2012.01.06
School closing announcements no longer on roanoke.com
We’re no longer posting school closing and delays on roanoke.com.
We’ve been able to post this information for the past six years thanks to a partnership with public radio station WVTF, which allowed us to pick up a feed of the closings sent to and compiled at the radio station. As its listening area has grown well beyond the bounds of Western Virginia, WVTF found it increasingly difficult to manage this service.
“While our broadcast area was growing, technology advanced, resulting in our service becoming superfluous to other media offerings as well as direct-to-user methods used by schools and colleges such as text messaging and posts on their web sites and social media. Additionally, local TV stations – early entrants in providing this service – put the information and update it on their web sites and by crawling it continuously on the screen,” WVTF explains on its Web site. You can read the radio stations’s decision here.
Our only option to continue to offering the information is to manage it within The Roanoke Times newsroom. Like WVTF, we don’t feel it’s the best use of our resources given all of the other sources of this information.
I wondered about that, and I think it’s a bad decision, honestly. I tried looking for information earlier this month and found nothing, not even a notice that it wasn’t being offered. I tend to come to this website far more often than the TV news outlets, and one of the things I always checked was the list of closings. It unfortunately seems like the RT is purposefully doing whatever it can to drive away paper subscribers and web traffic, at least to the casual reader/observer.
I guess there’s yet one more thing I won’t be coming to the website for in the future. It’s a shame too, because there’s some good writers with good features, but it’s increasingly becoming a ‘what’s the point?’ sort of ordeal…especially with the pervasive belligerence that is tolerated and/or encouraged on many of the blogs.
Comment by Other John — January 15, 2012 @ 12:50 pm
Every school district has some sort of hotline, iPhone app, you name it, to get the word out. Radio and TV stations are pretty much in the same boat – they are truly the last to know. The teenage crowd knows it far faster, and if fast asleep when it finally gets to the masses. Makes pretty good sense to me. Pretty good time to pull this off, too, given the relatively mild winter we’ve had.
Comment by Rick H. — January 24, 2012 @ 4:49 pm