Technology can be a great money saver for Small Market Radio, but at some point you have to weigh the savings of expense against the quality of the return and wonder if it's really worth it.

Case in point: Out of market news and weather services. While managing stations in a very small market, I was inundated with calls offering the delivery of "high quality, large market-sounding news" or "big market-sounding weather" from services in a larger city, and it would be a way for me to "eliminate cost" like having a local news man or having staff take time to produce ever-changing weather forecasts.

My experience: Some of the news voices that I sampled were decent, but the work provided to get them simple things like pronunciations of small area villages and towns, or names of local politicians, etc. was time wasted when a local news person already knows them. Your local news person also can get to meetings and get his/her face in front of key city officials and business community leaders where an out of town service obviously can't. That proves to be invaluable when people start to realize you aren't "in the community" as much as you could be.

Yes, in some cases in the samples sent, the sound of the news WAS "big-market", very good news voices reading your local content, and in some cases they gather the content themselves. Some services let the local station gather the content, and they would then just produce the newscast. Cost varies depending on how much service you get, and in some cases it is indeed a cost savings over a local news person, and the quality is then the only issue: Is it better news delivery than what I have? If the answer is yes, then the only question that remains is how you're going to keep a local presence in the community without that local news person. Sure, you can have the GM and sales people and maybe even some of the on-air announcing staff cover local events, then you have to go right back to: is the money saved worth the time spent by others?

For weather, it was a far worse experience. The voices on many of the samples heard from various services were either too young sounding for what was desired, or just plain terrible, even if the way the content was delivered was efficient. The time saved by not having to worry about whether or not the forecast was updated by your local staff is offset by the loss of quality and the ridicule the station takes when very, very poor radio voices are frequently heard on your radio station.

The stations I recently managed were part of a company that hired such an outside weather service. We were "sold" on the "cost savings"...it is a barter arrangement, costing the stations only airtime for the network commercials, and we were "sold" on the advantage of having weather experts delivering our forecasts via FTP so that we would never have to touch it or take time to produce or input any of the forecasts sent.

First, there's no real cost savings, as producing weather forecasts are part of the regular staff's duties, you're simply taking away a duty that doesn't take much time out of their day anyway. Secondly, the delivery is indeed slick. The service in a far-away city logs into your server and inserts the forecasts, it becomes fairly "hands-off" for your local staff.

But for every decent sounding forecaster you get, you are stuck with people who aren't ready for radio at best, and some that never will be. If the quality of the sound of your radio station is important, you do NOT want a voice that should be training on overnights delivering your weather forecasts at 7am or 4pm, prime drive time.

General Managers and Executives that care about the sound of the station should do whatever they can to avoid such a service where you do not have the say in the voices that deliver the information over their radio station, and those who do not - and sadly, there are far too many in the business today - are doing more damage to their company and stations than they are good.