WASHINGTON – Their homes under water and without electricity, many Hurricane Katrina survivors could not turn to television or the Internet for news and information. So they turned to battery-powered radios, just as people caught in natural disasters have done for decades.
In many cases, local updates broadcast in the battered Gulf Coast came from reporters quickly sent in from outside the area and from disc jockeys pressed into service as news anchors. Many stations today do not employ reporters, so the scramble was on once the hurricane hit.
In New Orleans, WWL-AM had a local news staff and managed to stay on the air with backup generators. News director Dave Cohen said the news-talk station took dozens of calls each day from stranded people who asked how to find missing loved ones and where to go for shelter and food.
About 80 miles east, in Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., radio stations aired Katrina coverage with the help of a simulcast from a local television station and backup generators. Workers brought from out of town and local DJs helped report and broadcast the news.At one time, most stations employed at least a single newsperson. But deregulation of the industry in the 1980s and 1990s cleared the way for mega-companies to gain control of large numbers of stations and move away from programming aimed at a local audience.
"The programming became consolidated so that it's the same programming that you're listening to" whether you're in Memphis, Tenn., or Los Angeles or Washington, said Paul Sparrow, director of broadcasting at the Newseum, an interactive museum of news coverage that will open its new Washington headquarters in 2007.
Syracuse University's Rick Wright said many stations now rely on computers to run the programming, in some cases from faraway cities, instead of DJs or newspeople.
"As long as the sky is blue and the weather's great, everything is all right," said Wright, professor of radio and television at the Newhouse School of Public Communications. But when disaster strikes, stations cannot always provide the needed local coverage, he said.
Clear Channel Communications, the country's largest owner of radio stations, operates four music stations serving the Biloxi-Gulfport area that share one newsperson.
Clear Channel simulcast a signal from local TV until reinforcements arrived a few days after Katrina struck, said emergency response news director Pam Rahal, who flew in from Atlanta.
She said two reporters came from Miami and four from Nashville, Tenn.
Spokeswoman Michele Clarke said Clear Channel, like other national media companies, sends reporters to trouble spots as needed. The company does not believe local coverage is compromised by having outsiders deliver news and information.
"They are extraordinary, and in cases, award-winning journalists," Clarke said.
Before the 1980s, federal guidelines called for radio broadcasters to devote at least 6 percent of their average weekly air time to news, public affairs and informational programming. Advocates say that essentially meant most radio stations had to have some sort of a news staff. The standard was repealed in 1981 as part of deregulation.
Andrew Jay Schwartzman, chief executive of Media Access Project, a public interest law firm, said the lack of local reporters is felt most during a disaster.
"The failure to have people in place in each community means that strangers will be attempting to do on-the-job training" in the middle of a disaster, he said. "Radio's critical advantage is that it is the most local of all the media."
Five other music stations in the Biloxi area owned locally by Coast Radio Group turned their DJs into newspeople to cover the disaster.
The DJ for one of the stations, WGCM's Dave "Super Dave" Johnson, said when the storm hits, "all your plans get thrown out the window and you just start doing whatever you've got to do to get it (the news) on the air."
WWL-AM broadcast from its damaged studio in downtown New Orleans for two days and used a remote studio set up at an emergency operations center just outside the city. Forced to evacuate its 40 news staffers because of the rising water, WWL struck up an unusual deal with rival Clear Channel to pool their resources and beam a broadcast.
WWL, which is owned by Pennsylvania-based Entercom Communications Corp., used Clear Channel's Baton Rouge studios and combined their staffs for the "United Radio" broadcast. It was simulcast on some of Clear Channel's seven New Orleans' stations as well as WWL and two other Entercom stations in the city.
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