For the past 20 years, we have been collecting, aggregating, and disseminating news and information related to transit and transportation every work day, with very few exceptions. Now, the time has come to sunset this product to concentrate on other projects and tasks.
After careful consideration, we have decided to promote other news aggregation sites and to focus our efforts on teaching users how to better execute transportation research. The end of our current fiscal year seems like a good time to say goodbye to our Los Angeles Transportation Headlines, and our final issue will go out on June 27th.
We launched our Headlines in 2005, when the internet, journalism, blogging, information sharing and public advocacy all looked very different than today. So much has evolved since then. Our effort to push coverage of local mobility issues to Metro’s planning department staff eventually grew a subscriber base of over 5,000 users across Metro’s workforce and beyond Southern California to other parts of the country and around the world. We began with brief emails, then moved on to a blogging platform, RSS feeds, Google keyword alerts, and other tools before launching a full-scale digital newspaper over the past several years.
However, that endeavor has become unsustainable for several reasons. The sheer volume of resources to be consulted, analyzed and optimized for inclusion has grown exponentially.
We currently publish approximately 2,000 links to news stories each month, and have probably distributed more than 200,000 since we began — meaning we have probably “eyeballed” close to a million stories to consider for inclusion. Metro’s librarians have done this one by one, day after day, for two decades.
We now want to channel that dedication, perseverance, and commitment into a new communication product going forward. We will maintain our subscribers database for now, and we hope to share more details toward the end of the month.