A rant (AKA my monthly post)

An email I sent to a local radio station that hosted an Election Night party I attended:

--

Hi,

I'd like to offer some thoughts on your Election Night event
at Grand Central Bowling:

First, a little background... before that night, I had never listened to (or, really, even heard about) AM 970 or to the Rick Emerson show. I came to Grand Central as a result of seeing WW ads and deciding that of the parties I knew about, it looked like the biggest. The presence of Rick Emerson, Storm Large, and anybody else was very much secondary to the obvious main event: the election.

My first introduction to your station and to the Rick Emerson show (not including the table with station-branded schwag) was when most of the TVs upstairs suddenly changed from nail-biting (but increasingly celebratory) election coverage, complete with graphics, maps, stats visually displayed. The new view was of a table with a few people I had never seen or heard of before talking to each other.

I'm sure this part was unintentional, but at this point the audio was still coming from CNN. That meant that we could still barely make out CNN audio over the din of the crowd, but all we could see were these random people talking and laughing with each other. After about 5 minutes of this, I waded through the masses to your table
downstairs to let them know "WTF??" They got right on it and soon we were no longer hearing CNN.

What we began to [barely] hear then, were these [still unknown] people talking to each other. Because of the noise of the party, we couldn't hear what they were saying, except to be able to tell that these people were periodically looking at CNN on a screen next to them (which all of us had been perfectly happy watching for ourselves until the picture changed) and telling us what was going on (again, instead of LETTING US WATCH IT OURSELVES). Once again, we couldn't actually hear WTF they were saying, so the net effect of all this was to reduce the information available for the mob of desperate Obama hopefuls down to nearly zero.

I'm sure you must have heard our chants of "C-N-N! C-N-N!" pretty quickly after that. We had come there to WATCH THE ELECTION but now had less information than we would have had if we had just stayed home. Everyone upstairs was looking at each other in disbelief at how poorly planned the decision to put these people on had been. Our indignation and anger (at the only entity we knew of to blame...
the station whose logo was prominently displayed on the screen that we so fiercely wanted to go away) subsided when the channel was turned back to CNN. We assumed that whoever was to blame for such an out-of-touch choice to cut off the flow of information to people who were relying on it like oxygen had wised up.

Despite that initial resounding democratic uprising, though, we found ourselves faced with periodic returns to these people talking, which included each time being unable to hear what they were saying as well as being suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from incoming election news -- the one thing we all needed.

By far worst of all, though, was when your people were yakking unintelligibly at and several minutes beyond the moment when the race was called for Barack Obama. The moment that should have been a massive wave of celebration, the moment probably everyone in the whole building had been waiting for for 8 years was kept from us by (in at least our opinion during those moments) these idiot talking heads and the idiotic radio station that put them there.

I am completely serious when I say that I think that if your people would have continued this mistake, there may have been violence and destruction in Grand Central that night. The annoyance and frustration we had all felt during earlier interruptions quickly began to turn to blinding fury. The mob upstairs was literally ready to come down there and break down the wall if need be to get the people there to shut the hell up and let us see the results so we could celebrate.

Finally, the picture was changed back (since I couldn't hear anything the radio hosts were saying, I still don't know if the channel was changed each time in response to our anger or if the hosts just obliviously finished their spiel as planned). The celebration began, and the rest of the night is history.

But you need to know a couple of things:

1. The wave of celebration that swept the entire planet when Obama was declared the winner was reduced to a trickle in one bowling alley in SE Portland by what felt (and still feels) like an arbitrary restriction of the flow of information. The surge of joy everyone else was able to feel together was for us only the slightest whimper of hope that spread slowly through the bar, and for us this hope quickly turned to rabid anger at the ineptitude of whoever was preventing us from sharing this experience.

Of course I'm not trying to say that you ruined my (or "our") whole night -- the election of Barack Obama as President is the highlight of my political life so far -- but truly your incompetence tarnished the initial moments of the experience for a lot of people.

2. As I mentioned earlier, I had previously had zero exposure to AM 970, and had no opinion of the station. Perhaps you have great shows/hosts/guests or whatever, but after that night (and I think I speak for more people than just myself), all I feel toward your station is resentment. Whoever planned the portions of the night's
event that went so wrong did your brand no favors.

Suggestions:

1. Pick a better location. For what your station apparently wanted to do, I think Grand Central was the wrong place. For the festivities to have successfully involved a live radio show, I think we would have needed to be gathered more centrally in a single room so that we could at the very minimum be prepared for when the attention was going to be directed elsewhere. As it was, every time the channel
went to the radio people, it seemed random, inexplicable, and arbitrary.

2. Be realistic about the crowd. I don't think there was any way you could have interrupted the graphic data displays of the news networks without pissing a bunch of people off, especially considering the fact that the noise level in the bar made it impossible to hear what the radio people were saying. I really think the only way it MIGHT have worked would have been if we could have seen and heard you without
losing our ability to keep an eye on displays of incoming election news.

3. Be more nimble and in-touch with the needs of the crowd when a story is as rapidly developing and emotionally involving as elections are, and especially as this particular election was. This was a situation that required nearly instantaneous reaction to breaking news, and what you provided instead was ponderous, irrelevant, and inaudible. Perhaps the radio hosts are unable to talk and conduct their show while simultaneously keeping tabs on ongoing developments.
If that's so, though, you need to have someone whose responsibility it is to closely monitor for updates and bust in and tell the hosts to STFU when, for example, the news comes out that WE HAVE A NEW PRESIDENT, AND IT'S THE GOOD GUY. That isn't the kind of thing that can wait a few minutes while some radio host finishes his
oh-so-witty-and-erudite point about whatever the hell he's talking about.

Besides the lacking responsiveness to breaking news, the talk show portions could have gone a LONG way toward connecting positively with the crowd if they had a) talked only during commercial breaks or whatever and b) COMMUNICATED that... I dunno, put a damn sign up behind the hosts that says "we'll return to CNN when they return from break" or whatever. Just randomly switching over to something we can't
hear (except to be able to tell that the hosts are reading stuff off of the CNN screen they're reading... talk about adding insult to injury!) is FAR from acceptable.

Okay, I'm done with my rant. I'm not sure what I "want" in response to this email. I guess at minimum it would be nice to be able to know that the people responsible for planning the night have actually read my email. If one of them were to elaborate along the lines of "yeah, we really screwed some things up that night, and we learned some lessons for next time" I could gain a lot of respect back, and would MAYBE even consider going to a future 970 AM-sponsored event. Maybe.

Thanks for your time.
Jason