the game, some disaster happens locally or an absolutely huge local area news story breaks, how is that handled.  Some, if not many, major league teams are on the market's news/talk leader.
You would still need to feed the game to all the affiliates, most of whom are not effected by the local situation in and around the flagship station's market.  I assume most stations have contingency plans in case something like this occurs.

[PTBoardOp94]

I don't remember ever hearing an NFL broadcast interrupted on any station, flagship or otherwise.  These "disasters" are quite rare, and the NFL takes up like 60 hours year of air time per year.

Having said that, when the Indianapolis Colts were on News/Talk WIBC, Emmis had the ability to feed WIBC different programming than the network.  The would do a ten second news brief in the legal ID break. "WIBC Indianapolis. A man has been arrested on drunk driving charges after hitting a school bus. Details after the game."  Now that the Colts are on all-sports WFNI, I suppose that it doesn't really matter.

My guess is that all stations originating syndicated programs use an auxiliary studio and not the flagship station's main air studio for production of the network broadcast.

[Nathan Obral]

I do remember when the Iraq war began. Here in Cleveland, the initial bombings took place in the middle of the Cavaliers-Grizzlies game, which flagship WTAM/1100 carried.

Shortly after their PBP voice, Joe Tait, made an announcement regarding the bombings, WTAM then took ABC Radio News' live coverage (which WTAM was an affil of until 2005) right after the next commercial break. The rest of the game coverage aired on one of WTAM's sister FM stations, WMMS/100.7, and WTAM inserted quick spots in the middle of the ABC coverage stating the game was continuing on WMMS. IIRC, the rest of the FM stations in the CC/Cleveland cluster interrupted programming in some way, shape or form.

Fortunately for most NFL games, they do air on Sunday, so moving game coverage in the event of a major news event - presuming the game would still be played - would not be an issue. Plus the true flagships for most NFL teams are on FM anyway, either music or spoken word.

[Going back to Nashville]

We had a similar situation in Chicago, when the war in Afghanistan started, after the 9-11 attacks.

The Bears flagship is Newsradio 780 WBBM. When the news broke, they moved the game to CBS
sister station 670 WSCR, and went all news on WBBM.

This is the only time I remember this happening due to breaking news.

When The Hawks were in the playoffs, The schedule conflicted many times with The Cubs
On WGN 720, bumping the Hawks to 560 WIND. WGN has to give priority to the Cubs, due
to their arrangement with the team. The Cubs eventually agreed to move to WIND, so the
final playoff games could be on the stronger flagship WGN.

I know the WGN example was not due to any type of Crisis, I just thought about it while
I was thinking about your topic.

[Bengalsfan]

In my past experience with the Georgia Bulldogs and Cincinnati Bengals radio nets, most, if not all, flagship stations that also produce games do so out of an auxillary studio. 

We are also getting away from flagship stations producing the broadcasts particularly in college sports where a school will award an outside company the production rights to the broadcasts.  In that way the flagship station takes the satellite feed just like the rest of the affiliates.  This allows the flagship to automate and not have a board op during the whole game.

Many years ago in a life far, far away, I had to board op Georgia Tech football games.  WGST in Atlanta produced the games and they simply put a program output of their board up on the satellite feed.  You had to be quick on the local breaks or you'd clip WGST spots on the feed.  That's before computers and we ran spots on these things called 'carts'.  And you had to manually load each break.

[The King Bee]

Almost all major sports networks do parallel feeds that are not affected by the breaks, bulletins, weather warnings or other potential interruptions by the "flagship" stations. During local break time, the net will maintain either effect mike audio for stadium/arena natural ambient sound, rejoin music, or silence.

I've board operated for many a game, and back in the days when the net feed was the flagship station's audio, dozens of board ops along the line would play "cat and mouse" with the net trying to keep unwanted flagship station ID's and the like off the air.

[salemjedi54]

I was the board op for the Dallas Mavericks Radio Network when they were on KLIF.  We did run the network from the main KLIF on-air studio.  We did not go away in the event of a local disaster, we carried the game, but we did drop-in :30 newscasts during the in game local breaks.  We fed the network(via the Texas State Network) with auxilliary on the board, but for program for KLIF.  TSN got our aux signal and sent out either with isdn, switch 56 or maybe satellite to the affiliates.  I'm not sure. 

[gr8oldies]

I worked at a Reds affiliate in Indiana in 1976. We had a telco line. There was a Kings Island floater spot that ran on the network but not WLW. Lots of Reds affiliates took an off air feed from an FM station that had a telco line.

[salemjedi54]

Speaking of flaghship stations, how many Urban or Urban AC are flagship stations of sports teams?

[Nate Wesley]

Speaking of flaghship stations, how many Urban or Urban AC are flagship stations of sports teams?

D.C.'s WHUR-FM is the university owned flagship for Howard University football, and UAB Blazers football and basketball is cleared locally in Birmingham on WUHT "Hot 107-7".