WHTM-TV ABC27 is off the air. They went off the air on Saturday. They were off the air Sunday. They're off the air today.
Retailers buy a lot of advertising between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The station isn't just going to lose money because they can't run the advertising, they're going to lose customers as well. This is one of the most important weeks of the retail year, and stores that can't advertise are not going to be able to sell the goods next month. Some of them are going to go out of business. Some of them are merely going to remember that WHTM cost them a lot of money because they were unreliable.
They're going to lose some viewers, too. Their regular viewers are going to sample local news on WGAL - which is significantly better. They're going to sample cable television shows which are often better than ABC's shows as well.
Jay Leno has already lost me due to the writer's strike. I was formerly TiVOing both Letterman and Leno. With the writer's strike, I'm watching neither - and I've discovered Corner Gas on WGN. I can't record three things at once on my TiVO, only two, so I can add Letterman back - but Leno is history.
Back when Hurricane Katrina was still a threat, we checked out our stormworthiness. Our data center doesn't just have an emergency power generator big enough to handle the center, but it has a backup generator, in case the emergency power generator fails. And there's enough diesel on hand to run the generator for a week. The datacenter buildings were designed to withstand a Force 4 storm, but in fact have ridden out a Force 5 hurricane, so that's pretty sound, too.
The servers don't go down if we lose power here at the house. In fact, we did lose power last week, for about 50 minutes. Never the less, we'd quickly feel a pinch. Our business phone needs electricity, because it goes over the internet, so we have to power the "modem", router, and Vonage converter. The phone number "rolls over" to my cell phone, so we're safe for a while, but having to drive the car in order to charge the cell phone is kinda silly.
So we bought an emergency generator back then. It's big enough to not only run the computer system, but the deep freeze, and the rest of the house, because little generators cost almost as much as big ones.
Never the less, when the lights went out last week, we found out we were unprepared. No flashlights could be found, and the only candles we could come up with were scented Yankee candles, which smell nice, but don't shed much light. Needless to say, I bought four flashlights the next day, and did a trial run of turning off the power company, and firing up the generator. Next time, we'll be in a lot better shape.
It wasn't cheap to do that; it added about 1-2% to the cost of the house. On the other hand, I considered it a cost of doing business.
I can't imagine what the folks at ABC27 are thinking. Within an hour of going off the air, either the station manager or the station engineer should have been able to figure out that their power crunch was going to last a while. They could have - and should have - made a few phone calls. Getting someone to haul in a generator mounted on a semi trailer, and getting someone else to haul in a tanker truck of diesel fuel, would have been expensive, but a bargain compared to the cost of going black during the week before Christmas.
If anyone knows of a good station manager looking for another job, WHTM belongs to Albritton, and they're headquartered in Washington, D.C. I kinda figure that they'll be changing station managers about the start of the new year....
I don't watch ABC27 very much anyway, so it really doesn't matter to me, but I have to wonder why they're asleep at the switch.