I can't remember who brought this to my attention, but I'm glad they did! WeatherBrains, a weekly netcast for weather geeks, recently interviewed David Clark from The Weather Channel. For those of you who have no idea who David Clark is, he's the current president of The Weather Company's TV division. Which basically means that he oversees all programming decisions for the network. And he's been with the network for almost three years.
If you still have any interest in The Weather Channel, you'll definitely want to download the podcast or watch the video! Mr. Clark takes over an hour of his no doubt busy schedule to talk to the guys. And in doing so, answers a lot of questions about where TWC has been (within the last decade or so) and where it's going.
Even though I haven't watched TWC in years, I have to give major props to Mr. Clark for taking the time to answer questions. I also want to thank the guys at WeatherBrains for asking a lot of great questions and giving a voice to weather geeks like myself who were once raving fans of the channel.
You can download the podcast or watch the netcast on the WeatherBrains website. If you don't have an hour to spend or are just interested in the highlights, here are the things I thought were interesting.
David starts by mentioning the announcement last week about their decision to move back to covering the weather 24 hours a day. (If you missed that announcement, I wrote a short post about it on our Facebook page.) He states that the move will take at least a few months to complete, and was driving partly by viewer feedback. Which is interesting because people like myself have been complaining about the lack of weather coverage for over a decade now!
Later on, David gets into the release of the iPhone and how that was when they started taking a major shift towards long-form programming. Before the iPhone, TWC was considered the country's "weather app." If you wanted to get your local weather forecast (when your local news wasn't on), your choices were basically local radio and TWC's local forecast.
It's one thing to speculate that the iPhone hit TWC hard in terms of viewership, but Mr. Clark looked back at the ratings. What he found pretty much confirmed his suspicions. Years ago, viewership would have huge spikes every ten minutes. Those spikes generally don't exist today.
It's interesting that weather websites didn't have that much impact on viewership, but the iPhone did. I guess that viewers just got used to checking the weather on their phone, rather than TWC. And as a result, the only reason to ever watch was during severe weather.
So with people starting to get their local forecast from their phone, The Weather Channel started looking for ways to replace that lost viewership with something else. So they tried a number of things, including "Forecast and a Flick." David admits that showing movies was probably their worst idea.
Kevin (one of the "WeatherBrains") asks David if weather geeks are a large enough audience to support the network on a day-to-day basis. David says "probably not," which is why they've waited so long to switch back to 24/7 weather. The long-form shows have been very good to them in terms of ratings and advertising revenue.
David then talks about how they might be looking at "success" in a different way going forward. They would like to try to see if they can get some of their core weather geek audience back. He also sees live weather coverage as a more successful platform in the long run. I assume he means that eventually people get tired of taped shows, but live coverage is always new.
Dr. John Scala mentions that when he was at TWC, there was a shift from the fundamentals of forecasting to more of a focus on personalities and short stories. Which is one of the reasons why he left. So he asks David about what shifts he sees coming.
David believes that we'll see a shift towards 24/7 "forecast-driven" coverage mixed with "science explainers." The reason for this is that while many don't necessarily need TWC for their forecast, many are still interested in hearing from an expert. Especially when there's severe weather in the area.
With the idea of a return to 24/7 weather in mind, Nate (another "WeatherBrain") asks David if they plan to apply the same approach towards the website. David points out that most visitors come to weather.com via their local forecast page and not the home page. So most don't see the non-weather stories. However, he does believe they will "tighten up" the content in the future, making it more weather-related.
After David's answer, Nate asks another question related to the click bate type headlines like "50 million people affected by Winter Storm." Nate wonders what TWC's motive is behind headlines like that. David states that click bate is "a tantalizing headline, you click on the headline, and it's not the story you expected." And therefore TWC doesn't do click bate.
Actually, that is not click bate. I've never come across a website that had a headline, and when I clicked the headline, I was greeted with a different story. Click bate is where you develop your headlines in a way that's designed to get clicks (hence the name).
So a non click bate version of the headline above would be "Winter Storm headed to the east coast." Both headlines are true, but the first one is designed to get more clicks because it evokes emotion in the reader. They see it and think "wow 50 million people!?"
Regardless of what click bate is, David says that it's "a line that we're trying to walk." I'm not sure what he meant by that, but he says that we can expect a return to more weather-related content. I'm not sure how that relates to sensational weather headlines, but it would be nice to see less stories about abandoned parks and what the "fattest" cities are.
Rick (another "WeatherBrain") asks about the status of the show "Weather Geeks." He wonders how it's doing in the ratings and whether it will continue to be part of the programming. David states that it has been successful and will continue. Furthermore, he believes the show should be an hour long, but hasn't yet convinced Marshall (the host).
Since David mentioned their spat with DirecTV, Nate asks him to go into more detail about what happened and what they learned from it. Mr. Clark explains that there are generally two ways for a cable channel to make money. One is advertisers and the other is subscription fees.
In case you're not aware, a subscription fee is a payment made to the channel by your cable or satellite provider. The amount they pay is based on the number of subscribers they have. The amount per subscriber is generally pretty low (ex. 5 cents), but when you're a large provider like DirecTV, that fee can be well over a million dollars!
As with any contract involving money, cable networks try to get the most amount possible when their contract is up for renewal. Their ability to get more, David says, is based on the size of their audience. So as an example, Disney-ABC owns ABC, ABC Family, half of A&E, ESPN, and the Disney Channel.
As a result, if Disney-ABC doesn't get what they want, a provider could loose a good chunk of their audience. Not good. So they have an enormous amount of leverage. Whereas a company like TWC only has one channel, and therefore less leverage. But providers can't pass those increases in fees on to the consumer, so they try to make up for it by giving smaller channels a smaller subscriber fee.
David says that they were surprised that the "weather community" seemed to side with DirecTV. Speaking only for myself, I'm not sure why he was surprised. TWC abandoned their serious, professional 24/7 weather coverage for a mix of weather "personalities" and reality shows. And then when DirecTV didn't renew their contract, they expected us to drop DirecTV for another provider that carried TWC. Why in the world would I go to that amount of trouble to help a network that I no longer cared about, and seemed to no longer care about me as a viewer!?
I don't begrudge TWC for trying to get a fair price from DirecTV. And I have no problem with them trying to get viewers involved in getting them back on the air. What I had a problem with was the way in which TWC handled the situation. As I said, TWC didn't just ask viewers to call and ask DirecTV to get the channel back on the air. They (and in particular their CEO David Kenny) went way overboard. First, they said that DirecTV dropped them.
Now I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that a provider can't just drop a network when they have a contract. TWC's contract expired, so by law DirecTV couldn't continue to air TWC. So if my understanding of that is correct, TWC lied to viewers. Not cool!
If that wasn't bad enough, TWC asked viewers to call Congress! They also demanded that viewers switch providers, as a way to show DirecTV that they were serious about TWC. Their reasoning for this was that they believed that people were going to die if they didn't have access to TWC.
I'm sorry, but I have to call bull on that. TWC is no doubt important to many people, but something that will cause them to loose their life without it? Please. In today's digital age, there are several other outlets that people can access for severe weather information. Besides tons of internet websites and apps, there's local TV, local radio, and weather radios.
Again, I don't blame The Weather Channel for doing what's necessary to stay on the air with fair subscriber fees. But I thought the way they handled it was childish and unprofessional. And Kevin (one of the "WeatherBrains") seems to agree with me. Not surprisingly, David believes that David Kenny (the CEO) handled the situation as best he could.
On to the next question, James (the "head WeatherBrain") asks David about the naming of winter storms and TOR:CON. James tells David that it will be "mass chaos" if every weather service starts coming up with their own severe weather indexes. He proposes a standard of sorts that every service uses, so there's no confusion.
David tries to clear up the misconception that both ideas came from their marketing department. He says that both ideas came from their meteorologists, with TOR:CON coming specifically from Dr. Forbes. He says that TOR:CON came with a desire to simplify things for audiences.
In regards to naming winter storms, David says that while they believe that winter storms should be named, they don't mind at all if someone else (like the National Weather Service) does the naming. Like with TOR:CON, the idea for naming winter storms came about with the desire to make things simple for the viewer.
I'm not a meteorologist, but I disagree with David here. Regardless of who names them, I think naming winter storms makes things confusing. First starters, winter storms are generally much larger than tropical systems. They also take on many shapes (whereas tropical storms and hurricanes have relatively similar shapes and sizes), and occasionally merge with other storm systems.
Secondly, winter storms tend to move much quicker than tropical systems. And obviously there are (generally) a lot more of them in a season. And it's because of this uniformity and slowness that tropical systems are easier for the viewer to identify and track.
Plus, tropical systems have very specific requirements as to their classification and naming. Not so much with winter storms - at least as far as I've seen. Although I do agree that it makes it easier to talk about them on social media.
After that discussion, James asks David about an email exchange between him and Al Roker that garnered headlines a few weeks ago. David says that the emails had nothing to do with the cancellation of Al's show. Furthermore, he says that they did not receive one phone call from news outlets attempting to confirm the story.
The decision to drop Al's show was made prior to the exchange, and was due to the high cost of taping in New York and Al having to do five hours of TV every morning. So they decided to reallocate those resources elsewhere. Al will continue to be part of TWC, but in the form of storm coverage and possibly some specials.
James then asks David to clear up what happened with Sam Champion and AMHQ. David states that this was another story that the press got wrong. The show its self is not going anywhere and Sam will be helping with the expanding programming in prime time.
And that ends my analysis of the episode. If you're interested in hearing more, I encourage you to view or listen to the entire episode on the WeatherBrains website.
Beloved, long-time Weather Channel OCM Dave Schwartz passed away on Saturday, July 30th. His death marked the end of a long battle with cancer. Dave was without a doubt my favorite OCM.