Shocking: Snowmageddon Means Ratings Gold

Photograph by wonggawei on Flickr

It's no surprise why TV news divisions love winter weather events like Snowmageddon/Snowpocalypse 2010—keep hyping it, viewers keep tuning to see what will unfold! Storm Field, weather man (and son of Dr. Frank!) tells the NY Times, "There was a point — I think this goes back 20 years or more — when you had consultants coming in, telling stations weather was something important and you should move it up in the show.... I had these moments where I thought they wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t get on the air like Crazy Eddie and scream, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming, white death from the sky.’" Wait, like this infamous AccuWeather.com guy?

Field added, "Therefore, the more ratings you can generate, the more revenue you can generate. And in a failing economic climate where people can go online and get instant weather gratification, they’ve got to do something." See, people, that's what your damned weather widget is up to—it's forcing TV folks to do something.

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By Jen Chung in News on February 17, 2010 3:28 PM

Comments [rss]

MT

P.S. has any one made the connection yet that the psycho accuweather.com above does the local weather for 1010 WINS?

Joe Schumacher

Bringing on the crazy does bring in the viewers. That AccuWeather video has almost a million hits. The Washington Post has a story about the meteorologist and his antics.

MT

I vote for "white death from the sky" to replace 'Snowpocalypse/snowmageddon.'

Storm Field just got crazy cool in my book.

jaycjay

There's no link to the Times story above, but it's here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/nyregion/17snow.html

It all summarizes why I get my weather info directly from the NOAA website... actual forecasts instead of hyped coverage of forecasts.

SP

Me too. Love it. weather.GOV not weather.COM, sukkas.

SP

No fucking shit. That's been my argument all along. Weathermen (and women) are fame whores who are bitter that they only get two or three minutes of camera time to tell us shit we can figure out on our own just by looking out the goddam window. Whenever there's even a HINT of a storm they hype it to no end just so they can be the center of attention for few more days. Gothamist is guilty of this too. SNOWPOCALYPSE and all those other bullshit alarmist headlines are only meant to generate pageviews.