Severe Weather Slam Dunk

Friday, May 26, 2015

The morning started with the grind typical of all morning news meetings.  We were still in flood conditions as the rains continued to fall in a record month for rainfall, giving us too much of what we had prayed for during three years of drought.  It seemed a straightforward day ahead covering the high water.

At about 2  p.m., that all changed when we got a severe weather warning. What followed was an impressive display of new media muscle.  The TV-broadcast weather team was already in continuous coverage as were all their competitors. The web producers were right on the heels of the on-air team, maybe five minutes behind.  One of them, Garrett Powders, is an RSU alum.  Garrett and another web producer knew to start feeding the website, while web manager, Richard Clark, instantly stared feeding social media.

It was more than regurgitation.  Each of them pulled media from multiple sources, weather radar, helicopter video, and photos and video from the field to create a product different from the on-air broadcast. Each producer made her or his own decision about what material to plug into the website, Facebook and Twitter in a product that can be described as new arrival in the royal pantheon of news coverage.  Which form is now dominant?  It depends on where the customer is.  If you're watching at home, the TV is king.  But most people are somewhere else, especially in the middle of the afternoon. Through alerts from weather apps, robust coverage on computers at work, smartphones and tablets, everyone, everywhere could know if tornado, hail or lighting was headed their way.  Also, the TV broadcast was being streamed on the web.

For a traditional media guy, it was magic.  No, I'm not so old that I don't access the new world, young whippersnappers. I, too, often hit the radar online and have a weather app on my iPhone.  Thank you. But to see it as the producers are entering this content click by click, picture by picture, was exciting and enlightening.

The question is, how does any station get these new media users over to their newscasts or sell to them in the ten seconds they are checking radar.  The reality is many young people will never become regular viewers of TV newscasts?  As I heard one student express, "If the news is important, it will find me?"