By Ken Lass
You are glued to your TV set, watching NCIS, or The Voice, or a rerun of Judge Judy, or The Bachelor. And just as the bachelor is about to decide whether to extend a rose to the evil, conniving, two-timing brunette, or the sweet and innocent blonde who grew up in an orphanage, the show is interrupted.
Suddenly on your screen is a local weather person standing in front of a multi-colored radar image, telling you there is a thunderstorm warning in Winston County. They switch to a young reporter standing on a street corner in Haleyville, who informs you it’s not raining there yet, but as soon as it does, you’ll see it here first.
You live in Trussville. Or Moody, or Pinson, or Center Point. You glance out your window. Nothing but clear skies and calm conditions. They interrupted an important show like Funniest Home Videos for this?
I get it. You’re frustrated. Maybe you even take the name of the weather person in vain. Maybe after hours of constant weather coverage, it never does rain at your house. They got it wrong again. Why must we have weather every ten minutes, or every six minutes, or every breathing moment of life?
Maybe take a deep cleansing breath for a moment. Let’s pause and look at the big picture (no pun intended). Keep in mind a local TV station is a business. As such, its primary function is to turn a profit for its owner. The station makes money by selling commercial time. The more viewers you have, the more you can charge for those ads.
You generate viewers to your local newscast by doing stories that people are interested in, stories that affect their lives. So let’s see, what is the one story that affects everybody’s life? Of course, it’s the weather. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who is not at least casually interested in what the weather is going to be like tomorrow.
That information is especially in demand by young mothers with children, the holy grail of TV viewers. Women aged 25 to 49, who must decide how to dress the kiddos for school. Advertisers will pay top dollar to flash their products across the screen to them. So you try your best to attract those viewers by giving them weather. Lots of weather. Drill it into their brains that, when they want to know the weather, they can come to you. Maybe stick with you. Maybe they’ll watch the rest of the newscast and hang around to see Vanna White’s latest dress on Wheel of Fortune.
Stations rely on the weather people to make that happen. It’s not an easy job. Thankless sometimes. They are tasked with forecasting accurately for an impossibly wide area. The conditions in Tuscaloosa may be far different from those in Anniston. There may be a tornado watch in Cullman, while the wind may not be strong enough to bend a flower in Clanton. In severe weather they are asked to fill continuous airtime for hours upon hours, often with very little new information to report. All the while knowing the station is receiving a million phone calls from angry viewers who want them to switch back to Dancing With The Stars.
Ironically, when a TV station jumps into continuous coverage mode, they actually lose money. All those commercial breaks go down the drain. The motives are mostly altruistic. The weather people really are concerned with saving lives and providing adequate warning of dangerous stuff that may, or may not, be on the way. Naturally, there is hope that a by-product of the coverage will be the winning of new fans to more permanent viewership.
I can tell you that most TV weather people are great folks, salt of the earth types. I know this to be true because I spent forty-three years working alongside them in TV newsrooms, thirty of those years in Birmingham. Yes, sometimes you begin to glaze over when they start talking about vortex signatures, or when they excitedly try to explain how the station’s Super Galactic Doppler Ten Million Interstellar Star Crushing Radar system works.
But I also watched them spend countless hours giving of their time to speak to school kids and charitable organizations, educating about staying safe, and raising funds for causes of many types. Chances are both you and your child had a TV meteorologist come speak at your school at some point. Yet they are never completely off the clock. Tornadoes don’t take weekends and holidays off. Weather people learn to take the viewer complaints in stride, secure in knowing they are serving the greater good.
And by the way, they almost always get it right. It’s just that when they get it wrong, everybody notices. Everybody.
So the next time they break into your favorite program, be kind. Somehow, somewhere, somebody’s life may depend on it.