The Weather Channel in the Age of the Everyman Weatherman
The Weather Channel in the Age of the Everyman Weatherman
It comes as no surprise that The Weather Channel had a very good week. Its website Weather.com saw its strongest two days of web traffic ever on Monday and Tuesday, with a combined 807 million page views. And on TV, The Weather Channel outperformed Fox News on Monday. But during Sandy it was also clearer than ever that the task of broadcasting weather news no longer belongs solely to the weatherman: the most-discussed storm dispatches were the Instagram photos—at an upload rate of ten per second, according to the photo-sharing app—of downed trees and flooded stairwells, the live Tweets from Atlantic City and Red Hook. In recent months The Weather Channel has been publicly struggling to define its brand. Last week it announced that it was cutting 7 percent of its staff and changing its name from The Weather Channel Company to The Weather Company. Several lifelong weathermen have recently departed. “We were awesome for Sandy,” CEO David Kenny said in an interview. “The strategy is to make sure we’re awesome everyday, even if it’s to a smaller group of people.”
So instead of selling the weather as a general interest topic, the company is changing its game. Its new strategy, Kenny says, is to focus on the “43 million self-defined weather enthusiasts” in America. This group includes everyone from trained meteorologists to science-minded teenage boys to the assorted people who obsessively monitor low pressure systems around the country…