By Hannah Osborne
Matt Santini is the mayor of Cartersville, GA, the station manager of WBHF, and the play-by-play voice of the Cartersville Purple Hurricanes. Santini has served WBHF for 22 years and the community of Cartersville for 15 years. The Bartow County community faced three tornadoes over a five-year period, and WBHF played a vital role in not just providing coverage, but in rallying recovering funds for the community.
The Georgia Association of Broadcaster’s Bob Houghton talked with Santini about the difference AM radio can make in times of disaster, as well as the power of AM radio in connecting a community.
GAB: How would you describe WBHF place in Cartersville and its impact on the community?
“WBHF has been part of the Cartersville and Bartow County community for nearly 77 years. We have had a number of different formats, but the one thing the station has always done and had a priority on is local news, as well as local sports. We’re a little bit of an oddity now in today’s broadcasting world, we’re a sole operator. We’re a stand-alone, 1,000 watt AM station and we do have an FM translator. Our task is to serve the Bartow County community. We’ve been the source for credible content 7 days a week. We’ve been here for emergencies and weather events; any type of positive or negative information that the community needs to know about, we’ve been here for them.”
GAB: Over the past few years Cartersville has been the target of three major tornadoes and several other local emergencies. Tell me about your experience during these times of crisis and the role your AM station played before, during, and after these events.
“Fortunately, we’re just past the decade mark of not having a tornado, but we went through a period of time where we had three tornadoes in a 5-year period. We’re close to the Atlanta market, which is a great resource, you can track the tornado with the Atlanta radio stations. At the same time, they’re covering other communities when there’s bad weather, so we use them as a resource for some of the modeling.
“We had one in March of 2008 and what I remember most about that particular day, coming into the radio station to provide local coverage, I was on the air, I had a news reporter with me, and that particular tornado was heading for downtown Cartersville. I actually instructed my news reporter to leave the studio and get into the safe area we have here, which she refused, so we continued to provide the coverage. What I remember most about that day was saying ‘Hey if you’re out on the roads right now there is a tornado coming towards our community, if you have nowhere to go, come to us, we have a safe area.’ We had 12 people, that were out on the roads in the storm, that came to the station and we provided shelter for them. Fortunately, that tornado did leave the ground and veer off from the downtown tornado. With that tornado, we worked with the United Way and some of the local churches to provide needs. I have a friend with Phoenix Aaron with access to a helicopter and we followed the path of the damage, getting a sense of where it came from, where it went. Cartersville dodged a bullet that day, but our friends in Bartow County, and neighboring counties didn’t.
“In Pine Log, in April of 2011, a tornado struck in the middle of the night in a remote area of the county that at the time did not have good cell service or internet. That one caught everyone by surprise because this was a very odd event that hit at about 2 o’clock in the morning, so you can imagine the trouble that first responders had. After that event, the next loss project was installing a countywide alert system that would better cover the county. In the days and weeks after the tornado the community really came together. Our radio station reached out and teamed up with a local newspaper and a popular local social media site, and we did a radiothon. The three of us banded together and in one morning we raised over $35,000 for local tornado relief. Again, a 1,000-watt radio station, a local newspaper, and a local social media site raised over $35,000 in a 5-hour period. It remains my most rewarding day as a broadcaster for what we were able to do for the community.
“The third tornado was in January of 2013 and at the time of the disaster, I was sitting in a restaurant with a couple of my colleagues when we got word that there was a tornado warning occurring. We drove through the storm, making it safely back to the radio station to help with coverage. There was a F3 tornado that took a couple of lives in the north end of our community in Adairsville. That’s what broadcasters do, and that’s been our experience, we provided help through the United Way and with the help of local churches up there to provide information and resources to those affected by the event.”
GAB: You’re the mayor of Cartersville and play an important role at WBHF as the manager of the program, tell us the role the radio station has in the community and the size and scope of Cartersville. Tell us a little bit about being the mayor, being a public official in the community, and the role you play in the community.
“Cartersville and Bartow County are a quickly growing area. We’ve tried to keep a lid on it, but I think it’s getting ready to come upon us. Cartersville currently has a little more than 20,000 residents, we’re right off I-75, which plays to our advantage and we’re about the midway point to Atlanta and Chattanooga.
“I’m fairly certain there’s not many places that have their mayor as their station manager and their station manager as their mayor. To me it’s really important to make sure that, speaking from a broadcaster’s perspective, to maintain our credibility and our ethics. It’s really easy from an outside perspective to think that we may not cover an event that would reflect poorly on me. I try to keep my role as the mayor as separate from the news department as I possibly can. There’s time as a mayor that I have information that would make a great story that I cannot share with the news staff, I have to let them obtain that information organically. There are times I have to tell the news department, when it comes to issues with the city of Cartersville, if there’s something that is to be critical of the city everybody is empowered to do that. If you don’t have credibility as a broadcaster, you have little else. Everybody knows, good or bad, they’re to do news stories and if attributable, that’s fine. We don’t try to grease the wheels for the city. 10:20-10:35.
“For instance, our public works director will come in if the roads are icy, and the police and fire know that they can use us as a resource. I wish more governments would view media outlets as a resource instead of a threat. It’s been an interesting and fun combination, but again, if I was a station manager and not a mayor I would be glad to have a mayor that viewed us as a resource to share information with the public, and if I was a mayor who wasn’t a station manager I would be appreciative that there is a local outlet that you can use to get and share information.”
GAB: You are also the play-by-play voice of the Cartersville Purple Hurricanes, a perennial state power in football and baseball, with alumni playing at the professional level in both sports including the number one draft pick in the 2021 Draft, Trevor Lawrence. In most southern towns, local high school sports are extremely important. How does WBHF connect with the community and their involvement in local teams?
“We have been fortunate that our area has had fantastic athletes. You mentioned Trevor, the first year I was a contract employee with the station at the time of Ronnie Brown’s senior year, who went on to be the second pick of the NFL draft of the Miami Dolphins; Andre Fluellen who was the third round pick of the Detroit Lions in 2008. A few years ago we had Anthony Seigler, he was the 20th pick of the MLB draft.
“We’ve been in a great area for sports, when you bring up football it is a key component in the south in particular. What I’m really proud of with our station is since the beginning the station has covered Cartersville football, but we bring in a team of people, we have a friend who started the Adairsville High School Sports Network, and Charles Wilson we work hand-in-glove within Bartow Sports Zone. On a Friday night in Cartersville, we cover all four teams with active streaming. During the halftimes, we put together packages with highlights of all the teams, so that not only Cartersville students, but all students, can have their names on the radio and receive the recognition they deserve. I’m really proud of the fact that we do football of course, but we do a rather robust basketball schedule, and baseball, we even did soccer a couple of years ago. An opportunity to spotlight as many of the good things that are going on amongst our youths. We do a showcase game for Little League baseball as well, the top two teams as of a certain date play and I go out there to do a live broadcast and it’s an awful lot of fun.
“Being a broadcaster you have to cover news and sometimes that means you’re covering the bad things, but we try to mix in a lot of the good things. A radio station is only as good as it’s willing to be involved in the community and we make it a high priority to find different, and interesting ways to interact with the community, and sports is certainly a common and simple one to do.”
GAB: Some people say that radio is like water or electricity, it’s taken for granted until the faucet is dry or there is no light. AM radio provides safety, community service, and a direct relationship with the sports teams, the life blood of your city. What does Cartersville look like without WBHF?
“It leaves a tremendous void in credible and attributable information. I mentioned our newspaper earlier, they, like a lot of other newspapers in smaller towns, have cut back to three publications a week. Social media sites claim to be media sites, but typically their information is public speculation or it’s not attributable or any level of responsibility for the information they report. What we all want, is not just information, but attributable, responsible, credible information because that’s the only thing that stamps out misinformation. In addition to the news and the sports, our morning show spotlights local organizations, non-profits or people doing interesting things so that they can tell people about what’s going on if they are interested in being involved or if they are in need of a certain service, or if there’s a festival going on downtown. How they can get involved and make the most of being a part of our community.
“I’ll sum it up with this, there was one time, I wasn’t in the broadcasting business long, when somebody said ‘Well why is it such a big deal? It’s just a 1,000-watt AM radio station.’ I said ‘That’s exactly right, that is why it’s a big deal because there are a thousand places where for instance in the south you can listen to the Georgia Bulldogs, or hear what is going on in Atlanta, but there is only one place where you are going to find out what happened at a Uharley City council meeting or a White City council meeting or a Bartow County school board meeting. There are seven smaller towns here in Bartow County and we cover all of them.’
“Again the void that’s left, if you’re not going to get it there, where else are you going to get it? These local radio stations, every AM radio station in the country, they’re local. They’re providing information to people that care about what’s going on in their own backyard. Without that conduit, it would really have a negative impact on communities.”
GAB: One last question, tell us about why keeping the AM radio in the car is so important.
“I will go back to the example I gave earlier about having listeners come by the station for safety while a tornado was approaching. When there’s a time of need and you put something out over the air, you might be wondering if there’s anybody on the other side, but to get that reaction and for people to take the work that we did and sought shelter because of the words that came out of my mouth, that’s pretty powerful. Listening habits and options have changed over the last number of years, and everyone relies on the Internet. I have heard the water and electricity analogy, evolution has been through the internet and when your phone is working and the wifi is up, everything’s great. When it’s not, you’ve got a real problem. In times of severe weather, internet connectivity is among the first to go, right there along with electricity. AM radio tends to stand. I have likened the removal of AM from vehicles to removing smoke detectors from homes. Your smoke detector is there for you every day. You may or may not think about it daily until it becomes a lifesaver.”
