Allen Media stations dumping local weather segments

[-- US 175 --]

Just saw this earlier on FB.  All the Allen Media TV stations are going to substitute having local on-camera weather segments during newscasts and instead will have recorded segments done by The Weather Channel, which Allen Media also owns.  All the meteorologists at the stations will be out of a job, also.  Very sad if this goes through, and ratings at those stations should reflect it, as well.

[vdeane]

Just saw this earlier on FB.  All the Allen Media TV stations are going to substitute having local on-camera weather segments during newscasts and instead will have recorded segments done by The Weather Channel, which Allen Media also owns.  All the meteorologists at the stations will be out of a job, also.  Very sad if this goes through, and ratings at those stations should reflect it, as well.

Yikes.  Local TV news can be one of the best ways of getting a forecast; if the meteorologist is good and familiar with the local area, they're often better than any forecast available online.

[GaryV]

I looked on their website to see where these stations were. Their map puts Flint MI somewhere northeast of Saginaw Bay. Hmm, if they don't even know where their station is, how are they going to give them a good forecast?

[Thing 342]

I looked on their website to see where these stations were. Their map puts Flint MI somewhere northeast of Saginaw Bay. Hmm, if they don't even know where their station is, how are they going to give them a good forecast?

The Allen Media wiki page has a complete-looking list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Media_Group#Television_stations

Mostly small markets concentrated in the midwest, with Honolulu and Tucson being exceptions.
They seem to own a large number of stations in Hawaii, I wonder if they'll all lose their dedicated meteorologists.

Sad to see, but I can't say it's a totally unjustifiable change, given that an increasing number of people get their weather forecasts from the Internet and a lot of what local "meteorologists" did was read off NWS forecasts in front of a green screen.

[Road Hog]

TV stations are relied upon heavily for live severe weather coverage. If you have to rely on some yahoo out of Atlanta to provide street-by-street updates, what's the point?

[jeffandnicole]

TV stations are relied upon heavily for live severe weather coverage. If you have to rely on some yahoo out of Atlanta to provide street-by-street updates, what's the point?

Because it actually doesn't matter.  The yahoo out of Atlanta can produce the same exact forecast as the local person. 

[Road Hog]

TV stations are relied upon heavily for live severe weather coverage. If you have to rely on some yahoo out of Atlanta to provide street-by-street updates, what's the point?

Because it actually doesn't matter.  The yahoo out of Atlanta can produce the same exact forecast as the local person. 

Of course they can provide the same forecast. The anchor can rip and read the forecast. But when it comes to an actual tornado on the ground, can Atlanta tell people at a truck stop in Valley View, Texas to take cover?

[Thing 342]

TV stations are relied upon heavily for live severe weather coverage. If you have to rely on some yahoo out of Atlanta to provide street-by-street updates, what's the point?

Because it actually doesn't matter.  The yahoo out of Atlanta can produce the same exact forecast as the local person. 

Of course they can provide the same forecast. The anchor can rip and read the forecast. But when it comes to an actual tornado on the ground, can Atlanta tell people at a truck stop in Valley View, Texas to take cover?

The Weather Channel does local coverage of severe weather outbreaks quite often: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPezO6WK6eQ
Furthermore, primary alerting of tornadoes is the responsibility of the National Weather Service and the Emergency Alert System.

[vdeane]

Sad to see, but I can't say it's a totally unjustifiable change, given that an increasing number of people get their weather forecasts from the Internet and a lot of what local "meteorologists" did was read off NWS forecasts in front of a green screen.

I find that a good local meterologist is more accurate than the online forecasts.  Emphasis on good.  I can count on WTEN's weather coverage to be more accurate than the online forecasts most of the time.  WROC's, not so much (in fact, I lost a lot of trust in WROC's weather after the eclipse).  If you can find a station with an older meteorologist who's been there for 20-30 years, they're the ones to watch.

[Scott5114]

The yahoo out of Atlanta can produce the same exact forecast as the local person. 

Having been in a hospital in Pontotoc County that was showing the Weather Channel for some reason during a tornado event, and having seen one of the relevant yahoos out of Atlanta repeatedly try and fail to pronounce Wapanucka...no, no they cannot produce the same exact forecast as the local person.

Snarky cosmetic issues aside, tornadoes are finicky and very particular quirks in local geography can provide a strong influence on their paths. (For instance, OKC-area mets will pay special attention to any storm that develops near the Wichita Mountains, because that's where the most catastrophic mesocyclones to affect OKC have historically originated from. A met from Atlanta isn't going to know that.)

[ilpt4u]

Our ABC affiliate in Southern IL, WSIL, is in this boat. The TV DMA is weird to begin with, since there is no "central" city. WSIL is the Southern IL station, licensed out of Harrisburg and studio in Carterville, WPSD/NBC is out of Paducah KY and thus local news primarily focuses on Western KY, and both KFVS/CBS and KBSI/FOX are out of Cape Girardeau MO and their local news primarily focuses on Southeastern MO.

Yes all 4 cover the whole DMA, but local news and weather is where the differences are biggest, as each station tends to focus local news and weather most in its sub-region

Getting rid of WSIL meteorologists is a crappy cost cutting move.

[Life in Paradise]

Our ABC affiliate in Southern IL, WSIL, is in this boat. The TV DMA is weird to begin with, since there is no "central" city. WSIL is the Southern IL station, licensed out of Harrisburg and studio in Carterville, WPSD/NBC is out of Paducah KY and thus local news primarily focuses on Western KY, and both KFVS/CBS and KBSI/FOX are out of Cape Girardeau MO and their local news primarily focuses on Southeastern MO.

Yes all 4 cover the whole DMA, but local news and weather is where the differences are biggest, as each station tends to focus local news and weather most in its sub-region

Getting rid of WSIL meteorologists is a crappy cost cutting move.

I am in the adjacent DMA (Evansville, IN) and your market is larger than ours according to media market pop.  This makes some sense in leveraging resources since they are said to own the Weather Channel. This could very well backfire as time goes on.  Gannett (USA Today) has quite a few newspapers around the country, and they leverage their nationwide presence to get news stories, but at the expense of losing most of their local reporters and content in those papers.  With the reduction of what made the local paper "local", you get to a point of "Why do I still get this local paper?".  I could see a competing channel making the commitment to keeping local weather, and with the right personality, could help keep their operation afloat against a dwindling Allen Media channel.

[US 89]

TV stations are relied upon heavily for live severe weather coverage. If you have to rely on some yahoo out of Atlanta to provide street-by-street updates, what's the point?

Because it actually doesn't matter.  The yahoo out of Atlanta can produce the same exact forecast as the local person. 

Of course they can provide the same forecast. The anchor can rip and read the forecast. But when it comes to an actual tornado on the ground, can Atlanta tell people at a truck stop in Valley View, Texas to take cover?

The Weather Channel does local coverage of severe weather outbreaks quite often: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPezO6WK6eQ
Furthermore, primary alerting of tornadoes is the responsibility of the National Weather Service and the Emergency Alert System.

The real goal of severe weather coverage is to encourage people to take action when a tornado is approaching their area. A trusted local meteorologist who knows the community is a really effective person to do that. The NWS can issue a tornado warning that gets broadcasted over TV/radio and cell phone alerts, but there are going to be a certain subset of people who won't take action ("nahhh they said there would be a tornado last year and the year before, and we didn't have one"). Local coverage where a known, trusted figure can point out specific neighborhoods or landmarks can make that a lot more real to people and potentially save lives. "This tornado is heading right for the intersection of Locust and Oak Streets. You know where that Walmart and Braum's are? You see the Birchwood Heights neighborhood to the southwest? These are areas directly in the path of this tornado." That hyper-local knowledge saves lives. And it takes years of experience and trust building between individual meteorologists and the local community to get that. If you want to see a perfect example of this, watch some videos of James Spann out of ABC 33/40 in Birmingham doing tornado coverage. He's been at this for years and years and might well be the most trusted figure in Alabama.

You are never going to get this kind of thing from the Weather Channel, which will have to divide its staff out across the country if more than one local area is experiencing tornadoes. You're not going to have years of watching and building trust with the same people. If you're getting tornado coverage from a remote source, you're going to get a different person each time, and most of them won't be familiar with local geography or communities. Watch the Weather Channel now during tornado coverage and you'll notice they frequently mispronounce city and county names when covering weather in areas that they obviously don't know as much about. That doesn't sound like much of a trust builder to me.

Bottom line: it does make some financial sense as a business decision. I hate to say this, but I would not be surprised if there is an increase in tornado fatalities in these markets.

[SEWIGuy]

Watching the local weather forecast, which is usually more accurate than any other one I get, is the only reason I even watch local news.

[hbelkins]

The Allen layoffs also include some local journalists at their TV stations. Gray TV recently did something similar in its small markets. In Hazard, one of their mets got laid off along with a few reporters, and they have cut back the number of local newscasts (WYMT will simulcast WKYT out of Lexington).

A local met does know the area landmarks. They can tell you if a tornado is approaching a certain neighborhood, school, fairground, etc., out of their personal knowledge. They also know when certain events are taking place to further warn people. TWC in Atlanta isn't going to know that Hillbilly Days is taking place in Pikeville.

[wxfree]

I remember in the 90s, when The Weather Channel was about the weather, one of the meteorologists would try to act like the locals, making reference to smaller features.  Specifically I recall him mention driving the Mixmaster in Dallas and at another time going to the outlet mall in Hillsboro.  This was for no particular reason at the time, just showing off his knowledge of the area.  I don't remember his name or know if he's from here, but I seem to think he did the same thing for places in other areas.  It stuck out in my memory.  Another one once mentioned that she had lived in the Panhandle for about 10 years and saw how a lot of the farm to market roads don't have much of a ditch, due to the flat ground, and how that could result in flooding in a rain event.  That wasn't the same thing, because it was related to an ongoing weather event and was relevant to safety considerations.

This guy on The Weather Channel saw how the locals know their area and wanted to mimic that.  On an related note, I enjoy watching coverage of hurricanes hitting Louisiana, because when they rebroadcast the local stations, the weathercaster knows how to pronounce the names of those little towns with strange spellings.  That's how I found out where Amos Moses is from.

[thenetwork]

From what I've heard in the trades, local sponsors are starting to pull their ads off the Allen Group stations.

I don't know how people can take Byron Allen's Weather Channel seriously when, on most nights, the channel airs for the umpteenth time 15-year-old reruns of tow truck drivers on the 401 in Ontario.

BTW, I get much of my Weather information from Weathernation.  Mainly because the staff is based in Denver, and I live in Western Colorado.  And they do straight Weather in the evenings!!! What a concept!!!

[Bobby5280]

Thankfully Allen Media doesn't own any TV stations in Oklahoma. Gray own our local ABC station, but they haven't been stupid enough to get rid of the local weather department there or the CBS station they have in Wichita Falls.

[ZLoth]

Unfortunately, it's a business decision. Local newscasts are dependent on local advertising, and that has been down over the past years. We have had numerous carriage disputes between the multichannel providers and the fees that get passed along to the consumers just to carry the local stations. In addition, Allen Media has a significant amount of debt.

In looking at the station list, it looks like Allen Media began acquiring stations beginning in 2019, plus they acquired the Weather Channel through the "Entertaiment Studios". While they don't own any stations in Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas, they do own stations in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, all of which were in the tornado sector formerly known as Dixie Alley. Hopefully, the other major stations in those markets still have good weather staffs.

I've stopped relying on local stations for the weather as I can some good information online through links I have previously provided. If there are the possibly of tornadoes, then I'm looking at Texas Storm Chasers.

[vdeane]

I am in the adjacent DMA (Evansville, IN) and your market is larger than ours according to media market pop.  This makes some sense in leveraging resources since they are said to own the Weather Channel. This could very well backfire as time goes on.  Gannett (USA Today) has quite a few newspapers around the country, and they leverage their nationwide presence to get news stories, but at the expense of losing most of their local reporters and content in those papers.  With the reduction of what made the local paper "local", you get to a point of "Why do I still get this local paper?".  I could see a competing channel making the commitment to keeping local weather, and with the right personality, could help keep their operation afloat against a dwindling Allen Media channel.

I've noticed that local news is definitely getting more national coverage over the years.  It's especially prevalent with Sinclair stations, whose "local news" segments are basically national news plus weather and sports and maybe a local story or two if something big is happening.

Of course, media markets are 1:1 relative to metro population.  Albany has a larger market than Rochester, for instance, even though by population it should be the reverse.  This is because Rochester is adjacent to Buffalo and Syracuse, and Buffalo especially takes up some counties that would otherwise be part of the Rochester DMA.  And this is magnified with Albany being the state capital, meaning that Nextar (and probably others too) uses it as a "state flagship" station, so WTEN gets more funding than other Nextar stations in the state (which conversely tend to air at least one WTEN story a day on state politics, along with Empire State Weekly on the weekend).

[thenetwork]

I did sales at a small-market TV station 18 years ago.

2007:  The station employed around 2 main anchors, 10 reporters (some were also weekend and fill-in anchors), 3 meteorologists, and 3 sports reporters.

All had to have college degrees at a minimum and know how to speak and write stories clearly.

2025:  Same station now has 1 main anchor, 8 reporters & 2 sports reporters (ALL randomly rotate as anchors) and 2 meteorologist.

Like in 2007, in this small market, they are their own cameramen, editors & teleprompter operators...


...However, since the pay is pretty much at or near minimum wage now, and not a good career anymore (working the same or more hours doing the work of 2 or 3 people), they will pretty much take anyone with a pulse.  You don't need to have a college degree anymore, nor do you have to be at least 21 years old.

This is now commonplace in small-market stations, and slowly invading medium market stations. Much of this thanks to the station owners who are letting go the more-experienced senior employees with the larger salaries.

Many of the on-air people I worked with then as well as the few now i watch that I had a feeling could go far in television got wise and and left that career for more lucrative careers outside of TV. 

[Bobby5280]

I think of local TV stations being a sort of equivalent to minor league teams in professional baseball. Talent in front of the camera and behind the camera usually isn't paid squat, except for maybe a few key people. TV stations can do this because there is a big supply of college graduates with degrees in broadcasting, journalism, communications, etc. There are only so many TV stations and only so many job openings at them at any given time. It's an employers market.

Employees at small market TV stations work on their reels hoping to move up to bigger/better TV stations or other TV-related production gigs. Very few move on to the big leagues, such as network-owned TV stations in the biggest cities.

Technology "improvements" have made the situation even more difficult for anyone wanting to get into the TV broadcasting industry. Various production jobs have been automated away. Cameras are remote controlled or pre-programmed. Anchors often remotely run their own teleprompters using a device at their desk. When I worked at a local TV station in Georgia 30 years ago the cameras were human-operated. There was a floor manager. Numerous crew people were in the control room. Back then we would produce a lot of our own graphics, bumpers, etc in-house. Now a lot of that work is farmed out to the parent company.

I wouldn't recommend TV broadcasting as a career choice. Local newspapers in small/medium sized cities are in just as bad of shape, if not worse. Journalism in general seems like a dead end field to study, which is scary considering a free press is one of the few things that can expose corruption from the local level all the way up to national. Without the fourth estate it's easy for Kleptocracy and Autocracy to take over.

[Scott5114]

And it takes years of experience and trust building between individual meteorologists and the local community to get that. If you want to see a perfect example of this, watch some videos of James Spann out of ABC 33/40 in Birmingham doing tornado coverage. He's been at this for years and years and might well be the most trusted figure in Alabama.

I'll raise you the now-retired Gary England out of KWTV in Oklahoma City. They uploaded to YouTube, in full, his coverage of the May 3, 1999 tornado outbreak a couple of years ago. Definitely worth a watch if you want to see a pro in action.

[SEWIGuy]

The Allen layoffs also include some local journalists at their TV stations. Gray TV recently did something similar in its small markets.

The local station I watch for local news in the morning is a Gray station. My favorite bits are when they go to their "Washington reporter" who probably spends two hours every morning answering the same scripted questions with the same scripted answers from anchors from accross the country.

And the random story from another Gray market in a completely different state that I guess the local producer found interesting.

[Life in Paradise]

The Allen layoffs also include some local journalists at their TV stations. Gray TV recently did something similar in its small markets.

The local station I watch for local news in the morning is a Gray station. My favorite bits are when they go to their "Washington reporter" who probably spends two hours every morning answering the same scripted questions with the same scripted answers from anchors from accross the country.

And the random story from another Gray market in a completely different state that I guess the local producer found interesting.

For some of their markets, they may be given questions to ask to set up the reporter's recorded answer.  The largest markets may have it more personalized.