One of the better panels at BEA that I saw discussed covering crisis and emergencies. The panel discusses how some college stations. It seems as though students at the stations that were discussed, really wanted to be involved with covering emergencies, until the emergency involved them.

Yeah you can talk about a tornado, but when the tornado comes, are you in the shelter or are you outside shooting video? That’s the question everyone should ask before joining a team to cover weather emergencies.

Two interesting ideas came out of this panel. First, at one of the schools, the campus radio station was able to work out a deal with campus police so that the police could immediately take control of the radio station in the event of a campus emergency. A system was setup so that campus police could simply pickup the phone and dial into the station, go on air, relay information, and then return the station to normal programming.

This service is something that we might want to consider implementing at Oakland University and at WXOU. If we could get a similar system in place, when all hell breaks loose on campus, it could be very helpful.

Another idea comes from Western Kentucky University. There, students organized the WKU Storm team. The team is a group of students who are interested in forecasting weather. A storm team would be a great idea for WXOU. I think it would be a great addition to our news coverage. That is of course if we had some volunteers who were interested in forecasting weather verses reading it off of weather.com.

Click Here for more information on the WKU Storm Team.

Overall this was a great panel. I hope we could implement some of these ideas at WXOU.