AWARN, Local Partners Convene Regional Roundtables To Reboot Broadcaster-Public Safety Partnership

With its local partners, the AWARN Alliance is convening a series of roundtable discussions between local TV stations and local emergency managers — the people who issue emergency alerts. The goal is to lay the groundwork for the voluntary use of NextGen TV Advanced Emergency Information (AEI) and “reboot” the historic partnership between broadcasting and public safety.

“NextGen TV AEI offers benefits for TV newsrooms that are not yet well-understood — it can actually make their jobs easier in emergencies,” according to AWARN Executive Director John Lawson.

“Besides reinforcing the ‘first informer’ positioning of local TV stations, AEI can actually streamline and automate the process of warning viewers in a very geo-targeted way without interrupting programming for everyone else. And because the alerting authorities are now sitting on rich-media content they can’t easily get out — evacuation routes, flood maps, fire drone video, pictures of missing children and suspects, for example — AEI actually can facilitate stations’ content production for multimedia platforms.

“The AWARN Roundtables are a forum for broadcasters to meet their local alert originators and explore ways to work together to deliver geo-targeted, rich media emergency information. Although NextGen TV will be discussed, the real focus is building relationships,” Lawson said.

• The next AWARN Roundtable is in Raleigh, N.C., and covers parts of two days, Oct. 6-7. It’s co-hosted by Capitol Broadcasting’s WRAL, PBS North Carolina, the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters and the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.
• The AWARN New Orleans Roundtable is Nov. 2-3. Public station WYES, the Louisiana Broadcasters Association and state and local emergency management agencies are co-hosting, with support from the state broadcaster associations in Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.
• With co-hosts ONE Media 3.0/Sinclair Broadcast Group, the Maryland, DC and Delaware Broadcasters Association, and National Capital Region alerting authorities, NAB is hosting the Washington, D.C., Roundtable on Dec. 7-8 in its offices.

Sponsors to date include The Weather Company, an IBM Business; LG Electronics; ATSC; Capitol Broadcasting; PBSNC; NCAB; NAB; and ONE Media 3.0. Additional sponsors are welcomed.

The first AWARN Roundtable was hosted by News-Press & Gazette’s KEYT Santa Barbara, Calif., in March and drew a cross-section of emergency managers and broadcasters from across Southern California. The California Broadcasters Association played a leading role, with additional sponsorship from ATSC, Baron and T-NET Japan. The meeting led to positive reviews from participants and provided a template for the events this fall.

“AWARN activities have always drawn strong support from the TV engineering community. Now it’s time for the C-suite, especially news directors, to get involved in the future of emergency information,” Lawson said.

Registration information for the Roundtables can be found at AWARN.org.