Here are a few announcements from Potomac Local News.
National stage
Potomac Local went national this week. For the first time, not one but two national TV networks — CBS News and ABC News — showed a video we shot for a local story in Stafford County on their respective evening newscasts. See the CBS video here.
We were honored to have been approached by both networks, who asked us to use the video of parents walking their children to school on Monday, January 24, participating in “Mask-off Monday.”
In years past, Washington, D.C.-area TV stations have featured videos that we’ve shot on stories randing from pedestrian fatalities to tornado damage. Sharing our video is one more way we’re working to tell the story of our community.
An update on obituaries
After much deliberation and consultation with our web developers, we’ll no longer regularly update our obituary section. For the past five years, we’ve used a script to automatically pull information from obituaries posted to the websites of funeral homes that operate in our region and then post that information to our website.
These posts have resulted in varied and poor user experiences in recent months. In some cases, the script would pull in the entire obituary and post to our site, and other times it would include only a link to a funeral home website or just a name and photo.
That’s not how our community members should be remembered.
Over the years, funeral home operators updated their websites, leading to complications with our script interacting with the respective sites.
In the future, we’ll continue to accept and post obituaries sent to us directly from funeral homes.
For years, we’ve tried to make obituaries work on our website. After the News & Messenger (formerly Potomac News and Manassas Journal Messenger) closed in 2012, many readers asked me if Potomac Local News could feature obituaries similarly to how they appeared in the newspaper.
I had several meetings with funeral home operators to create a new relationship between our companies. However, after the newspaper’s closure, many funeral home operators told me they were taking the cash they used to pay the newspaper to feature obituaries and use it to upgrade their websites.
As it turned out, they weren’t interested in paying us to feature obituaries when they had just improved the obituary section on their websites.
Because I know how popular obituaries are among our readers, for your reference, I’ve listed the websites of funeral homes in our area from which we used to pull information.
- Baker-Post Funeral Home
- Covenant Funeral Home
- Mountcastle-Turch Funeral Home
- Mullins and Thompson Funeral Home
- Pierce Funeral Home
Increased ads — But not for our members
Some have noticed the presence of more ads on our website. After announcing our website is now maintained by Local News Now, for the first time since 2012, we reintroduced network or “programmatic” ads to our site.
Programmatic ad slots are filled automatically and are meant to compliment the feel of the site, and aim to cater to our readers. Unlike the ads that have traditionally appeared on our site, the programmatic ads were not sold directly by me or someone from our team.
On stories written exclusively for our members, programmatic ads will not be shown.
Your support matters
Finally, thanks to all our subscribers who continue to support our effort to tell the story of our community. Reader support has never been more critical to our operation.
Please consider becoming a member today for 100% access to our content.
