After years of mocking our local meteorologists for being the only profession where you can be wrong half the time and still keep your job, the truth comes out at last. We love our local weather people and we are sad to see them go.
Recently KWWL-TV in Waterloo announced its plan to lay off all four of its meteorologists. One member of the “Storm Track 7” team, Mark “Schnack” Schnackenberg, has been reporting for 30 years. Now, along with Joshua Franson, Brandon Libby and Danny Cassidy he was given two weeks’ notice to clear out his desk because their parent company, the Allen Media Group was replacing local reporting with forecasts from The Weather Channel, based in Atlanta, also owned by the Allen Group. Allen planned to fire more than 100 meteorologists nationwide. But did viewers really care?
Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil used to say, “All politics is local.” The same might be said of weather. When the tornado sirens go off in your town, you’d kind of like to know if a twister is heading for your house. Desperate for this critical information, you go to your local news station which cuts to its weather headquarters in Atlanta, playing a clip of some snowbound Canadian truck drivers. A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center determined that 70 percent of Americans regard local weather forecasts “important to their daily life.”
Some viewers wrote in to express their dissatisfaction with the impending layoffs. DDT wrote, “Another BAD idea in pursuit of saving money.” Bama wrote, “Local weather is the only reason I watch local TV.” Catsk wrote, “The Weather Channel is the WORST. You sure don’t want that channel to rely on during a storm, severe weather or emergency.” Pam wrote, “Local weather is what viewers want, not the canned national stuff not tailored to their regions.”
Byron Allen, 63, owner of Allen Media Group is a self-made billionaire who started out as a stand-up comedian. He purchased an oceanfront mansion in Maui for $22.8 million in 2018, now valued at $100 million. He may be laughing all the way to the bank, but many of his stations’ viewers have vowed to go elsewhere for local news and weather. Some of us old geezers who have lived in Iowa a long time are not laughing with him. We see that our weather is changing. Weather events are becoming more extreme like the EF-5 tornado that flattened Parkersburg, the “thousand-year-flood” in 2008 and the freakish derecho in 2020 that swept away trees and roofs across the state, including so many beautiful trees in Mount Vernon and Lisbon. Canned forecasts out of Atlanta might be worse than merely inaccurate. They might be life-threatening.
A few days following the layoff announcement and the resulting backlash, Allen has “decided to pause and reconsider the strategy of providing local weather from the Weather Channel in Atlanta.” This is not to say that local weather people won’t still get the ax eventually. Just not immediately. Local meteorologists can lick their fingers and hold them up to see which way the corporate wind is blowing. They’ll be right about half the time.