Friday, February 13, 2009

Timing of no-longer-will-publish notice interesting

The Fayetteville City Council voted to renew the contract with The Arkansas-Democrat Gazette (parent company of the Northwest Arkansas Times) last week. That exclusive contract covers public notices of government actions.
This week, the Northwest Arkanasas Times informed the manager of the public-access stations, Government Channel and Cable Access Television, that the newspaper no longer will publish the weekly schedules of the two Fayetteville stations in its Sunday Living Section. This service was treated as news and not as a public notice. The Public, Educational and Government channels' listings do not appear in the normal TV guide of either paper.
CAT 18 has its own Web site that is supposed include weekly listings and the city Web site includes government-channel listings.
The list of links at right on this blog spot includes links to blogspots that also run the listings for those channels.
But many views of the PEG channels clip and save the week's schedules from the newspaper and will miss the printed version.
Anyone wanting to receive those schedules may ask to be on CAT's mailing list by telephoning 444-3435. Anyone wanting to be on the government-channel mailing list may email rdelahoussaye@ci.fayetteville.ar.us


The reduction in advertising revenue caused by the weakness of the economy has forced not only the Times but most other newspapers to reduce the amount space available for features such as local public-television schedules.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Amusing that the newspaper decides to cut out free copy that people find useful, and they think that will save the business.

It does make the case, against their own interest, that people can get this information elsewhere -- online -- as they could well get all public notices from the city.