When the snow flies, it’s not the only blizzard we’re dealing with in the KWWL Newsroom. We’re buried under an avalanche of emails, phone calls and faxes with weather-related announcements. And after a day like today, we have to wonder whether our service is a good thing gone too far.

To be sure, people have come to depend on KWWL and KWWL.com to relay announcements about schools cancelling classes or dismissing early. The same goes for snow emergencies, church service cancellations and large businesses shutting down because of bad weather. But lately, it seems that we’re dealing with a lot more than that. Small clubs, groups and businesses tell us they want their announcements published too. One has to wonder why these groups of 10 or 15 people don’t just use a phone tree or an email list to notify everyone, but that’s a question for another day. The challenge for us is finding a way to serve them all in some way.

Running every cancellation - large and small - at the bottom of the screen is an impractical solution. With literally hundreds of announcements, the list gets so long it could take 30 minutes or longer for any one cancellation to be seen just once. In our over-scheduled lives, that’s just too long for many people to wait.

Instead, we’ve opted for a two-tiered solution. Our policy is to take every announcement request. Other stations don’t always do this, but we believe we need to make an effort to serve our customers in every way possible. We publish school announcements, church announcements, government announcements and snow emergencies on KWWL and KWWL.com because they’re likely to affect the most people. KWWL.com offers all announcements immediately. The priority list running on KWWL runs as efficiently as possible. We publish other announcements only on KWWL.com. These may be small businesses, civic organizations and other groups. You might even learn about someone’s 30th wedding anniversary. These smaller announcements are also immediately available online.

To be sure, it’s not a perfect solution. I’ve taken a call or two from an event organizer who explains some of her group members don’t have computers. Even so, we believe this solution is the best way to deal with what’s become a Pandora’s box full of announcement requests. A line from the 1982 Star Trek movie comes to mind. Spock says, “…logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Captain Kirk responds, “Or the one.”

Posted under From the Corner Office