Putting a local TV schedule on the local newspaper's website: how it works and what to watch for

When someone wants to know what's on the local channel tonight, they almost never switch on the TV. They open their phone. And if that phone already has the local newspaper's website for the weather, the news or the bus times, the schedule belongs right there.

That is what we do with Televisió de Castelló (TVCS), a local television station in Castelló, Spain, and the newspaper castello24.com: the TVCS schedule is built into the newspaper's website. Here is how we'd approach it and what to look out for.

Why the schedule makes sense inside the newspaper

A local TV station and a local newspaper share an audience: people from the same city who care about what happens nearby. But that audience doesn't always sit in the same place. Someone reading a story about a town festival or a council meeting may not know it's being broadcast live that afternoon. With the schedule on the site, readers see what's on right now and what comes next. The channel, for its part, gets a shop window on a site people already visit.

What to show

A web schedule is not a printed TV listing. What people check most is usually what's immediate:

• What's on now, clearly highlighted.
• What's next, for people waiting for a specific programme.
• The full day, with a simple way to move to other days.
• Clear times, with no ambiguity or odd formats.
• A direct link to watch the broadcast from there, so nobody has to go looking for it.

One source, not two copies

The most common mistake is keeping the schedule in two places: one for the channel and one for the website. Sooner or later someone forgets to update one of them. The sensible approach is to edit the schedule in a single place and have the website simply read it.

This matters even more with live broadcasts. When we set up a live show, the end time is almost never the planned one: a council meeting runs long, a concert starts late, an official event stretches. If the schedule can't be corrected quickly, readers land on a programme that is no longer on, or miss the one that is.

It shouldn't slow down or break the site

A schedule widget lives alongside everything else on the newspaper's website, which calls for three things:

• Mobile first. Most quick checks happen on a phone; if it doesn't read well there, it's no use.
• Light loading. A module that slows the newspaper's page ends up annoying everyone.
• A plan B. If the data doesn't arrive for any reason, show a sensible message, not an empty gap or an error.

It also needs to look like part of the newspaper: fonts, colours and spacing in line with the rest of the site, not a foreign object pasted in.

One more widget among those people use every day

The schedule works best when it is treated for what it is: a useful everyday tool, like the weather or the city bus. For castello24.com we have also built widgets for those two, and the logic is the same: something concrete, answering a question people ask themselves daily, and giving them a reason to come back to the site.

That's why it pays to avoid filler. A widget that solves nothing is noise. One that tells you in two seconds what's on TV or when the bus is due stays on people's phones.

What sits behind it

Integrating the schedule is the visible part. Behind it are other pieces of a local station's work that are worth having sorted, such as keeping a 24-hour recording of the broadcast, or being able to share a pool signal with other local stations.

Do you run a local TV station or a newspaper and want the schedule to be where people already look? Get in touch and we'll talk it through.