Underserved Markets
During a conversation with family in New York I discovered that most of the small towns in the Catskills and Adirondacks didn’t know that there would be flash flooding in the mountains as a result of Irene.
I just didn’t understand that, because I’m sitting down on the Gulf Coast and I knew that this was a major flood event in the making, just based on Irene’s size. North of NYC you start climbing into the old mountain ranges of the Northeast, and after the wettest August on record in the area, there would be massive runoffs. You see it in Haiti and Central America every time a tropical storm passes through.
After thinking about it, it occurred to me, that the information was available, as I was looking at it on the National Weather Service sites, but it wasn’t being delivered. These little towns and villages don’t have much in the way of local media because they aren’t large enough markets to support radio or television stations, so there really wasn’t much access to information for the people who live there.
For those who had television access, it was probably satellite, and they would be watching the NYC stations, which would have NYC weather. If you lived on the wrong side of the hill, you wouldn’t be able to get satellite reception.
Rural America really hasn’t been included in the ‘Internet Age’.
5 comments
Tell me about it. I finally got rid of our local cable monopoly and traded up to our local DSL monopoly with Verizon. The DSL is 3 times as fast as cable, which is a joke because it usually is the other way around anywhere else besides upstate NY.
This is not the first time media consolidation has left rural areas without essential information. I remember a story a few years ago in which a man spotted a tornado and attempted to phone the only local AM radio station to warn people… only to discover that the station had no personnel and was broadcasting entirely automatically. (Regrettably I didn’t save a link to the story.) So the tornado smashed through the rural community with no warning. If you think media consolidation has only financial effects, think again.
No local news or weather, nor local reporting, everything coming in on a feed to a computer link.
The last I knew, Frederick, the Chenago Valley Telephone Company still runs its lines on fence posts. People don’t know a lot about New York State other than what they think they know about the City.
Sounds like the cable company is using leased lines for its ‘Net connection, and coax Ethernet for the ‘last mile’. They started that way down here, and every time someone new was added, the signal degraded.
Rural counties in New York have minimal cell service, and the public safety radio net isn’t actually available.
People need to get Weather band radios, but there is no guarantee they will be able to get a signal in the mountains.
Yeah, Steve, down here you get NPR, Clear Channel, or a Mississippi-based corporation, no matter what your radio tuner says. The formats change quarterly.
But the free market solves all markets, so clearly this is a case of government intervention in the free market causing problems :twisted:.
Oops, sorry, I was just channeling a right-wing kool-aide drinker there. My bad.
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
When the DJ who puts on ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ sounds like he’s from Bangalore and not Birmingham, something will change, but until then it will be a central computer program that selects what’s on your local radio.
During hurricanes all the local stations link to the feed from the University of West Florida public radio station which uses the audio from a Pensacola TV station for coverage. The counties to the East of me probably do the same thing with a TV station out of Panama City and the Florida State University public radio stations.