NPR Stations Launch Text-Only Sites for Low Bandwidth Users in Crisis Areas

"With Hurricane Milton looming, NPR stations got a lower-bandwidth way to reach residents"

Sadly I think that more news sites will need to consider this in the future. We've always built the web on the assumption that every line goes up. The CPUs are going to get beefier, the bandwidth pipe larger, the memory bigger, etc... In the future I don't think that stops for the type of safe wealthy people who don't really need most of the news. But for the readers most badly in need of reliable news and information? Those people won't see the performance lines on their internet accessing devices go up.

An increasing schedule of disasters year after year means we're going to need to reconsider how we serve the people who are most in need of good reporting.

The move mirrored some quick civic-minded action after the last big hurricane, Helene, which devastated parts of western North Carolina. The NC Local News Workshop built a text-only version of several N.C. outlets, including public radio’s Blue Ridge Public Radio and WFDD as well as Asheville Watchdog and Enlace Latino NC. The sites were praised by both readers and public officials.

This sort of work is incredibly important and more news orgs should be considering it. Not just more accessible sites either, how to serve over the Onionweb, how to download data from the site and deliver it outside of the normal connections to the web, how to interact with and support mesh, and likely more that I haven't even thought of. None of that even touches on how many sites that claim to be global organizations are serving heavy sites to areas of the world that, as a rule, have poor internet access. And we'll need to talk with advertisers too about what they can do to support a low bandwidth news world.

Text-only news sites are a niche interest at best in normal times. But a natural disaster is not normal times. (That’s why you’ve seen a thousand stories this week about how to use recent iPhones to text over satellite when cellular networks are down.)