Hype of the Day: KMOV Severe Weather Reporting

Last night, there was nasty storm system that went through the midwest. I was watching television at the time and of course, I missed a substantial portion of the show I was "trying" to watch because of the incessant (ironic, I know) interruptions for "weather alerts". I gave up and changed channels. I ended up watching Laurence Fishburne being interviewed by Craig Ferguson (funniest late night host) on local channel 4 (KMOV). I had the remote in hand - prepared for the quick channel change as soon as the weather man interrupted. Then a commercial came on and the weather guy interrupts saying, "...we're interrupting this commercial break...will try not to interrupt the show...". I was blown away! Although they did eventually interrupt the actual show, I was thoroughly impressed by the fact that they "got-it". I watched those weather alerts because I appreciated that they understood to some extent, that many of us see these interruptions as very unnecessary particularly when they already have cropped out a third of the screen, during programming, to post and scroll the same alerts.

Alerts that interrupt broadcasting make good sense, prior to the event but once the storm has hit, it makes little sense to interrupt broadcasting to tell everybody that there's a storm happening somewhere that obviously has no effect on you because you're able to see the broadcast. Then there's the fact that they now have a dedicated weather channel on the new DTV signal. These weather guys expend a lot of effort attempting to make what they do, cool and interesting. The fact is that most of us will never be all that interested in the weather. Every news program has spent a lot of money on fancy systems and graphics for the weather reporting portion of their broadcasts and all we really want to know is if it's going to rain; is it going to be hot/cold - very basic stuff.

I blogged not too long ago about my issues with weather alert interruptions and I was so happy to see that someone at channel 4 must have been thinking the same thing, I had to blog them out a bravo for the effort. Anywho, that's the hype.