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It was always the secret sauce of ratings success. I can’t tell you how many times I woke up on a key day in the old “sweeps” world with one thought on my mind: Please let there be weather! Severe weather? Great. But simply the mere presence of inconvenient weather would often be enough to juice the numbers.
I’m sure there were even a few times we tried to make the most of a passing rain shower. When people wanted weather information, there was really only one place to go — your local TV newscast. Hang on, I’m tearing up. Those were good times.
Fast forward to today and everyone has a virtual meteorologist in his or her pocket. Weather information is available to us all day long from a variety of somewhat reliable tech-driven sources, available on your phone or even smartwatch. Local stations no longer can hold “a first look at the weekend forecast” over your head to get you to watch a few minutes more.
Despite this, the local meteorologist has actually held up pretty well from a value standpoint in the eyes of the news consumer. Any research project that features a local content inventory comes back with weather still at the top of the list. Local meteorologists also tend to be the breakthrough talent in a local landscape that has seen the number of newscast superstars shrink dramatically in recent years.
Why is this? And