Media Shout Out

Columbus, GA is TV market 112 -- meaning, it's the 112th largest television market, according to the Nielsen people who compile the TV ratings. It's a smaller market, very rural, and home to a number of TV stations...none better, in my opinion, than WTVM.

There are many stations in markets of comparable size whose news teams put a broadcast on Sunday nights with a skeletal crew...sometimes with newsreaders anchoring weather and/or sport reports in the same show. At WTVM, they're not heavily staffed...but did they ever pull together tonight.

During Sunday's 10pm newscast on co-located WXTX-Fox 54, severe thunderstorms in the Columbus area started to turn violent. The WTVM news team, on air already, cut-in to their primary programming on both stations and launched into wall-to-wall tornado coverage. It was interrupted only briefly when the sound of intense winds in the midtown Columbus area -- where WTVM is located -- caused the seven or so people in the station to leave their positions and take cover in an interior bathroom for about 15 minutes. The stations radar filled screens as the storm, now believed to be a tornado, passed over.

It might have been easy for this small news team to report the worst was passed and closedown. Not these guys. At 0120 ET, they continue non-stop coverage, streaming at wtvm.com, complete with LIVE reports and reporter/photog video from Columbus to neighboring Phenix City. Damage is widespread but mercifully minor, at least as far as can be reported.

The WTVM news team, working massive overtime and providing an invaluable source of vitally needed information, is doing the kind of work that newsrooms and television stations in large markets and small can take some lessons from. Bad economy or otherwise, WTVM -- commercial-free -- is living up to its FCC mandate: "to serve the public interest as a public trustee."

Good on you, WTVM. Done right.