A few months ago, I put a local news app on my phone. Until this week, the alerts were minimal, but the past week my phone has been blowing up with alerts. "News" of road closings, free coffee at Starbucks because registers are broken, and football trades seem to warrant the same attention as Westside shootings, severe weather alerts, and power outages. I really can't tell whether there has been more news recently or the news station has simply decided to send more alerts. I've received at least eight in the past hour, most of them related to horrible storms that came through this afternoon. (There are currently 16,000 households in Jacksonville without electricity, just in case you were wondering.)
The downside of this -- beyond the annoyance -- is that folks will delete the app (or just stop paying attention to it) and not know about serious problems, real news that affects them in their daily lives. I started to delete the app earlier in the week, as it's the only sound on my phone that doesn't turn off when I shut off the ringer. It beeped in class and I looked around innocently as if it weren't my phone making the noise. Later, of course, I confessed. When I did look, the alert was something silly about Florida football. I guess everyone is in such a hurry to be the first to report something that no one bothers to consider that any given story could wait until airtime. Give it a rest, people! A tornado warning is news; free coffee is not.
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