Camas man's service delivers crucial news

Craig Walker started out providing snow alerts in Clark and Multnomah counties, and now runs a one-man business that keeps the media updated in cities across the United States. (TROY WAYRYNEN/The Columbian)

Craig Walker, 54, measures his life in winters. This is the 30th year that the season has dominated his life.

The first was 1979. He went to work for an education service district in Portland in September that year, a job in communications. The job was about a lot of things, but the part about snow was what changed his life, turned him into an Internet entrepreneur, and changed news distribution across much of the Pacific Northwest. But we’re getting ahead of things.

Walker’s communications job wasn’t just about snow, but that was a big part of it.

“I was in charge of getting the school closing news out for Southwest Washington, Multnomah County and Clackamas County,” he said.

Nobody had e-mail back then, let alone fax machines, so this was a telephone, paper and pencil job. It required phone calls to school districts, long lists of closures, and then calls to newspapers, radio and TV stations, to update each. It was grueling work.

And when Walker left the education service district in 1993, nobody else wanted the responsibility, so he agreed to continue, on a contract basis. When it snowed he stayed up all night, talking to superintendents, updating TV stations, no sleep until the word was out.

The fax machine helped, when it arrived on the scene. “We finally broke free from the verbal communication chain where things can get written down incorrectly,” Walker said. There was no more mistaking Schuebel, Ore., for Washougal, Wash. But it was still a sleepless job.

The great leap forward came in 1998.

“I got the four local TV stations together and said, what if we do e-mail?”

Executives at KOIN Channel 6 had an even better idea. They offered to build Walker a Web site that would send an e-mail to other news organizations — and at the same time would automatically update the KOIN news site.

“The next year all the news sites wanted this,” Walker said. He hired a tech firm to take control of the Web development, then added a feature that allowed school districts to directly enter their weather updates online. Automatic updates, automatic e-mails to the media.

And FlashAlert was born.

With the power of the Web, Walker has built his simple concept into much more than the original School Information Network.

He branched out geographically, moving beyond Portland and Clark County to serve communities in Colorado, Texas, Alaska. He branched out from school districts, inviting police, cities, hospitals, and others with emergency news to join the network — for an annual fee of less than $250 apiece. And then he moved beyond emergency news, allowing subscribers to reach the media with updates about community meetings, Red Cross statistics, volunteer opportunities.

Two years ago Walker started letting individuals sign up for e-mail alerts.

“We can send out information to parents, school district employees, and so on, directly,” he said.

The service has nearly 2,000 clients — two-thirds in the Vancouver-Portland area — and about 75,000 individual alert subscribers

“It’s been tremendously helpful in my line of work,” said Kim Kapp, spokeswoman for the Vancouver Police Department, which signed up for the service six years ago. “It’s been absolutely the best way for us to get information out quickly that gets the attention of the media.”

Walker’s service cuts down on overhead and administrative work she would need to do to keep up a media contact list, and allows any authorized police department employee to send alerts without going in to work, Kapp said.

“And Craig Walker is the easiest guy in the world to work with,” she said. “He’s a one-man shop, and he’s always accessible.”

FlashAlert sends dozens of updates each day, by e-mail and through automatic Web site updates at news organizations (including The Columbian).

The job is less about snow than it’s ever been, but when it falls Walker still has sleepless nights.

“When we had the ice storm five years ago, I did not leave my house from Sunday afternoon to the next Friday morning, I was so busy,” Walker said. This most recent storm, he did make it outside — but never without an iPhone that kept him connected to calls, e-mails and Web updates.

“Winter is my busy season,” he said. “From November to March, I don’t leave town. I don’t travel.”

For 30 winters, now, that’s been his policy, a policy that early on sometimes felt like a trap. But with snow delays and freezing rain and school cancellations piled up over decades in his memory, Walker looks back on the winters of his career with pride.

“I get out faster, better information so people can make decisions,” he said. “I don’t want anybody waiting at the end of an icy driveway for a school bus that will never come.”