It was anything but business as usual during WGN 720 AM′s noon business broadcast Tuesday when the main studio link went down, forcing the station to scramble with archived shows and contingency plans after at least 10 minutes of dead air. according to The Chicago Tribune.
“We had a studio router crash,” said WGN Radio station manager Todd Manley. “The transmitter was never off the air, but there was no audio. It was painful.”
With the main studio on East Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago down, engineers were able to put on archived audio directly from the station’s transmitter in Elk Grove Village, some 30 miles away. The “emergency fill” included old Steve Cochran morning shows and Lou Manfredini’s home repair shows, Manley said.
By about 12:30 p.m., engineers had rigged a fix, enabling the station to temporarily broadcast on the air what is normally an online streaming-only show by midday hosts Bill Leff and Wendy Snyder. Steve Bertrand then hustled back into the main studio to finish up the last 15 minutes of the one-hour business lunch broadcast from the station’s main studio.
Listeners confused by the dead air, followed by a melange of programs, lit up the station’s switchboard and posted some befuddled reactions on social media.
While the Tribune Media-owned station was back on the air and broadcasting from its main studio before 1 p.m., Manley said they were preparing for a longer outage, including packing up afternoon drive host Roe Conn to do his show from the transmitter building in Elk Grove Village, if necessary.
The “digital malfunction” also temporarily killed the station’s phone system and shut down internet access from studios, Manley said. The station is still trying to unravel exactly what happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment