No, I did not force Broadcastify to end Detroit Fire Department scanner feed

Update: Broadcastify has revived the feed under a new channel.

Rarely have I felt compelled to respond to asinine allegations in a column because I know you have more important things to do. But I am making an exception for this odd claim from a man in San Antonio, Texas because I’ve been getting inundated with inquiries.

Let’s check out the allegations on Broadcastify, a website and app that streams audio from police and fire department scanners:

Naturally, the hundreds of people who listen to the scanner on any given day were angry with me. And many of them have let me know about it.

Trouble is, none of that ever happened.

This started on the eve of Devils’ Night, when the volunteer who provided the Detroit Fire Department scanner feed shut off the service. One of his friends called me and said someone in the city had pressured him to cut off the feed. I wanted to see if this was true and sent him this message on Facebook:

I never heard back from him, so I figured he didn’t want to talk, and I respected that.

That was the end – or so I thought.

But Lindsay Blanton, the COO of Broadcastify/Radio Reference, accused me of harassing the scanner provider. I explained that I sent a single friendly message and never again tried to contact him.

The service has been down since last week. Why? Because of “continuing harassment and threats from Steve Neavling.”

I explained the libelous nature of the absurd claims, to which Blanton responded:

OK.

So then I received an email Thursday from the scanner provider, who said he never made claims that I harassed or threatened him.

His email:

“I was directed to take the feed offline by the team at radio reference, who received threatening emails from a user called motorcitynews towards them and me due to the outage on 10/29/14 and that’s all the information that I have got on this issue.”

Motor City News?

Never heard of them. I feel bad for the scanner provider who appears to be caught in the middle.
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He’s volunteering his time and explained that he’s burned through three computers to provide the feed.

Hopefully Broadcastify/Radio Reference begins providing the service again.

In the meantime, I am tweeting updates of fires using a handheld scanner.

  Broadcastify, fire, Firefighters, Lindsay Blanton, Radio Reference, scanner

Steve Neavling

Steve Neavling lives and works in Detroit as an investigative journalist. His stories have uncovered corruption, led to arrests and reforms and prompted FBI investigations.

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