As Tropical Storm Ian seeks its path and closes in on Florida’s gulf coast, Beasley Media Group outlines its readiness strategies for serving the affected local communities of Ft. Myers, Tampa and Naples. FL.
In Ft. Myers, wall-to-wall updates are scheduled to commence on Sunday, 09/25, at 8AM when Beasley stations will broadcast NBC-2 updates once an hour.
Hourly live and prerecorded updates are scheduled to continue through Tuesday at 6pm, and if the storm materializes into a CAT 2+/3 hurricane, per the forecast, updates will be every 15 minutes through the storm’s duration.
Engineers will be on standby ready to keep stations on the air and ensuring the generators are in working condition, and full of diesel and battery backups fully functional.
Traffic departments are ready to manage catastrophe orders.
Beasley says it will have its DJs back in studio one hour after the storm passes (if they can safely make it in) ready to inform the community of any issues, dangers, supplies, and pertinent information.”
In Tampa, the plan this weekend is all about education and preparedness, including promoting Beasley’s hurricane supply checklist online as well as the latest from the national weather center and storm center tracker all of which are already live on all of Beasley websites.
On Monday, Beasley will partner with the stations’ news partner, WFTS ABC Action News, to have their weatherman available to the station morning shows and then, depending on current storm path and timing, the stations would use the ABC weatherman as appropriate with the other talent after morning drive.
If after morning drive on Monday, there is no hurricane watch yet, talent will handle most of the content and they will do recorded updates from ABC Action News as needed.
Depending on the path and timing on Monday, they will have a formal recorded update from their ABC partner as well as preparedness content from jocks until it becomes a “hurricane watch” for Tampa Bay.
Once Tampa is under a hurricane watch, the stations will move to two more formal sounding updates an hour.
If it becomes a hurricane warning for Tampa Bay, there will be two formal updates an hour plus another piece of jock content for a third update each hour.
Engineering will also make sure that we can simulcast all of the stations together, if necessary, to provide local coverage or wall-to-wall with ABC.
In addition, if Tampa Bay does indeed go into a “hurricane warning,” the teams will also produce the necessary legal ID and have it on standby if stations are forced to go to any sort of simulcast pooling of talent to cover the storm or ABC wall to wall coverage depending on situation.
If under a hurricane warning, program directors and traffic directors will work ahead on three days of logs, anticipating breaking format and altering content as time progresses.
Traffic directors are already working from home and the IT department will make sure they can alter logs as necessary including if it reaches a catastrophic situation.
If Tampa Bay is indeed in the path of the storm, staffers will return when it’s safe.
Beasley will have several on-air veteran talent that have covered many tropical storms in the past including MJ, Nio Fernandez, Travis Daily and Launa Phillips.
Regarding the BMG Digital Content Team/Quu Dashboard Messaging functions, Justin Chase and his team are working closely with Steve Newberry and the entire Quu team to make sure important safety and preparedness messaging is up and running via the stations on the dashboard for drivers.
This has been implemented as of Saturday morning across the BMG stations in Tampa and Ft. Myers. In addition, the corporate digital content team is working around the clock with Digital Program Directors in the markets to develop custom content for the individual markets as well as ensuring links featuring important information available for listeners to be able to access.
