Radio contestant Jennifer Strange and her family.
Imagine the frustration, the torment, the sadness.
You've built a great company, you're a responsible broadcaster, you've got one of the better companies to work for, and one day you get a phone call telling you a promotion gone bad at one of your stations has resulted in a listener death.
Never in a thousand years could you have anticipated this scenario. No matter how much planning, how many rules, how much great management, it all came down to a poor decision on the part of some employees in the radio station, who never even imagined someone would really drink too much water and die. Yet Jennifer Strange, a mother of three who was trying to win a Wii video console for her kids in a "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest on Entercom's KDND/Sacramento, died trying to win.
This will go down as one of the biggest promotional tragedies in the radio broadcasting industry.
For almost three years, especially in the last several months as the trial neared, the media has been pounding the story locally and nationally, and the station has often been in the news, but not in a positive light. The GM of the station, the involved employees (10 employees were fired over the incident), the regional VP, and the CEO have probably had days consumed by meetings with $600-per-hour lawyers who defended the company as Strange's family asked the court for $34 million-$44 million for wrongful death. This is a radio nightmare.
Of course, Entercom lost the lawsuit and $16.6 million was awarded to the family yesterday.
I am not in a position to judge whether this was the right settlement, too much or too little to compensate them for their pain. I cannot imagine what this family has gone through. I feel deeply for them.
I also cannot imagine what the people at Entercom and their CEO, David Field, have gone through. I feel deeply for them as well. Entercom has the option to appeal or ask the judge to reduce the award, but nothing has been said about that yet, and Field may have to take more than $16 million from his business, his stockholders, his employees to pay this award. In these days where every dollar counts, this is a huge hit. To those thinking that this big corporation won't even feel it, it's simply not true. A judgment like this could put most any broadcast company today at risk. All because some well-meaning people in the company had a moment of poor judgment.
Knowing David Field as I do, I know he is a buttoned-down, detail-oriented, systems-driven guy. He has high ethics, the utmost professionalism, he is an excellent broadcaster, and I can only imagine how he must be beating himself up, wondering if something could have been done to prevent this tragedy. I'm sure he feels deeply for the family and for his employees, who have been through nearly three years of hell over this.
If anyone in this industry would have had a good prevention system in place, it's David Field. Perhaps a system or rule wasn't followed. That was raised at the trial, but we'll probably never know everything that happened that day.
But in spite of all the systems, all the rules, all the regulations, all the communication, I'm not sure this could have been foreseen. Even if there was a rule that said, "Under no circumstances is the station to do anything that could result in physical harm or death to listeners or employees," most people involved at a promotional level probably would never have considered this a risky promotion. Even if they did know some risk could be involved, they would probably assume than no listener would put their own health at risk to win a prize and would stop before any point of danger. And contestants did sign a standard contest risk waiver, which didn't hold up under California law.
We as an industry need to use this example of a promotion gone wrong as an important lesson. It could have happened to any one of us. If any good comes from this tragedy, perhaps it is the prevention of future tragedy.
Though I'm not saying the people at Entercom were reckless in any way, this is an industry prone to reckless behavior. For instance, I was on the air at 14. I grew up as a teen on the radio, pretty much doing and saying whatever I wanted. I pulled some outrageous stunts, said a lot of foolish things, and frankly it's a miracle something like this didn't happen to me or my stations back then (though we did lose the license of 96X and spent a year in an FCC trial, which is a story for another time).
One of the things that makes radio so magical is that we attract insane people who want to draw attention to themselves. Though there are fewer teens on the air today than in the 1970s, this is still a young and creative business filled with rebels who could easily think up something equally dangerous, not even realizing it. All the more reason we need to invent ways to communicate with employees and have fail-safe systems in place to ensure responsible behavior.
Every radio station manager in the world who reads this should talk about the Entercom story with staff members in a meeting and ask, "What could we have done to prevent this?"
Though we must never remove the fun and playful spirit that brings so much to our airwaves, we need to make sure something like this never happens again.
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