Hurricane Isabel wheeled across the Atlantic heading for landfall and folks in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I live, got busy stocking up on batteries and plywood. Then we got some good news. The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore had been staying here, but he was moving up the coast.
Wilmington and nearby Wrightsville Beach are where the hurricanes come to visit, and so we've gotten used to seeing Weather Channel staff setting up shop here. Like other folks around the country, we've also learned to track hurricanes, winter storms and all kinds of weather events by checking the Weather Channel throughout the day.
In the twenty-one years it's been with us, the Weather Channel has changed the way we think about weather and the way we use weather information. 85 million homes get the Weather Channel--98 percent of the cable households in the US. That's the kind of success no one imagined in the beginning.
The Weather Channel was the brainchild of John Coleman, a television weatherman, who convinced Frank Batten, of Landmark Communications, that a 24 hour weather channel would be a good idea. For a while they were the only two people who thought so.
There were some hints, though. Local television news directors had discovered that they had more viewers who stayed till the end of the local news if they finished with the weather. And newspaper people knew that the weather was one of the few things just about everyone would look for in the paper.
So Coleman and Batten forged ahead, but doubt wasn't the only obstacle they had to overcome. There was also the problem of getting weather information in a form that they could use. That meant developing a way to tap into National Weather Service data for every collection point. It meant developing a satellite feed. And it meant convincing the Weather Service to have every station develop a forecast in the same way.
They brought meteorologists to Atlanta from all over the country. On May 2, 1982, Frank Batten threw the switch to start the Weather Channel. Things began to change almost immediately.
There was a change in who covered the weather. Back then, TV stations often didn't hire meteorologists to do their weather reports. Local stations seemed to favor eccentric characters who dressed strangely. That didn't matter much though because those weather reporters were only on the air for three to four minutes at a time.
The Weather Channel hired professional meteorologists. Their job was to report on the weather and explain it. They came from all over the country, including legendary hurricane expert John Hope from the National Hurricane Center.
Weather on TV was new to Hope and many others. But doing weather on TV the way the Weather Channel did it was new to every one of them, including those who came from television stations. An on-air stint on the Weather Channel lasted four hours instead of four minutes, and that took some getting used to. But it worked.
By 1986 the Weather Channel was breaking even because of fees that cable systems paid to carry this new kind of weather reporting. The cable systems were willing to pay for the Weather Channel because their subscribers wanted to see it.
Today more than half of US viewers rate the Weather Channel as "indispensable." To put that in perspective, that figure's just about double those for Fox News or CNN.
Sure, some of those folks are weather junkies who watch almost all the time, but most aren't. Most Weather Channel viewers are folks like you and me. They're the businessperson checking to see about travel delays, the parent planning a weekend outing, or me figuring out whether to take an umbrella to church or whether to replenish the hurricane emergency kit.
The bottom line is that the Weather Channel delivers value. It gives us important information in a form that makes us want to watch.
There are updates on breaking weather stories, updates on developing storms, and weather service warnings. "On the 8's" there's local weather. If your cable system subscribes to this feature you'll see a specific update and forecast for your area. The Weather Channel developed the technology to make that possible.
The television presence is supplemented by one of the most popular sites on the Web: weather.com. That's where you can find local information whenever you need it, find more information and depth on stories run on television, and sign up for services that will alert your pager or cell phone about emergency weather situations.
The technology is important, but only because it supports the Weather Channel's whole new way of reporting on the weather. You don't get a dry statistical forecast, you get drama. It's a play-by-play approach to reporting the weather that's fueled by the passion of the Weather Channel's personalities.
The first one that I was aware of was John Hope. Here was this white-haired 80-year-old guy who always looked a little rumpled. He was the Hurricane Expert and it really seemed like he knew everything that anybody knew about hurricanes. But even more than that, he loved hurricanes and he loved studying them and he loved sharing what he found with you and me.
We love the Weather Channel because it gives us accurate, timely information that affects our lives. And we love the Weather Channel people who are passionate about the weather and about sharing what they know with us.
Take Jim Cantore. I don't know what he was like as a kid, but I bet he was the one who always wanted to be outside in the rain and the snow and whatever else nature had to offer. Now he gets to do that for a living and tell the rest of us all about it. Maybe more important for me and others where I live, his very location gives us a clue to where the next big weather story is likely to be.
