Public Media and Sandy - Shameful Coverage #sandy #pubmedia

Here is what Doc Searls - a huge fan of Pub Media - discovered about Pub Media's pathetic efforts to cover Sandy in his area.

"12:48pm: In a crisis like #Sandy, one of the great failures of public television is exposed: there is almost no live local coverage of anything, despite a boundless abundance of presumably willing helpers in the Long Tail.

Public TV’s connection with What’s Actually Happening is astoundingly low, and ironic given its name.

Scheduled programs throb through the calendar with metronomic precision. About the only times they ever go live is during pledge breaks, which always give the impression of being the main form of programming.

If they were as good at actual journalism as they are at asking for money*, they would kick ass. I’ve included local public stations in my list here. None of them are go-to sites for the public. I just scanned through them, and here’s the rundown:

• Maryland Public Television displays no evidence that a hurricane is going on.
• WHYY Philadelphia-Wilmington: Pointage to Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, which ran from 10-Noon today. The top Special Announcement is “Visit NewsWorks.org or follow @NewsWorksWHYY on Twitter for continuing coverage of Hurricane Sandy.”
• WNET in New York is itself almost inert. But it does have links to its three broadcast outlet pages. thirteen.org in Metro Focus has a scary visual of likely flooding in New York, last updated at 7:38pm Sunday. WLIW, another of its stations, has the same pointage. That’s about it. Its NJTV site is a bit more current. They post this: “Committed to serving Garden State residents during what is predicted to be an exceptional storm in Hurricane Sandy, NJTV will provide updates throughout the day plus Gov. Chris Christie’s next press conference. Monday night, join Managing Editor Mike Schneider for full storm analysis during live NJ Today broadcasts at 6 pm, 7:30 and 11 pm. Residents can also expect ongoing weather-related news updates on the network’s Facebook andTwitter sites. NJTV is also planning a joint broadcast with WNET’s MetroFocus news program on Tuesday night at 9:30 pm, to assess the effect of the storm on the Tri-State area.” Can’t wait.
• WETA in Washington, D.C. has exactly nothing. WHUT appears to be down.
• CPBN, the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network, has nothing.
• WGBH in Boston points to a show about the great hurricane of ’38. Almost helpful, that."

So when is Pub Media going to go to the public and crowd source important events? Andy Carvin was covering Sandy from his appartment - it's not even hard to do. So what is the reason that most stations don't do this?