I hope Matthew Yglesias gets laid off

Weather is a big deal in Joplin/Pittsburg, according to the TV stations. It's the first thing on every night on the NBC affiliate, no matter what the top story is otherwise. The CBS station puts a recap in its "First 7 Minutes." The CBS station is also sending its meteorologists out on its annual "Sky Watch Weather" tour this month. The CBS station operates the Fox affiliate, so that newscast also places a high emphasis on weather.

I'd guess that of the 25 minutes of the 35-minute 10 p.m. newscast that isn't commercials and banter between anchors, weather gets 10-12 minutes, easily. Sports gets about 8 except on Friday nights during football season. That might get sports bumped up to 10 to 12 minutes, but it will be at the expense of news, not weather.

 

I expected Jeff Jarvis to write this.

 

In a 650-tweet sequence.

 

Here in Boston, weather gets by far the most airtime on local news. Oddly enough, except for the CBS affiliate, sports does not get so much time as might be expected. What DOES get time is endless videos from far away of car chases, cute animal stories, drunken celebrities reeling out of LA nightclubs, etc.

 

I've noticed in the past couple of years that the AJC website always has a weather story on the front page, usually nothing more interesting than "it's going to rain tomorrow" or "it's hot today." Which in July or August? Not exactly breaking fucking news.

 

I'm 30, and haven't watched a TV newscast in years. I would guess that few of my friends ever watch either. I imagine I'm not the only one in my age range who could say that. We don't obsess over the weather and we know we can find it in about 10 seconds on our smart phone. What I see happening is that the older generations crave this info, but as they die off, the TV news is going to have to reformulate its broadcast or nobody will watch.

 

Nobody I know under 40 watches local TV news except my son, who is in politics and public relations, and therefore does so as part of his work.

 

A few thoughts from the TV side of things...

Weather coverage is the biggest driver of viewership, and it's not particularly close. It's almost impossible to overplay weather coverage in local TV news. Every study puts it as the top priority, and every bit of anecdotal information backs it up. We can track viewing patterns minute-to-minute, and a huge number of viewers turn away right after the 7 day forecast airs. (That's why you will typically see the 7-day after the 20 minute mark of the newscast; if we hold onto the viewer from the 15 minute mark to the 20 minute mark we get credit for that viewer for the full quarter hour.)

I work in Phoenix. It's going to be sunny and hot for the next 4 months, until the monsoon hits. People will still be glued to the forecast.

In short, marketing a newscast with a reduced focus on weather would be like doing sports talk radio in Green Bay with a promise that you won't discuss the Packers. You'd be doomed.

As for the Pew study write-up that Vers excerpted:

That 40 percent is an absolute bullshit number. Morning newscasts do a huge amount of traffic and weather because that's why people are tuning in. They generally do not do sports. Evening newscasts do weather and sports, but do not do traffic.

I can tell you the newscast I produce is generally about 15% weather/traffic/sports. I don't know that any of our newscasts top 25%.

I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that government coverage has been cut in half since 2005. I haven't seen anything to suggest that's close to being accurate. Smaller markets cover local governments much more than big markets, but I don't believe there's been a significant shift overall. It is true that there isn't much government coverage on local TV, because government coverage generally makes for brutal television. Local TV is a tricky balancing act of covering important issues while still putting on a TV show people will watch. It takes a lot of time and resources to make a government story watchable. I can send that same crew to a house fire and in 20 minutes they'll give me a story people will watch.

Here's the reality of TV news, and it's something that most managers and producers fight against: if you want ratings to go up, chase ambulances. Everyone says they hate endless crime stories, but the ratings don't lie. The majority of us would rather be doing Stories That Matter. Those stories are frequently boring. Boring on TV is very bad.

 

We got a real reminder not too long ago about how important weather is to local TV. We get our local TV out of Hattiesburg, and when the tornado blew through there a few weeks ago, it wasn't Jim Cantore or the National Weather Service that people were turning to. It was the Local Joes who had the wall-to-wall coverage and the most up-to-the-minute information, and that's who people turned to.

 

The depressing thing about Yglesias is that he doesn't hide the fact that he's a legacy and he tries hard ... but he's still just not very intuitive and when he tries to delve into analysis it is frequently triangulated somewhere between Byzantine, embarrassing, and irrelevant.

 

Let me go back to my original question, which wasn't that weather is unimportant, but that it's such a priority to the exclusion of any good content.

I suppose what I'm saying is: Cut your weather staff down, lead with the 7-day forecast in the first four minutes, and actively pursue an audience that wants more, real news after that. And then pitch yourself as the "more than weather" station.

Maybe it's tilting at windmills, but c'mon: Sooner or later, folks pick a favorite weather guy in the market, and the other stations may want to try something else.

 

I understand your point, Alma, but it won't happen for a variety of reasons beyond an unwillingness to try something new. It would kill the ratings.

First, a quick point on how the ratings work: the ratings are broken up into 15 minute increments, so a half hour newscast will have two quarter-hours that are measured independently. If a viewer watches a total of 5 minutes during that quarter-hour, the station will get credit for the viewer. It's easiest to get and keep that viewer during the first 5 minutes of that window. That's why a 10pm newscast will typically be in solid news from 10:00 to 10:05 without a commercial, and again from 10:15 to 10:20 without a commercial. Weather will often begin during that 10:15 to 10:20 window, with the 7-day coming typically just after the 10:20 mark. We know a huge percentage of viewers will tune out as soon as the 7-day is over, so we're going to make sure we get credit for those viewers.

In short, the 7-day in the first 4 minutes is a non-starter, because we'll destroy our ratings number. We could push it back a minute and get credit for the viewers in the first quarter hour, but the numbers for the second quarter hour will be brutal.

And more to your point, I think, there simply isn't an audience you'll attract by downplaying weather that will come close to making up for the audience you'll give up. In most cases, the weather viewers and the hard news viewers are the same people.

By the way, there is no weather "staff" to cut back on. On my station, the weather "staff" is the guy you see on screen, and I'm in a top 12 market. You may well have a weather producer in a few places like LA or NYC, but it's not common.

And one last pertinent point: weather really isn't bumping any "good content" from the newscast. I produce a half-hour newscast. Subtract all the commercial time and the news hole is about 20 minutes. On a typical day, the weather guy gets 2:30 to 3:30 in the newscast. I don't have sports or traffic. That leaves more than 16 minutes for news.

It's been a long, long, long time since I had anything approaching 16 minutes of "good content" for my newscast. Giving an extra minute to the weather guy isn't bumping an expose on wasteful military spending. It's bumping video of a parrot that can whistle "Copacabana."