WTOP News: DC, MD and VA News

I just came in from my car. It is September 20th. There is a story on the air about beaches reopening because they were closed due to medical waste washing ashore earlier in the week. I go to the app and search ‘beaches’ and ‘beach’. There is no link to this story. No articles come up that are less than a few years old. So I then search ‘medical waste’ I get stories from earlier in the week from 2 days ago, but not the one currently on the air. This app is ALWAYS like this. You can never find the story unless it is a major headline. Sometimes they announce on air a keyword to search to find more information on a story the article but not lately.

The app functions fine, however it doesn’t fit my screen correctly and the upper section covers my clock and my network & battery icons at the top. I can’t use the hamburger menu, search or back arrows. As I started writing this I began to wonder if my font size settings might be affecting the UX, but if the app is following the disability developer settings and separating the top UX from the rest of the compliant parts it shouldn’t be an issue. Either way it’s something that needs to be fixed.

Around the DC metro area this radio station is jokingly known as the “all commercial, occasional content all the time”. They stick a commercial in every nook and cranny - And the same lame low end commercials over and over again. The commercials are mostly for overpriced roofers, window installers, plumbers and “clinics” for erectile disfunction or any other disease, or fake disease a hypochondriac could imagine. Basically, if you hear a commercial on this station (and that’s mostly what you’ll hear) you want to avoid that company like the plague. I have had this app for a few years and throughout the day I would check in at the top of the hour for news updates or for weather updates or until the commercials drove me away. But the recent version of the app started sticking in a commercial every time you start or pause the app. That’s a new low and the last straw for me. It’s ridiculous to force feed so many commercials, especially at a time when people are fleeing commercial driven media for on-demand services. I know the station is owned by some greedy media conglomerate that couldn’t care less about quality, but the listening experience on this app (and station) has become intolerable. Unless you love endless bad commercials from lame companies, don’t waste you time with WTOP.