CLEVELAND — Hello, News 5 app reader. I have something to share with you. Well, some of you. Those of you who have our push notifications enabled on your phone don’t need to read this. Here: You can scram and read this story about a guy in Cleveland who turned his entire house into a pipe organ. It’s a delight.
For those of you who have downloaded our app to your phones but do not have notifications enabled, stay right here because we need to talk.
There are a few reasons why you may not get our push alerts, ranging from “I already get a lot of notifications thank you very much” to “I did not know that was a thing.”
If you didn’t know our notifications were a thing, let’s fix that.
How to get our push notifications
1. Open your News 5 app and tap Settings at bottom of screen
2. Tap Notification Settings
3. Enable News, Weather and Sports – or just the ones you want
Hit Back, and you’re all set.
If you want to silence the sound on notifications, go into your phone’s Settings, find Notifications, go to News 5 and disable Sounds.
As for the rest of you…
If you elected not to receive our notifications on your phone, we need to talk, because, frankly, you’re missing out.
We’re not like those other guys – pushing a bunch of stories that don’t really matter, all of which read like they are written by a soulless news robot who thinks the words “Key issue to be studied by committee” is a headline that an actual human would want to click. Not us, friend. We aim higher. Every push alert is discussed by our team. They are all quite intentional and very much written by humans.
Intention means always asking: Is this story, or is this live video, worth disrupting someone’s day? I mean, there you are, perhaps enjoying a kielbasa or some other local delicacy, when out of nowhere you get a message on your phone that totally takes your attention away from savory smoked Eastern European meats. The notification says something like, “Murder spree killer on the loose,” and it doesn’t say where, so you assume it must be happening here, and then you click to open it, because you do not want to be murdered as part of a spree, and it’s happening in Missouri, and it’s not that you don’t care about the good people of Missouri, but your life is not in danger, and now your mood is ruined and your kielbasa of joy has become a kielbasa of sadness.
That’s the old bait-and-switch, and we don’t do that.
When we disrupt your life, it will be for newsworthy and mainly local reasons.
Such as:
- We’ve got some concerning/bad/terrifying weather headed our way
- And related stuff like power outages, floods, closures
- Some major global/national thing happened
- There is local news that impacts a lot of people
- This includes major crimes
- We’re breaking news related to some high-interest topic
- Such as, for example, a pandemic
- You cannot drive on a major freeway at the moment because of an accident or some such
- Something happened Cleveland sports fans will be talking about
- There’s a weird or fun story you'll want to see
This list is not exclusive, but that covers a lot of it. We promise only to bother you when it’s important or when the news has enough merit. But that’s only half of the News 5 Push Alert Promise. The other half of the promise is that we will communicate with you as if we are human beings writing the news and as if you are a human being who is reading it. This is why, when we’re not covering some life-and-death story, you will occasionally receive push notifications like these actual push alerts that we have sent to our followers this year.
The News 5 Push Alert Promise is this: We will not annoy you, and will inform you, and we will occasionally delight you, with notifications from our app.
We may occasionally miss the mark, in your eyes. For example: We may report on some news out of Mentor that is of little interest to folks in Portage County. We may have a nasty weather in Huron County that is of no consequence to folks in Geauga. Give us a little leeway on that. We cover 17 counties and millions of people. Buuuuuuuut if we get to the point where you just can’t take it anymore, email me at joe.donatelli@wews.com, and we’ll talk it out.
Don’t have the app? Whaaaa?
If you made it this far into a local news article about push notifications on your phone and you do not have our app on your phone, your destiny now is clear.
Download for iPhone and iPad here
Joe Donatelli is the digital director at News 5 Cleveland. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Email: joe.donatelli@wews.com.
