I was reading about some of the changes this morning. Some good, some bad. More weather, but less staff. Less in the field reporting it seems, more user generated content. (You shouldn't be out in bad weather taking pictures, but if you just happen to be, go ahead and send them to us.)
I don't know if the owners have been very happy. They seem to always be changing things. They probably really do want to sell. The digital side has been the more successful lately. I wonder what things may eventually look like.
I have AccuWeather's weather channel instead of TWC. All it involves is someone in front of a green screen reading stuff off. That's it. And it is not an improvement. (I don't tune in.) You need a mix of things. Less scripted programming is great, unless they wanted to have educational weather shows on rare occasions. They used to have an early morning program a long time ago called Weather In The Classroom I think that I did actually like.
But more live weather, pretty much all live weather is what they need. They do need to keep that interesting to not have people bored. (Weather people like us watch, but you need the casual viewers to keep tuning it to make a profit) WUTV seems like it would be a continued great fit. I don't know what their ratings have been though. (Maybe that is not something casual viewers would like as much, I don't know. I'm biased.) I don't know how they cover live weather on WUTV, such as if they send it to somewhere else if they are covering severe weather. If they were covering a severe tornado, the laid back environment would not be a great idea. But for normal weather, it seems like it would be a lot of fun. I've liked the evening weather coverage, inbetween all the reality TV they have had. In that period they actually covered weather. (Evening Edition or Weather Center, I forget what they call it.) Current weather, covering the past day, and even worldwide, having a wide range of weather information. I wonder if some of that will change and what it might be if they did. (I think that is where they really do it well right now.) User generated content has always been a part of it, and even more would not be bad. I just hope they still go out in the field some. (Hurricanes I'm sure. But maybe less for other weather. Although as long as they continue naming snow storms, they sure need to have someone there!) Come to think of it, naming snow storms might be something that hurt them. They really got hammered on that, not just weather geeks. A lot of people find that ridiculous. That might have hurt their reputation quite a bit.
Also, while some of their digital content is very popular, a lot of times it is weather adjacent, barely, or not at all. They post some funny or interesting stuff on Facebook sometimes, but often they are just desperate to have people click to view ads. Although you didn't have to view an ad to see the tetherball playing ram that comes from this YouTube video. Not sure why they decided now was a good time to put that on Facebook or how that relates to weather, but sure it's funny enough. But I would not really want to see that as a new show of user generated content. (Not even sure if they got permission to use that video.) In reality though, they should probably stick to weather. But the thing is, they get more people sharing the crazier stuff that is often not weather related. So if they make more from that, that is what they go with. (the digital side of The Weather Channel has always been a little nuttier in this regard, but now that makes them more money apparently)
At least Godzilla is weather related. Not just El Niño, he's a cloud, so now he's really weather related.
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Speaking of things not related to weather, I just finished watching a nice documentary this morning on the Homo naledi find:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/dawn-of-humanity.html
Not weather related, but educational at least. (first half is mostly about previous finds) |