Nothing new. This is the second time this has happened on CityNews.
 

RadioActive wrote:

CityNews was interrupted several times Wednesday for what I believe was the first actual official use of the new Emergency Alert system that came into effect in April. While I suppose it was effective, it was also kinda weird. The message interrupted City's The 5 newscast, with a large red banner in the middle of the screen that obliterated several in progress reports. A very off putting robotic voice read the words as they crawled by, which in this case was a warning about possible tornados in certain parts of City's viewing area. 

Meteorologist Adam Stiles would later explain to viewers that the process was completely out of the station's control and it could easily happen again anytime.  

I turned to several other TV newscasts, but no one else seemed to be doing them and I didn't hear anything similar on local radio, beyond the usual host reading Environment Canada warnings. I suppose the first big test worked, at least on City, but it was certainly very odd and you might have thought it would have appeared - as the late great Mark Dailey might have said - Everywhere. 

I heard some emergency alerts on 680 News around 5:30 p.m., and what sounded like the tail end of one on 640 at around the same time.

I would love to see numbers, and there's probably no way they could be reliably generated other than by Rogers or Bell, but how many people, when this 'alert' happens in the middle of their newscast, turn to another newscast for 'breaking news'.    

IMHO the danger of this 'breaking in' during a newscast, is it makes the 'news' look like they don't know what's happening or what's supposed to be important.  I'm all for breaking in during Two broke girls or whatever, but there should be a way around this.
 

I was listening to Bill Carroll and there were several interruptions after 5:00.

What was interesting was that nobody on air was aware they were being interrupted.  After one announcement, Bill and Chris were trying to figure out if they were actually on the air.    Then, after another interruption, they proceeded to explain what was going on and, sure enough, that was interrupted.

I really do wish they used better voice synthesis.  My android phone is much much better and is actually rather easy to understand.  
 

Larry Fedoruk devoted the first half hour of his show on CKTB to this very thing Thursday. He was apparently inundated with angry tweets and emails from people who were pissed off by the constant interruptions. The listener complaints ranged from the robotic voice that some found hard to understand to the fact that, because the station's signal goes a long way, the alerts weren't meant for their immediate area, yet they kept hearing them. And some who were in the affected places were perturbed that the sun was shining when the weather warnings came and there was no sign of anything coming.

Fedoruk worries that if those in control of what he called "a new toy" continue to use it the way they did here, people will simply stop taking it seriously and tune out the message altogether, perhaps on the one occasion when something really is imminent. 

Larry agreed with some of the tweets, but explained it was out of his control and wondered if the system needs a lot of tweaking - especially since he spent a good part of his Wednesday show constantly updating the weather, essentially making the alert interruptions totally redundant. 

Just one last note about Larry Fedoruk's coverage of this story, which was also brought up on RB's Live Drive. In a later recap toward the end of his show, Fedoruk made three interesting points.

1) He indicated Pelmorex was supposed to give advance notice to stations about the interruption, but no one apparently contacted any of them. He predicted there would be a flood of phone calls by radio outlets to the company asking, "what the hell was that?"

2) He tried to explain to listeners why the hosts on talk radio couldn't hear what was on the air, due to having to monitor the studio feed instead of the on air output, mainly thanks to the delay system. That may explain why so many talkers weren't aware of what was going on during their show. 

3) And finally, while I'm sure the system will eventually work itself out, Fedoruk concluded with what may be the line of the day on this issue. "The biggest disaster," he concluded, "was the system itself."