I hate TV weather

See, as I said, I hate the callers who call and bitch that we're preempting a show for weather, but I love the callers who say we saved their lives because they were able to get out of the line of storms and get to safety.

 

I still say weather.com is the way to go. I can pull up the radar and use the satellite imagery to zero in ON MY HOUSE within a couple of minutes. The "local" news from half an hour away will not give me anything remotely as useful.

 

Not everyone has the Internet. Not everyone has cable or satellite.

 

Exactly. And it sounds like tonight is a night when these warnings are needed.

Not overkill, at all.

 

True. That's why I'm not saying we should drop the weather from the local news. On the rare occasions I watch the local news, the weather is the one thing I'm most interested in, but I can't tell you the last time I watched it.

 

I happen to agree with that. My fascination with tropical storms/hurricanes is well documented, so I'd be a hypocrite to say otherwise. My posts on this thread are about the other 350 days of the year, when severe weather is not an issue.

When it's news, when it's potentially life-threatening, go for it.

 

I'm guessing far more people want in-depth sports coverage on a normal day than want in-depth weather analysis (anything beyond high/low/precip), but I could be wrong.

 

The answer is -- at least in a larger, metered market -- because your rating is established every 15 minutes, the first five minutes of the 15 minute period are the most important.

You get credit for a viewer if they watch you for 5 minutes in a 15 minute period. That's why you almost never see a commercial between 5:00 to 5:05 or 5:15 to 5:20 in a 5pm newscast - you are trying to keep the viewer solidly through that period. Weather almost always comes in the period around 5:17 - 5:20, with the 5 day or 7 day forecast slightly after the 5:20, because that's what viewers are most interested in.

Sports, not weather, comes at the end of the show, because (a) the last minutes of the show have the least impact on the ratings, and (b) a huge portion of the audience doesn't give a single shit about sports. Seriously. If there is no compelling local story that crosses over to the non-sports fan, the tune out of the sports segment is large enough that some stations have eliminated sports altogether.

A large portion of the audience cares very much about the weather, and on a day with serious weather the numbers will go up significantly.

 

On local TV they do. They confuse highlights with the turning point, fail to provide context (even where a team is in the standings unless it's football) and generally cheerlead rather than report.
Local TV weather can be as short as a minute -- will it rain or snow tomorrow, and do I need a coat? -- or go on forever the way Tom Skilling does in Chicago. He goes on so long, the director finally punches up the forecast slides and forces Skilling to read 'em off. But Skilling brings in millions so he can do that.
And gee, isn't it funny that it ends up being about money.
Which, in my city, is why storm warnings that scroll across the screen disappear when a commercial comes on, even if we haven't gotten past the "From the Fox 17 Triple-Doppler Weather Center..." The warning can wait until the ads are over. Sheesh.

 

Tornadoes are one and two counties away from here.....And my dad/sister live in one of them.

 

Holy shit. The tornado sirens are going off in my town.......

I love storms and all, but I HATE tornadoes.

 

Get to a shelter, now.