weather

While the public can get weather info on their phones and other devices, TV plays a crucial role by putting the nuts-and-bolts of weather reports in perspective. However, the abundance of user-generated content that pours into newsrooms via social media — most notably Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — has been particularly transformative by widening the breadth of what broadcasters can cover. 

The weather service is now providing 24/7 weather reporting to WZTV Nashville, WTVC Chattanooga and KOKH Oklahoma City.

Weather is a big element of local news, but a story about the elements once had to be extraordinary to warrant time on a national newscast. Now it’s routine, and not everyone considers that a change for the better. Over the past five years, the newscasts have essentially doubled the amount of time spent on weather and natural disaster stories. The time has more than quadrupled since the early 1990s, said news consultant Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the content of the broadcasts.

CBS’s Philadelphia duopoly of KYW and WPSG (CW) expanded its weather team last week with the addition of a new resource —  a team of citizen weather observers who have signed up to join the stations’ Eyewitness Weather Watchers group.  As members, the Weather Watchers, who already number more than 100, will help the stations’ […]

The StormPins weather crowdsourcing app turns viewers into “junior meteorologists” by letting them mark, or “pin,” severe weather, as well as the damage it leaves behind, with photos and video on neighborhood maps so other folks know what’s heading their way. Emily Barr, CEO of Graham Media, is such a big believer in StormPins that the company invested in the app. “It really allows local television stations to build a kind of sense of community and reinforce the idea that viewers get to contribute.”

Michigan news site MLive has a huge following around coverage of weather. The site’s weather section has ballooned both in content and readers over the past two years, hitting a high of 13 million page views in January.

In covering tornados over the past week, broadcasters supplemented their more traditional on-air, real-time forecasting and weather radar images with warnings on social media sites, station websites and even robotic telephone calls. Doug Heady, chief meteorologist at KOAM Pittsburg, Kan., says: “I really don’t consider us nowadays to be TV meteorologists; we are kind of multimedia meteorologists.”

After spending the last three years in Fort Wayne, Ind., at LIN Media’s WANE, meteorologist Jonathan Conder is returning to Oklahoma City as the weekend weatherman at Hearst’s KOCO. Prior to working at WANE, Conder worked at KFOR, Oklahoma City’s NBC affiliate, from 2005-2010. Conder says he’s excited to join the KOCO weather team in […]

The most popular mapping and navigational tool on the planet, Google Maps, is expanding its traffic coverage. This week the app added traffic accidents and other incidents courtesy of Waze, the mobile startup Google acquired for $1 billion earlier this summer. This is just one more sign that two of local TV’s biggest drivers — weather and traffic — are under increasing pressure from non-traditional competitors on the platform that increasingly matters the most: mobile.