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Life returning to normal in Southwest Florida
Radio and TV stations are slowly returning to near-normal programming in the Ft. Myers-Naples market, where Hurricane Charley's worst devastation hit Sanibel and Captiva Islands and the mainland communities of Charlotte County, including picturesque Punta Gorda. But since the main business areas of Ft. Myers and Naples were largely unscathed, local managers tell us they don't expect any prolonged business impact from the storm.
"It was tough, but we got through it," Brad Beasley, Market Manager for the Beasley Broadcast group stations told RBR/TVBR. Various ones of his five stations were knocked off the air during the storm, some for several hours, but as of yesterday all but WWCN-AM were back on the air. WXKB-FM was still simulcasting audio from Waterman Broadcasting's TV stations (8/16/04 RBR Daily Epaper #159) and some other Beasley FMs were running lots of listener phone calls about the storm impact, even as they returned to playing music.
Likewise at Renda Broadcasting, WJGO-FM was still carrying Waterman's audio, while WWGR-FM had returned to its normal Country format. GM Kelley McGrath said he was continuing to get phone calls from people who wanted him to continue the TV simulcast, since more than 300,000 people in the area are still without electricity or cable, so they can't actually see the TV coverage.
"We had some brave programming people who decided to stay," McGrath said of conditions Friday, when he ordered most of his staff to evacuate the studio building. He noted that the Waterman stations and the radio stations carrying their audio were all running commercial free for about nine hours during the storm and immediately after it tore through the area.
It was a somewhat different story at ACME's WTVK-TV. While its ABC, CBS and NBC competitors were running wall-to-wall storm coverage, the WB affiliate continued regular programming. Lacking a local news staff, GM Bill Scaffide told us, "We were not able to be as informative as the other guys." He closed down the station, except for master control, but didn't lose power at the studios. Although the station did lose power at its transmitter for a while, WTVK continued to deliver its programming by fibre optics to the major local cable systems - - at least for those people whose homes still had electricity.
Scaffide, McGrath and Beasley told us they didn't expect to suffer advertising losses in the wake of the storm, since Charley's devastation missed the main business corridors of Ft. Myers and Naples. The most damaged areas were the islands of Sanibel and Captiva, which are popular with tourists, and communities such as Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte in Charlotte County, which don't account for a lot of the advertising in the market.
RBR/TVBR was unable to reach the managers of Clear Channel's radio cluster and the WINK radio-TV operation. We were told by others that they too went full-bore with storm information for many hours, with WINK-TV, the local CBS affiliate, simulcasting storm programming on its radio stations. WINK didn't stream its coverage on the Internet, though, as the Waterman stations did. Waterman GM Steve Pontius told us Sunday that as many as 15-20,000 people were watching the WBBH/WZVN stream immediately after the storm, including officials at the White House who were trying to get a read on just how bad the damage was.
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