Adding Commentary to an Active On-Air Crawl Using SkyAlert

Did you know that you can edit the crawl text during an active weather event while your SkyAlert is in Monitor mode? It's a quick and easy way to add commentary to an active on-air crawl, so that you can react to changing conditions the instant new information becomes available. This capability allows you to give viewers more information about the changing characteristics, speed and direction of a weather event as it nears populated areas. You can also add customized, local storm damage information to keep your audience up to date with changing conditions.

Follow These Easy Steps to Edit the Crawl Text During an Active Weather Event

1. When SkyAlert detects an active weather event in Monitor mode, the Active Crawl window appears containing three editable fields:

• Comment after Header - Displays text that appears after the Header field
• Crawl body - Contains the body of the crawl text field
• Comment before Trailer - Show text that appears after the Crawl body, but before the Trailer field
  

Although the Crawl body is an editable field that can be changed, WSI recommends that you do not make any changes to this portion of the crawl text. The crawl body is updated whenever new data arrives, so any changes will disappear when a new bulletin is issued.

2. To change one of the fields, place the cursor in the appropriate field and type the desired message. You can also replace text in the field with new text. Remember that the header and the trailer (previously set up in Edit mode) are still displaying, even though they do not appear in this window.

3. Once the desired text is entered, click the Apply button. The new text will be added to the crawl text during the next crawl cycle. Any changes made to the Comment after Header and Comment before Trailer fields will remain until you enter Edit mode.

If you wish to remove any changes that you made to any of the fields, click on the Restore button on the right hand side of the window. This will undo any changes that you made to all of the fields after clicking the apply button.

If you make changes that you would like to delete BEFORE you click the Apply button, click the Clear button at the end of the field to quickly delete all changes. Note that each field has its own Clear button.

NOTE that all editable fields will return the their default - or original - setting when the active weather event expires, or when SkyAlert is put back into Edit mode.