Module 3 Blog

After further research I have concluded that the radio was the most effective medium when it came to communicating important information out to the community. The specific community I am focusing on is the city of Valley City. Mayor Mary Lee Neilson, identifiable spokeswoman, was on the radio many times giving updates about what was going on. However, at times I feel she passed off the questions she didn’t know, which was more often than not, to someone else. Now this is a good thing but also could be a credibility issue as well. Giving the questions to someone who is more knowledgeable to answer it gives the people of the community a more accurate answer on that specific crisis. However, it kind of gave the impression that the mayor had no clue what was going on at times, in my opinion. Some of the other spokespeople that you heard on the radio was city commissioner Jon Wagar, VC Public School superintendant Dean Koppleman, and VC Public Works employee Jeff Differding. They all gave information regarding their specific area of work.
After doing some informal interviews amongst my family members, every single one agreed that the radio was the most effective form of communication. They stated that even if you were in the car you could tune the radio in and get the latest updates. If you heard the siren blowing you knew that if you turned on the radio that within minutes you could hear the meaning of that siren. Whether it was to fill more sandbags, get more volunteers or the most recent was to notify of the sewer failure. One family member said if you wanted visuals on what was going on, as citizens were encouraged not to ‘site see’, the newspaper and local news stations were the best place for that. My sister who is living in Bozeman, MT said her best place of information came from Facebook. She attended VCSU for a few semesters so has friends from VCSU on her account and there were lots of students putting up picture albums of all the flood happenings. She said it was almost like a picture book of updates.
I have a bit more research I am going to do about each additional spokesperson Valley City had and following the rule in our book of only have one spokesperson decide if the city followed it. If the actions the city took to communicate that information to the citizens helped or hurt the Mayor and/or the cities credibility issues.