Old disasters, new media

An operator error yesterday caused a power failure leaving 5 million people in San Diego and nearby areas in the dark. Although communication efforts used a combination of old media and new media, many of the affected people in my hometown were literally and figuratively in the dark.

Unlike the Gray Davis-Enron-energy mismanagement blackouts of a decade ago, the San Diego outage fit the pattern of the major East Coast summer outages such as the great New York blackouts: a single problem cascaded failure throughout the system. At times of peak air conditioning load, there’s little margin for error in our electric grid.

In this case, an operator error in Arizona around 3:30pm Thursday temporarily shut down one major source of imported power for San Diego. The result would have been brownouts, but when the voltage on the San Diego grid dropped below normal, the 2.2GW San Onofre power plant was taken offline and the system collapsed at 3:40pm. Some 3 million San Diego residents were without power, as were Imperial County, portions of Orange County, the Palm Springs area, and Northern Baja California.

San Diego doesn’t have a lot of experience with disasters. We don’t get hurricanes, tornadoes or blizzards, although the mountain passes are (rarely) closed for snow or wind. None of the state’s major recorded earthquakes have occurred in the region, although the 1971 Sylmar quake did cause me to run to a doorway. Unlike LA, there have been no major riots, although the 2003 Cedar Fire and 2007 Witch Creek Fire each caused scattered deaths and $100+ million in property damage.

As it turns out, at the time of the blackout I was driving to San Diego for a Marconi Society banquet honoring communications pioneers Bob Galvin, Irwin Jacobs and Jack Keil Wolf. Because I was in a car, I was listening to the radio, and heard about the blackout less than an hour later, and heard the 5pm press conference that explained what had happened.

My inlaws were sitting at home with no TV, radio or Internet and didn’t know what was going on. I called them (from my cellphone in San Diego to their landline) and told them what I knew.

I was unable to reach my mom and assumed it was because she had switched from POTS to VoIP for the free long distance. As it turns out, Cox provides for battery backup for the MTA to work during the power failure. (In fact, I didn’t realize I was calling my inlaws on their Cox VoIP rather than Ma Bell’s POTS). However, my mom lives in a large senior complex and while the POTS was reaching the building, none of the phone lines were powered to the individual apartments.

At dinner, some of the other guests were surfing CNN.com or the local paper to find news of the power outage. Cellular systems were taxed — and sometimes overloaded or some cells were without power — but in general calls were going through better than after an earthquake (when everyone decides to call at once).

Driving around, I heard various authorities said “go to our Twitter feed”. The local utility, SDG&E, did a good job of updating the news as it came in — including a link to the news that all power was restored by 3:25 a.m. Friday. The Twitter feed for San Diego County government never noted that all power was restored, but did say county courts would be in session. The San Diego Airport tweeted problems from Thursday night but had nothing Friday. Similarly, the region’s main emergency preparedness agency had no posts since this one Thursday night:

@ReadySanDiego
RT: @SDGE While we're getting power back on to some areas, it will be some time tomorrow before all power is restored to region. #sdoutage

So as with other web-enabled communications strategies, such efforts are meaningless unless you make the commitment to keep your content up-to-date: daily or weekly for most organizations, but hourly for major institutions in a time of emergency.

In the end, the only communication medium that worked reliably was decidedly old media: news radio. The local news/talk station, KOGO, dates back to 1925. Although they (and other stations) had the cable news election night/disaster syndrome — babbling when there’s nothing new — nonetheless they were able to broadcast accurate up-to-date news to the widest possible audience.

In other words, mass communications run by journalists trumped social media run by amateurs or government officials. Now if only old media could find a business model that keeps them in business.

The outage certainly makes me appreciate the crank-powered Grundig radio that (ironically) my mom gave me one Christmas. However, it takes a lot of cranking to listen to a half hour of radio, so when I got home I plugged in the charger to the wall so I’ll be able to listen for an hour or so before I have to crank.

Next century not so promising

Today marks the second century of broadcasting, which promises to be far less auspicious than the first.

On Thursday, radio station KCBS will be broadcasting from the San José building where it predecessor began exactly 100 years ago.

Most (even Wikipedia) report Charles “Doc” Herrold as launching his first radio broadcast on June 11, 1909, and credit him as launching the first regularly scheduled radio broadcast a few years later. He had a radio station before the government license radio stations: he later got a license for KQW, which was bought by the (now news radio) station KCBS (later moved from San José to San Francisco).

As a publicity stunt, KCBS will be broadcasting from downtown SJ, then Herrold’s “College of Wireless Engineering” and now Fairmont plaza (covered by the SF press club and the Radio Business Report). Among those inspired by Herrold include Fred Terman (the man who grew Stanford’s college of engineering and cemented its relationship with Silicon Valley) and Herbert Hoover (who founded a thinktank at Stanford).

Unfortunately for KCBS, radio is dying off. Music is competing with iPods, and will die before news or talk. (Abolishing the “Fairness Doctrine” 20 years ago gave talk radio a new lease on life 20 years ago, so it might outlive news).

The problem is that the idea of broadcasting — and the mass media in general — was a concept of limited bandwidth rather than customer demand. Due to limited radio spectrum and startup costs, a city might have 5 radio stations or 3 TV stations, so everyone got the same content at the same time from these stations. Broadcasting was also enabled by (and enabled) nationwide distribution, providing a channel for a national broadcaster or network, whether Paul Harvey or Edward R. Murrow.

But since the Betamax, DVD sales and the Internet, it’s clear that broadcasting is a second choice for most media consumers. People get news when they want it from a website, music from a music site and talk from a podcast. Internet connections are not commonplace in cars, but they will get there soon (whether directly or via handheld cellphones).

So the first century of broadcasting included its high water mark, whether it was World War II (for radio) or the space race (for TV). It’s a record it will be unable to match in its second century.

We know how this story will end

Normally I pontificate about business model problems with newspapers or television. But the third leg of the 20th century mass media, radio, has exactly the same problems. Largely unnoticed by the general public — except for the Clear Channel death throes — broadcast radio is heading to the same ignominious end as awaits dead tree papers and broadcast TV.

Earlier this month, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby interviewed radio analyst Michael Harrison. Most of it was about talk radio — both conservative and liberal — but there were some important general points about radio’s viability:

Q: How big is talk radio? How does it fit within the larger radio universe?

A: Well, the talk-radio universe is affected by the economy, and the recession has been brutal to all advertising-based media. AM and FM radio are also faced with technological change taking away its monopoly on mass-appeal audio entertainment and information. You've got competition from cable television; you've got iPods and podcasts and iTunes; you've got satellite radio. And you have the Internet, which is changing everything. That being said, within the world of radio, talk has a huge following that's growing. The baby boomers grew up with radio. Radio personalities meant something in their life. They know how to use a radio.

Q: Doesn't everybody?

A: No. Many kids don't even have radios. The biggest problem facing radio is that the younger generation doesn't think of it as an institutional component of day-to-day life. And if people stop thinking of radio that way, then what's the value of owning a license to broadcast? That's why radio is in trouble.

And then to the proposal (opposed by the right wing blogosphere) to re-impose the “Fairness Doctrine”:

Q: Some people have suggested that instead of making broadcast licenses renewable every eight years, they should last only two years - that would put station owners on the spot more frequently, make them more susceptible to pressure.

A: Look, if we were coming into the golden age of radio, I would say, "Sure, owning a radio license is a privilege. It should serve the community. People should have to jump through hoops to have this privilege." But it's not such a privilege anymore. It's mired in debt, it's choked with regulation. And it's surrounded by competition that's not regulated and not in debt. Why make it even harder?

If you think about it, a broadcast license (TV or radio) was once a license to print money: a government-sanctioned monopoly (premised on RF scarcity) that was valuable in perpetuity. Now, while Internet has high entry barriers in terms of network effects and advertising costs, it has no formal regulatory barriers and thus (in principle) no upper limit on the number of entrants.

Things have changed dramatically in my mother’s lifetime (My dad died in 1995). For my parents, radio was the first mass medium — the only way that all Americans could participate in the same news during the Depression (FDR’s Fireside Chats) and WW II (Edward R. Murrow.) For people my age, radio was what you turn to after an earthquake or during a war; it also keeps me company during long drives across California. For my daughter, NYTimes.com or news.google.com will probably be all the news she ever needs — until she’s 30 and something even cooler comes along.

Indeed, for Harrison, the end is coming much sooner than people think:

Q: How many good years does talk radio have left?

A: AM/FM radio has about five good years left, if that. And what we consider to be radio today will be on the Internet. And the Internet websites will be media stations. The Internet is not only going to change radio; it's going to change humanity. That's how profound this revolution in communication will be.

If that’s true, I wonder who the surviving Internet radio stations will be. Will it be the online versions of the existing broadcast stations (who now have a huge royalty advantage)? Will it be Sirius XM and other premium services? Will it be Live365, Pandora and other web-specific aggregators? Will it be stations bundled under iTunes and the like?

Or will the idea of a stream and “station” go away? For music, Last.FM provides songs on demand. I’ve found that podcasts work much better than streaming for a medium length interviews (10-30 minutes), although (as with HTML pages) only some publishers are committed to making them available on a permanent basis.

I was recently wondering whether to retrofit an HD radio onto my 2000 pickup. I guess at this point I should plan to replace my dead iPod and just download podcasts for the long drives.