Radio Stands Tall When Canterbury Earthquake Hits

While TVNZ proudly proclaimed that 2 million Kiwis tuned in to its coverage of the Canterbury earthquake, the run-away winner story-teller in the first hours of the disaster was radio.

By 7am on Saturday morning National Radio and Newstalk ZB were bringing us eye witness descriptions from people – professionals and the public – who painted images of the devastation for us with their verbal accounts.

On ZB anchor man Larry Williams was superb – seamlessly ensuring listeners understood the big picture, bringing us the personal tragedies while sending out a steady stream of civil emergency messages to those that needed vital information.

It was compelling, and radio at its very best.

Compare that to TV1 and TV3 at 7am. What earthquake! We were being served up reruns of ‘entertainment’ programmes. Not even an on screen caption mentioning our largest ever recorded earthquake had occurred.

Naturally BBC and CNN were telling the world about it. What an indictment of our own television news services that we had to go overseas to find out what was happening in our own country.

Some time after 8am TV1 finally woke from its slumber and started to bring us excellent coverage, and we were able to ‘see’ what ZB had been describing brilliantly for an hour. TV3 had roused itself to putting up an onscreen caption under its entertainment programmes telling us it would bring us news of the earthquake from 11am. ‘News’ – by then it was ‘history’.

Social media also found the going tough as a communication medium through a combination of overloading, civil defence requesting people to restrict cell phone use to reserve capacity for emergency services, and the battery back up to power cell sites running low.

The other standout was Mayor Bob Parker. It was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man. Authoritative and calm, he exuded all that you want from the person in control when disaster strikes.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 at 11:50 am and is filed under Crisis Communications, Journalism, Media landscape, PR Matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Radio Stands Tall When Canterbury Earthquake Hits”

  1. Alex Says:
    September 8th, 2010 at 3:09 pm

    Radio was rubbish. Information was needed at speed on that morning. Nobody put any useful information out via radio until at least 2 hours after the event. To say radio stood tall in an absolute overstatement of the fact.

    Information regarding whether or not there was a tsunami potential should have been put out within at least half an hour. This did not come via radio.

    Civil Defense needed to get info out far more quickly. Half the stations in CHCH were out for at least 45 mins. RadioLive were one of the few operating and all they had was stories of the quake.

    Information of a useful nature poured in via Social Media.

  2. Peter Heath Says:
    September 8th, 2010 at 8:18 pm

    You got it, Alex! Check out http://www.prblog.co.nz/?p=378. Yet it still staggers me how few businesses and brand guardians have cottoned on to the constructive and destructive potential of this medium.

  3. Twitter roars | The PR Blog Says:
    September 8th, 2010 at 11:17 pm

    [...] Radio New Zealand National and Newstalk ZB did a fair job of pushing news of the quake out to the rest of the country while also keeping Cantabrians [...]