Boston radio and school closing/delay announcements

[Scott Fybush]

On 2/12/2013 8:26 PM, Ari Alpert wrote:

> In Providence, I noticed that WPRO AM continues to list all cities
> and towns on a regular basis (enter memories of Salty Brine saying
> "no school Foster Glocester").
>
> Are other markets trending away from this practice too?

Yes, and with good reason. As the parent of a fourth-grader, I don't 
depend on broadcast radio to tell me if she has school or not. Our 
district has a call-out service that will alert us, as well as text 
messaging - and even if those messages don't get through, I'd rather sit 
through 3 or 4 minutes of text scrolling on the bottom of the local TV 
stations than 15 or 20 minutes waiting for something to be read on the 
radio.

(Having said that: I'm just as peeved at the way some of my local TV 
stations don't edit their crawls. Over the weekend, I calculated that 
all of the 13 cancellations that were running in an interminable loop 
for hours on the local cable news channel affected maybe a total of 800 
potential viewers, even ignoring that some were for events that had 
already expired. Is it worth the potential of serving some of those 800 
people at the peril of annoying hundreds of thousands of other potential 
viewers?)

And of course in the case of a storm like the one New England just 
experienced, do you really NEED anyone to tell you there's no school in 
your particular district? Once the governor has banned travel, it's 
pretty much a given that everything's cancelled, isn't it?

s