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The days of meteorologists logging eight- or even 12-hour workdays are long gone.
“Weather is going to occur 24/7, and we’re on-call 24/7,” said John Gumm, chief meteorologist at CBS affiliate WKRC-TV Cincinnati. “In my position, even on the weekends, if there’s weather, I need to respond.”
Because of technology, Gumm no longer needs to race to the station to update on-air crawls and other alerts the outlet is sending to mobile phones or streaming channels. Instead, he can log in anywhere– even from his smartphone – to trigger or update alerts and he can adjust the way they appear if they happen to interfere with what’s currently on the air.
“I can go into the system and change the crawl to fit what we might have on the TV a little bit better,” Gumm said. “If, for instance, we have a football game on, I can change that crawl position so that it doesn’t block any scores from other games.”
Gumm has been pioneering use of Max Alert Live, a new solution from The Weather Company, at Sinclair, which has signed over 70 of its stations to use the alerting technology.
He talked about his experience with Max Alert Live during a webinar, “What Is Your Alerting Strategy? Enhance Alerts with Rich, Precise Information for Weather and Beyond.”
Automating Alerts, Updating from Anywhere
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To illustrate the impact Max Alert Live can have on his station’s weather reporting capabilities, Gumm offered a hypothetical scenario that could reasonably unfold on any given day. He imagined a relatively calm