90.7 WFAE is the NPR news public radio station for the Charlotte, NC market. Eric Teel serves as program director for WFAE and handles quality control for everything heard on the station, with production elements, announcer training, the schedule of programs, promotional strategies and more falling under his umbrella.
WFAE was already using Comrex hardware at two of their studios daily for connecting remote guests and hosts for live broadcasts. They also used the equipment to help other stations and network partners talk to Charlotte-based guests. However, for election night coverage, they were looking for a solution to replace phone calls for reporters on location.
Teel discovered Comrex Gagl – a remote contribution audio service that works with Comrex hardware IP codecs – through his engineer, Jobie Sprinkle. “It looked like it was going to check a number of boxes for us for the things that we were trying to do for election night.”
Gagl is available as a monthly subscription, which makes it particularly well-suited for one-off events that require multiple correspondents. “It was the thing that we were scratching our heads about leading up to election night,” Teel said. “How do I get them all connected so they can hear the show? You can’t listen to radio as your monitoring source and be involved in a live program. Nobody can deal with that kind of latency. So we needed that real time audio feed for everyone.”
On election night, WFAE put together a two hour live & local broadcast that was a combination of local news segments and primary national election news content from NPR in Washington. “I put my local talk show host in a studio with a panel of political analysts and experts to reflect on data that was being reported nationally and state and local race data from our journalists.”
WFAE stationed staff at various locations around the state, including Raleigh where some of the local Charlotte race representatives and candidates decided to host their post-election parties. WFAE also placed two people at different headquarters in Charlotte while the rest of the crew was in the building to follow AP and collect data. “During our broadcast, our host was able to call on the folks at those remote locations for live comments during our live broadcast.”
Teel served as the coordinator, producer, and board operator for the live election night programming. In terms of installation, Teel found Gagl to be a piece of cake. “Click, configure, done – it was that easy,” said Teel. “It was not even an issue. I mean, if you can open a word document, you can utilize this. It took us less than 30 minutes to get it configured.”
On the user side, the reporters found Gagl to be a simple solution too. “We basically gave them the link, and at a specific time we asked all of them to click the connect button,”said Teel. “This is basic stuff for anyone that works with technology. I would even trust sending a link out to a guest that doesn’t work in the broadcast world because it’s easy enough to use.”
Gagl gives users the ability to host up to five remote participants per session. “We only ever had one user talking on the air, but we had multiple people connected at the same time so that they weren’t out of the blue being brought onto a show with no context of what was discussed,” said Teel. “We fed our live program audio back to everyone that was on Gagl, so that they could listen along to the program in real time and be informed when they were asked to chime in.”
“To do a live broadcast with people at multiple remote locations, Gagl checks all of the boxes. It’s very easy to use and gives you an interface to communicate to your team seamlessly. ”