With Hurricane Milton on a path towards the west coast of Florida and projected to make landfall on Wednesday as at least a Category 3 storm, Beasley Media Group is making preparations at its Fort Myers and Tampa Bay clusters.
All stations in both markets have begun hourly storm updates, which will increase to twice per hour until wall-to-wall coverage takes over 24 hours before landfall. The company has partnerships with Scripps’ “ABC Action News” WFTS-TV Tampa and Hearst’s “NBC 2” WBBH-TV and “ABC 7” WZVN-TV Fort Myers which will be used to “enhance storm coverage”. The company is also suspending all syndicated programming during the storm to prioritize local storm coverage.
Beasley’s digital team is placing dedicated “Storm Central” section on the station websites, offering timely updates, which will also be shared across social media platforms. It will also use Quu’s dashboard technology to deliver special messaging featuring storm warnings.
Should there be widespread flooding, evacuations, or power/internet outages, Tampa will rely on “Q105” WRBQ afternoon host Geno Knight, who is based at the company’s Boston studios to continue coverage.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com