Local Radio Station Proves News is Essential

While living through an almost year-long pandemic, many businesses have faced major struggles. Bars, restaurants, stores, but what about media? Big Radio’s Lorin Cox helped shed a little light on how Covid-19 affected local media outlets.

Although it is often looked over, news is an essential part of life. To be informed about the events going on around you, is a powerful tool we should all possess. With the obvious fact that sports have been impacted, Cox explained that the amount of news stories never went down, but the number of events covered did. Lorin Cox said, “The pandemic changed what type of news we had and made us find it in new ways, but we never had a shortage of stories to cover. The world moves too fast for news to truly slow down, even at the local level”. 

With the shift of in-person to virtual events, Big Radio didn’t seem to have much of an issue. Some news assignments cannot realistically be done remotely. At the beginning of the pandemic, Big Radio’s Janesville office was moving to a different building. Cox said, “We had technological challenges with our new systems and getting everything properly transitioned.” He added that with the limitations of remote work, some of the audio was affected, but all-in-all, Covid-19 didn’t make a huge change to how they function as a company. 

This pandemic has brought on not only physical challenges, but emotional as well. Keeping the lightheartedness of the news proved to be a difficult task at the beginning of the rise of Covid-19. Cox explained, “The pandemic started off very heavy on the negative side, but I think once we all as a society got a better understand of what was going on and how life was going to be different, it became easier to find a lot more of the lighter side.” He admits that with all of the events from 2020, he believes that it brought people together to do better and see the lighter side of things. 

As we leap into the start of the year, it is important to remind yourself that this will not last forever. You can find more Covid-19 information at www.cdc.gov.