It was the second snow catastrophe in a week. Atlanta was shut down, and WSB-TV reporter Jeff Dore was jumping in and out of a “Live Truck,” trying to come up with something scintillating to say every 30 minutes during his 12-hour shift.
There are only so many ways you can say: “Boy, is it cold out there!” and, “The streets remain empty.”
A couple days later, Dore typed out his retirement letter. The business had changed, and he’d had enough. Back in the day, a TV reporter went out, dug up something odd, interesting or quirky, and then captured it for viewers.
Today, they’ve got to feed the monster, an insatiable 24-hour beast that demands stark images, captivating story lines, entertaining visuals and snazzy graphics — especially in Atlanta when there’s even a whiff of snow in the forecast. Woe be unto the reporter who can’t figure out a way to make even the most minor snowfall into must-watch television.
For perspective on their plight, I called three recently retired reporters, veterans who have occupied your screens for an aggregate 106 years. I figured I’d ask them what it was like to cover Snow (Not So Much) Jam 2015 from their couches.
Dore covered news for 30 years for Channel 2 Action News. This week, he sent out photos to old colleagues with him in an easy chair, a fire in the background, a glass of wine at his side.
Paul Yates, who did 40 years at Channel 5, flipped around the stations from his sofa, glad not to be shivering on some curbside for an 11 p.m. shot.
Paul Crawley, with 36 years at Channel 11, couldn’t resist the urge to recapture some of the old magic. On a video posted on Facebook, the bathrobe-clad lion of local TV stood in his driveway.
“As you can see, the roads are completely closed,” he intoned solemnly as the camera panned to simply wet asphalt. “Well, not really,” he said sheepishly, adding: “and the driveways are just … just … too … treacherous to …”
Reached Thursday, as he dug out at his Cobb County home, Crawley said “I’d call that my ‘If I was totally honest’ report. If I was still on-air, I’d say, ‘Well, it could get dangerous.’”
All savvy TV news reporters know that “what could be” is a very handy thing to have up their sleeves. As in: “We could be seeing some black ice out here.”
Crawley, like Dore, came to a realization during last year’s storm that this was a young person’s game. “It just beat me up,” he said. “Three days driving around in a Honda hybrid with my gear and shaving at Waffle Houses had lost the allure.”
During this week's Emergency Weather Watch, viewers were given a feast of live stand-ups of reporters in far-flung areas saying: "It's ice. No, it's snow and ice. No, it was snow and ice, but now it's rain. And a little sleet. But I think it might snow again. I sure hope it snows again because big fluffy snowflakes make good visuals and allow me to say 'The White Stuff!' Also, I hate standing in the rain when its 33 degrees."
Oh, yeah, and: “We could be seeing some black ice out here.”
Then there’s a cutaway back to the studio, where one of the station’s nine weather people will stand in front of a screen with a green blob (rain) moving across Atlanta, a pink line (sleet, or rather “a wintry mix’) stretching into the north ‘burbs, and a white blob (The White Stuff!) on top of the pink.
Industry research is clear, Dore says: Viewers eat it up. “As long as you keep showing the weather coming at them, they don’t turn away. They might complain about it, but they can’t turn away. They’ll say, ‘That’s the fifth time you’ve shown that.’ Well, how do you know that, unless you’ve been watching?
“It’s weather and live shots,” Dore said. “Something in viewers viscerally says, ‘I’ve got to keep watching.’ Research shows, nothing drives people to the TV set like bad weather.”
Is it the public demanding the non-stop coverage? Or is it the TV geniuses ringing Pavlov’s bell? It’s a true chicken-or-egg discussion.
(In the interest of full disclosure, the value of a good weather story is not lost on those of us in the newspaper racket, either.)
Yates, who watched this time from his Tucker home, said the media have become increasingly fragmented in recent years, with zillions of cable channels and all that the Internet has to offer.
“The fragmentation of the audience has caused local TV news to seek a reason for being,” Yates said. “Weather and the urgency it can bring is vital to the continuation of the local TV business. This is something that draws us together. It brings us back to the Big Three (networks). We’re all around that campfire.”
The managers of the local newscasts know this all too well. If they’ve got a bunch of people tuning in for these weather affairs, they’re going to do all they can to hang onto them.
“And that drives the news cycle to ever-lengthening segments,” Yates said.
With viewers tuning in and tuning out, you’ve got to keep repeating pretty much the same stuff. But you also have those who can’t switch it off, so you have to come up with something different to show them.
“You have to find a new car that ran into a ditch; you have to find a new pickup truck that spun out,” Yates said.
All three old reporters say the stations and their forecasters are in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.
But at the bottom of it, it’s pretty simple, Crawley said: “People like to watch cars spinning on ice.”
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