The surprise blast of late winter; in early spring, has left a number of Rupertites with sore backs and shoulders from shoveling, more than few cars with dents and bruises and perhaps left a few media egos a little battered as well.
With the first flakes of snow arriving around noon hour on Wednesday, most Rupertites probably figured we were in for a bit of a weather bomb by the time four o’clock rolled around. Little did residents know that by Thursday morning, there would be but one source of information available in Prince Rupert.
With the huge amounts of snow came power outages and radio blackouts, as the private Standard radio stations heard in Prince Rupert The Mix and CJFW went off the air, along with CFNR, also leaving us out of the communciations loop with the world was CityWest's cable vision service to the city which suffered a major outage for most of the day. Leaving only the CBC to keep Rupertites up to date about the developments of Wednesday and the school closures and road and business related information needed for Thursday morning.
Even the Daily News seemed to suffer the transplanted late winter blahs, offering up only a solitary picture of a bus and a tow truck on their front page on Thursday, despite at least twenty four hours of advance notice that something big had hit the city. Not one story on the storm appeared in print Thursday, nor did anything appear on their website. They perhaps will provide a full report on the snow day for Rupert in the Friday paper, complete with contributions from the digital camera happy folks of the city, as the Thursday paper had taken to asking for submissions from readers for upcoming editions of the paper.
Fortunately and surprisingly, one of the victims of the big blast of 2007 was not the Internet, for those in the mood for a little self serve information there were always the forum boards of hackingthemainframe, or some snippets of information from the likes of the Terrace Standard, Opinion 250 or the CBC British Columbia webpage. You could be your own weather detective at Environment Canada and follow the opening and closings of the highway at the Drive BC website.
But for the latest in up to date information, it fell to the folks of the CBC Daybreak North who, with the only working transmitter in town and a front window view of the mayhem of Third Avenue on Thursday morning. They provided frequent updates and interviews for the community, becoming the much listened to town crier of the air.
Days like Wednesday and Thursday are what local news is supposed to be all about, comprehensive updates, fast, frequent, informative and available. While their competitors could only sit on the sidelines and probably grind their teeth, the CBC was able to keep Rupertites up to date on one of the more interesting of days the city has seen for a while now.
The CBC occasionally gets a rough ride from folks, the nature of their split studio programming and the wide territory that they must report in, sometimes leaves the locals in Rupert feeling a little left out and under reported. But, as they proved on Thursday, when it’s time to provide local information, they’re the ones that we can apparently depend on.
With the private stations having downsized their operations many years ago, local programming has declined in content quite a bit since those golden days of radio. Thursday, due to the problems in getting their signal out to the public it not only declined, it was non existent.
One wonders why the private operators don’t have an emergency back up system in place to provide their signal, especially in times of civic need such as Thursday provided. It might make for a nice condition of licence at the next renewal hearing.
Kudos to the CBC for their work on Thursday, while they don’t subscribe to the national ratings services (being a public broadcaster there’s no commercial purpose to the ratings for them) we’re pretty sure that in Prince Rupert, they’ll be number one for a long time to come, with or without working competition.
We have no doubt at all, that anyone with a radio on Thursday had it tuned in at 860 on the old AM dial, that long forgotten form of radio broadcasting.
Thursday the CBC was surely the popular choice locally, if only because they were the only ones that proved to be reliable when needed most on Thursday.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment