Convention Coverage on WEOS

All this week on WEOS is Democratic National Convention coverage, and next week is the Republican National Convention. It's meant a lot of changes...temporary changes...to our air schedule: most notably that we've pretty much blown out all music programming (World Cafe and Echoes) in favor of special NPR coverage at night, a little more BBC World Service, a big extra hour of Democracy Now, and we're airing On Point with Tom Ashbrook, a call-in talk show, which is doing a morning and afternoon special each day from the convention itself.

Good stuff, all. I think we're providing a good alternative in convention coverage...especially with Democracy Now and On Point, which nobody else around the Finger Lakes are airing. Well, I hear WRVO is adding On Point to an HD Radio multicast channel, but HD penetration in the Finger Lakes is pretty low; we're airing it on our main channel.

There's an oddity that popped up today, though...and it really perplexes me: we're actually getting calls from people wondering where World Cafe is. We're running tons of promos, had prominent announcements on our website, etc etc. And, ya know, it's the National Conventions. These are kind of big deal, aren't they? Can't we live without World Cafe for two lousy weeks? Especially in Ithaca since, as far as I know, WSKG is not airing extra Convention coverage on their Ithaca signal.

I suppose people are just worried that we'll drop World Cafe permanently, which we've said more than once that WEOS will not do. We do plan to add On Point and keep World Cafe once we get WITH 90.1FM on the air in Ithaca. But we're not about to drop World Cafe...it's quite popular in Ithaca and you better believe we know that. It just seems silly to me; to think we'd even consider it, I suppose.

INSTANT UPDATE: No sooner did I finish this that I realized I screwed up our automation system's programming. It was supposed to wait to switch to the BBC until I made the change myself. Instead, it acted on the backup programming that switched it to the BBC feed automatically at 11pm, right in the middle of Hillary's speech. Crap. The backup settings are there in case Hillary's speech ended early, which was unlikely but was always a possibility.

And since I thought I had it set correctly, I didn't notice the error until nearly the end of Hillary's speech. Crap crap crap. At least I got it fixed in time to catch the NPR analysis.