As devastating wildfires tear through the Los Angeles area, radio has stepped up with around-the-clock emergency coverage. In the middle of the destruction since the beginning, Audacy’s KNX News is delivering critical information to residents in danger.
Radio Ink talked to KNX Director of News and Programming and Brand Manager Alex Silverman about the resilience of his staff, the battle on the ground to keep listeners informed, radio’s enduring role as a lifeline, and the human thread that ties it all together.
Radio Ink: It’s been around 48 hours since the fires began. How is your team doing?
Alex Silverman: It’s been inspiring to see how everybody’s handled themselves through it. And, you know, not a lot of sleep, but it’s been amazing to see how they treat it like they do. It’s a thousand times more intense than what they do on a day-to-day basis, and they get the information out and they don’t stop to eat or think or sleep. Sometimes they have to be reminded to do that, so that’s been part of my job.
Radio Ink: At what point did KNX start emergency coverage?
Alex Silverman: Immediately, when we got the first alerts that fires had broken out. Even before that, really, because we had been alerted by the National Weather Service.
Not only was this the highest level of fire warning, but they were starting to use graphics that I’ve never really seen before with big, bold, italic fonts saying, “This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation.” I’ve been doing this for about 18 years now and I’ve worked with the National Weather Service a lot. They don’t have any incentive to hype things. And when they use words like dangerous and life-threatening, they’re doing it because they mean it. So we prepared for something that would be very dramatic and difficult.
We added staffing. We made sure everybody was ready to work extra hours. We made sure everybody was prepared for the possibility that this would be a bad situation. We got the initial alert that there was a fire in the Hollywood Hills area, which ended up not being a big deal. But then when we got the call on Palisades and that one started to grow, we knew within an hour this was going to be a devastating situation.
Radio Ink: There have been as many as five or six separate fires at once. How many reporters do you have on the ground right now?
Alex Silverman: We have six full-time reporters, but we have had others on staff jumping in. I was a reporter for many years before I became a manager and so I’ve done some reporting because it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. One of our editors was evacuated from his home in the Altadena area. He went on the air and talked about what that experience was like. When you have a widespread event across a metropolitan area like Los Angeles you have to be ready to pivot and turn on a dime.
Radio Ink: What has been the power and cell reception situation?
Alex Silverman: Cell reception has been an issue. We rely on an app called ReportIt, which is our primary way for our reporters to connect and do live hits with the radio station. That is dependent on cell service and there have been several areas where cell service hasn’t been good enough to use that. There have been situations, particularly in Pacific Palisades and Malibu, where our reporters have had to go out to a completely different area in order to connect, send sound back, or get on the air.
First responders are also dealing with this now as more infrastructure is affected and more places lose power and generators run low on fuel. We know that that’s going to be a challenge going forward, but for the time being, we’ve been able to effectively handle it.
Radio Ink: What about on the listener side? Have you seen radio cover that information gap?
Alex Silverman: It’s a huge issue. We know that there are hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people without power across the area. Even the power companies have struggled to provide us with effective or specific information on where the power outages are and how widespread they are.
What that means for us is hundreds of thousands or millions of people depend on radio for information and we know that they’re depending on us.
We’ve gotten nonstop calls from all over the area from people not only asking us for specific information – because they know that we’re the source that’s able to get it to them – but just thanking us for being there and for providing information when they can’t get it any other way. That’s also how, in some cases, we’ve gotten a heads-up about incidents, issues, and even smaller fires that have come up. When they see a fire on the hill, their first thought is to call KNX News.
We don’t know what the over-the-air audience has been over the past few days, but just in terms of streaming, we have seen sustained levels of listening at 300% of what we normally see.
It sends a message about the importance and the relevance and the really critical nature of radio in our society. We can’t lose that message in this.
Radio Ink: Your community is understandably emotional right now. It’s not just grief and fear, either. In some cases, there’s real anger. How do you balance that sort of emotion with distributing information?
Alex Silverman: Our primary mission right now is to get people the information they need. Where are the evacuation zones? Where are the shelters? Where can people get supplies if they need them?
But we also have to cover the questions that people have. People really want to know is what areas have burned. They’re asking, “Is my house still there?” “Why has the power company not turned power back on in some places?”
There have also been political questions and we have covered those political questions. We don’t want to make the whole conversation about political questions right now because we don’t want to get in the way of getting people information. But those will be questions that have to be answered.
And of course, there will be the larger questions about what could have and should have been done differently.
This is an event that will change everything for Los Angeles. We’re going to look at this as before and after January 2025 when we talk about preparing for fires, in much the same way that we talk about the 1994 Northridge earthquake as before and after in terms of earthquake preparedness. Those questions are gonna be covered for a long, long time, and that’s what our audience is gonna be depending on us for. But right now, the critical thing is to get the information they need to stay safe.
Radio Ink: When it comes to radio’s role in a crisis, we saw a similar situation in Maui in 2023 and then there was the devastation in Appalachia from flooding last year. What does radio offer in these situations that no other medium can?
Alex Silverman: We offer immediacy, first of all. We’re always on, we are used to being on 24/7, and so it’s not a stretch for us to make sure that we have the resources to have wall-to-wall coverage.
We also offer the kind of experience that you can’t get by looking on social media, by looking on an app that aggregates without verifying.
We have people who have been doing this for 30 and 40 years, who’ve covered every wildfire. When the wildfire broke out in the Pacific Palisades, our reporter, Pete Demetriou, immediately knew that the last time that area had burned was in the early ’80s. That’s an answer that officials didn’t even have right away.
That kind of information is so valuable when it comes to the firefighting resources and the tactics and how effective they are and what people can rely on.
That kind of experience is unparalleled and the ability to hear it and get that information when there’s no power, there is no medium that can cover disasters in the way the radio can, simply because of the way we’re set up, both in terms of the humans who do it and in terms of how the medium is delivered.
Radio Ink: I know one of your staff, Nataly, had her childhood home burn down and she shared that experience and that grief on air. There has been a viral post about how one of your reporters sheltered someone’s dogs in their car while they returned to the fire to save more. Radio is ultimately a very human medium and that has clearly played a role in KNX’s reporting.
Alex Silverman: Yeah, I was going to mention Nataly because I found it incredible that she went through this horrible, horrible thing and she thought it was important to come on the air and talk about that experience, not just because it was something she went through, but because she knew that hearing somebody talk about the pain of dealing with that and the challenge of processing it, she thought that was important to share with our audience. And she was able to do that despite having to spend the entire day, not just informing, but helping her family through this tragic, tragic loss.
I am in awe of her for her ability to do that. After, I should mention, a day and night of reporting for 12 or 18 hours on everybody else’s devastation.
I do want to say that, and you know this, it’s not just the people that you hear on the air. It is all of our not just reporters and anchors, but our on-air and digital editors who are constantly pushing that information out on social media and on the web. It’s our production assistants who are making sure all of this audio is coming in and all of our reporters are connected and all of the tip messages are being listened to.
Everybody on the team has stepped up in a tremendous way. Everybody has done it without any complaint, without any question about needing to work extra hours. I know we have people on the staff who have made personal sacrifices. Their families and their homes are under threat and they’ve had to evacuate and they’re still showing up here to work because they know how important what we do is. And it is.
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