Fox Weather is the latest competitor to Atlanta-based The Weather Channel, a new 24/7 streaming service set to launch on Monday, Oct. 25.
Its Atlanta-based multimedia correspondent is Robert Ray, who most recently had been doing freelance work for The Weather Channel.
Ray said Fox Weather, based out of Manhattan, will be available on its free Fox Weather app in a way the TV network is not available on the Weather Channel app. (Cable contract restrictions prevent The Weather Channel from simulcasting on the popular app.)
He is not a meteorologist but Fox Weather has a meteorologist based in Atlanta working with him to parse out the scientific data and forecasting.
Ray, who lives in Alpharetta and is married with three teenage daughters, has worked with other startup operations in the past, including HD News in 2003, Fox Business in 2007 and Al Jazeera America in 2014, where he shuttled between New Orleans and Atlanta. Al Jazeera failed to build a viable audience and shut down in 2016.
Since 2016, Ray has been doing freelance work for places like CNN, The Washington Post and, most recently, The Weather Channel, covering both breaking news and enterprise pieces.
“I love that this industry has to continue to innovate and move forward,” he said. “Every startup I’ve worked on has had a different feel. Fox Weather is the most exciting one so far. Our app is going to be so much more robust and dynamic than the Weather app.” He said it will have not just the live broadcast but offer plenty of on-demand videos with plans for long-form story telling as well as breaking news.
He himself recently went to Nebraska to visit the National Drought Mitigation Center and learn about how they go about forecasting droughts — and visited a local rancher struggling through radical shifts in weather. He said the service plans to cover not just weather disasters but the aftermath long after other news outlets have moved on.
Fox Weather will also be supplemented by Fox-owned TV operations like Fox 5 (WAGA-TV) in Atlanta.
Ray said the network won’t shy away from climate change issues, which The Weather Channel recently said it was going to double down on addressing. “You have to report what the science is telling us,” Ray said. “We can all see it happening with our own eyes. There is absolutely going to be a focus on the journalism of climate science.”
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