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Delaying the national news

W

Wright County Guy

Frequent Participant
Does any other station delay running TOTH news by over an hour?

WVAL AM 800 /Sauk Rapids, MN (St. Cloud DMA) runs CBS News on the hour-ish, but an hour late. Example: it's 1:01:30, and the last notes of the final song from the noon hour (they are classic country, btw) end; you hear the legal ID; then the familiar TOH tone, and CBS news comes on that was broadcast live at 12noon. (And it's real easy to compare, since WVAL's neighbor is WCCO, at 830, who has been running CBS News at the TOH forever).

Presumably, it is done because the station is automated most of the day, but it seems like you can get your automation to cue up to the top of the hour to take news live.
 
It would seem that the automation software could record the incoming newscast (while a song is airing) and allow the system to begin playback of the newscast at the end of the song (while the newscast is still being recorded). The newscast would then be delayed anywhere from zero seconds to a few minutes.
 
Or the station didn't purchase the option which allows them to start playback before the recording has ended.
Even so, why not air the newscast at XX:10 rather than delaying it one whole hour.
 
KDAL-AM in Duluth, MN often runs the previous hour's "CBS News Update" (at :30) in place of the TOTH news so they can get in a voicetracked local news caplet and a commercial before switching to some talk show. They even have a fake CBS "bong" tone and a recording of the CBS news sounder to open it with. (Their automation lets the sounder play waaay longer than it should.) If nobody records the local news bite, they substitute a portion of a WSJ report...
 
WBRF Galax VA never stops in the middle of a song. They usually start CBS News late.

I wish WAVO Charlotte could do that. More often than not, they start a song and five seconds later there's the legal station ID and then SRN News.
 
Does anyone ever make a point of setting some sort of precise alarm clock so that they can turn on their radios at exactly the top of the hour to hear a newscast?
 
It can be done, and I've even tried it myself. Only trouble is, your clock-radio won't be as accurate as the station's timer, and eventually it'll shift a little either ahead of or behind the ideal starting time. But yeah, sure!
 
Wasn't / Isn't there some sort of FCC rule that says you can't delay a news feed that is supposed to be presented as "live"? This was something that we always talked about early on in my career at an OTA station.

R
 
Wright County Guy said:
Does any other station delay running TOTH news by over an hour?
Click to expand...

WCRN in Worcester MA used to run last hours newscast at the top of each hour. I am not sure they even have a dish or line to run it live. I hear they simply download it the newscast from the internet.
 
Robert Bass said:
Wasn't / Isn't there some sort of FCC rule that says you can't delay a news feed that is supposed to be presented as "live"? This was something that we always talked about early on in my career at an OTA station.

R
Click to expand...
I think it's better to do that than stop a song in the middle.
 
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