[EAS] Single point entry of CAP messages

[Adrienne Abbott]

Tom--
Pardon me, but I gotta ask...what business are you in? Let me finish before
you answer! With all due respect to Peter Drucker, you should ask yourself:
Are you in the radio business or are you in the entertainment and
information business offering a specialized, localized product that is
delivered via broadcast airwaves. Your answer makes a difference because
saying that CAP only benefits TV and Cable and other visual media is selling
your station and the radio industry short. Are you thinking that: 
	a. it's enough for a radio station to broadcast the EAS activation
once or 
	b. that the staff can copy down the information fast enough to be
able to accurately repeat the information in the next couple of breaks or 
	c. someone can get the information in the audio message to the news
staff and let them run it down from there. 
If that works for you then, congratulations, you are one of the few people
who've been able to successfully cope with the legacy EAS equipment. Your
exceptionalism is not the norm however. For a lot of people, the answer is
really 
	d. None of the above.

What I've found over the years is that 
	a. it's not enough to run the EAS activation once...people will want
to know more and they'll turn away from your station to find the details
they want, or
	b. the same guy or gal who's trying to copy down the information in
the audio message is also trying to run a board or a show and not every
piece of EAS equipment 		allows you to replay the audio message
multiple times, or
	c. the news staff always wants more than "the EAS just went off and
it wasn't a weather alert"...

For the automated station, the ability to receive the written text of the
EAS audio message means that someone on the staff can determine if further
action is needed and who to contact for more information, and they don't
even need to be at the station to figure this out. They can check from home,
from a restaurant, from the babysitter's, on their laptops or smart phones
and get the audio message in writing. 

The same thing goes for stations with on-air staff and means they can repeat
the exact information from the audio message as needed or recommended in the
state plan or by the Emergency Manager. They also have the information for
people who will call in and want to know "what did you just say about the
evacuation/AMBER Alert/school lockdown/road closure...?" 

For stations with a news department, that staff now knows exactly who to
call and what to ask, again, whether they are at their desks in the middle
of the day or at Joe's Bar on a Friday night. That text is pure gold and
that feature alone makes CAP worth the effort. 

But it doesn't stop there...getting to the point of my question at the
top...radio isn't just radio anymore. You can stuff that text into your RDS
display, you can send it to your web site, you can send it to your text and
email subscribers, you can put it on the reader boards on your billboards.
You can put photos of AMBER Alert victims and suspects on your website, you
can put maps of evacuation routes on your website, you can put a graphic
with instructions for boil water orders on your website (I know, I know, but
you'd be surprised the questions people ask when a Boil Water order is
issued!) In other words, you can use it to both serve your community and to
drive listeners to your station and isn't that what it's all about?

Adrienne

"Radio burps, it cries, it needs to be fed all the time, it requires
constant attention, but we love it." Jim Aaron WGLN 

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of Tom Spencer

Adrienne -

All that is fine and dandy - for TV and Cable Systems.

How does it benefit *radio*???

Legacy EAS is sufficient for radio, in 999,999 times out of a million.