A Must-Have App for Local News Bloggers
by Matt on May 12, 2009 in Blogging
If you’re a hyperlocal news blogger, I’m betting you already have a police scanner in your home/office that you use to keep an ear on what local emergency personnel are doing in your neighborhood. But what about when you’re not at home or in your office? How do you keep track of activity then?
If you have an iPhone, you must download and use an app called Emergency Radio. Here’s its WWW home page and here’s its iTunes download page. Emergency Radio has more than 900 frequencies listed right now, and the creators say more are added with each software update. (It even has my small-town Benton County, WA, frequency – but it doesn’t have our local city police.) You can see the full list of frequencies here.
Have a look at a couple screenshots:
After starting the app, I clicked the NEARBY tab at the bottom and the left-side screenshot is what I saw — my nearest frequency at the top. I clicked on the first listing, which led to the screenshot you see on the right. The audio begins to load right away, and streams within about 5 seconds. A nice touch — the app includes that scrollable list of police and emergency codes so you can understand better what you’re listening to. Another nice touch is the ability to save any frequency into a “favorites” list for quicker access.
How’s the Audio Quality?
Terrific. It sounds exactly like I remember scanners sounding back in my newsroom days. In other words, some of the audio is crystal-clear, and some of it is static-y and garbled. But that’s the nature of the beast. Here’s what matters: It’s plenty good enough to replace the need for a regular scanner, assuming of course that all of your local frequencies are included.
It’s All About Convenience
The biggest thing here is convenience. If you’re out and about and, for some reason, you need to have scanner capabilities with you, now you can. Maybe best of all, if you’re actually on the scene covering some fire or police situation, you may be able to listen in as things are happening and make your blog coverage even better. With that in mind, I think it’s a must-have app for all hyperlocal news bloggers/writers/reporters.
PostScript – Audio Sample
I had wanted to include an audio snippet in this post so you could hear the quality for yourself, but didn’t think of a way to do that until right after I hit the PUBLISH button. So, here I am an hour later with a short video that includes actual audio from the iPhone:
Pretty good, isn’t it? 
Your turn: Are there other iPhone or mobile apps that make life easier for local bloggers? Please share in the comments.
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Too cool Matt! The audio I heard was excellent. I have a Blackberry, but I want an iPhone. That is a great app.
Hi Matt. That is a very cool app. I was a crime reporter for 12 years, and spent eight years running to disasters and major crime scenes for CBC News in Canada. An app like that would have been invaluable, although, of course, I had a scanner.
I have made my own app that I think you’ll like too. It’s called ‘Poddio’, and it’s basically an entire sound studio on an iPhone. You can record, edit, and then send your finished story over FTP, and later, by email. Check it out on the app store by searching for Poddio. I’d love to know what you think.
thx, and happy blogging.
Very cool, definitely worth the 99 cents.
[...] the way, this is the audio source used in the Emergency Radio iPhone app that I wrote about last year here on HLB. So, whether you’re at home or out and about, you [...]