Thursday, November 2, 2023

Changes have arrived to the way PJXM dishes out police news for the Fort St. John and Dawson Creek areas as the detachments are not posting media releases to X or to their respective websites as much as they once did.

In fact, the Dawson Creek RCMP has not posted anything to X since September 30, 2023, and the Fort St. John RCMP hasn’t posted any media releases to X since mid October 2023. The same goes with the detachments website. Many other BC detachments, including the Prince George RCMP, continue to actively use X (Twitter) to post those much needed media releases for the news outlets and the public.

That tells PJXM that both the major BC Peace detachments are no longer interested in posting details unless it is a major incident that would require the news media’s help, following what Chetwynd and Hudson’s Hope do, posting only major incidents. While it is 100 percent the job of a news outlet to call into the RCMP, PJXM has never relied on that method over the 14 years in business to get news out to PJXM readers and that won’t change.

PJXM has always relied on a hard copy of a police media release for accuracy and accountability. Phone calls do not work as the phone call will need to be recorded in order to get an accurate picture and accountability. As for emailing the media relation officers on an incident, that is not good enough either as the information is limited in details and at most times is sent from an out-of-community RCMP detachment.

Due to this change, PJXM has relied on other communities for police news like Quesnel, Williams Lake, Kelowna, and Kamloops to fill out the news section of the website in order to keep website traffic at the required threshold. PJXM has also increased the number of BC government news stories to fill the gaps.

PJXM has since removed the BC Peace Region news section from its website and now all major police news from those two communities will be included within the BC News section effective immediately. That will include all other news from Fort St. John and Dawson Creek as well, which would be major highway closures and weather related information.

Questions? Email PJXM News at news@pjxmn.com