Rochester, NY Area Weather

Jerry Fuller - Commentary

Picture this: Watertown, NY. December 2009. A lake effect snowstorm is bearing down on the North Country. You’re looking for local information on the storm, and tune in to your local TV station, looking for the meteorologist on duty, keeping the area informed on the latest path of the storm.

The problem is, you won’t find one.

Believe it or not, neither of the two television stations in the Watertown market currently have a meteorologist on duty during the morning hours. Due to the recession and some boneheaded planning, local television stations have decided to target the weather department and are cutting meteorologists from the payroll, replacing them with reporters, thinking they’ll be able to do the job.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Watertown. Watertown is a tw0-station market, with market leader WWNY-TV (DT7) and low-budget challenger WWTI-TV (DT21/VC50). WWTI is owned by Newport Television, which owns a station in almost every market in upstate New York (except Buffalo and Utica). Back in the late 1990s, the station group (then owned by Ackerley Group) attempted to more evenly distribute its resources, resulting in upgrades to news operations at its stations in Binghamton, Watertown and Utica. Since the turn of the millennium, however, successors Clear Channel and now Newport have diverted the resources running those stations to their more successful, bigger stations in Rochester, Syracuse and Elmira, leaving the smaller stations in the cold. In Watertown, WWTI’s news team has been run mostly by one man,  John Moore. Now, I respect Moore very much for what he’s done for that station, single-handedly keeping the news operations afloat. However, up until 2009, he’s usually had the help of a meteorologist (either locally-based Jay Donovan or, through fiber-optic link, the weather team down in Binghamton). On June 5, 2009, Newport Television decided to both lay off Donovan and shut down the news office in Binghamton, leaving WWTI without a meteorologist. John Moore does a lot of good for that station, but having him read weather forecasts on top of his current duties is probably not good in the long term, either for the station or the market. (Note: WWTI has been sharing resources with WSYR-TV, their sister station in Syracuse, but the extent of how much is coming in the weather department is unclear.)

Contrast this with the market leader, WWNY.  WWNY is the market leader and is owned by United Communications Corporation. They’re the only station in the market with a full slate of newscasts, morning and evening. Meteorologists man the evening shifts on weekends and weeknights. On mornings, however, they have no meteorologists. Instead, they have former top-40 DJ Beth Hall.

Fairly young. Blonde.  Female. Kind of perky. No meteorology degree or experience.

That, unfortunately, is the profile of many so-called weather forecasters in markets across the country. In Elmira, there’s one we won’t name here. The story behind her is this: when longtime weatherman Steve Christy retired, WENY-TV put out a job listing for his replacement with one requirement: said hiree must have a degree in meteorology. At least two of the staff here at the Weather Blog, including myself, applied, and never even got acknowledgment. Well, apparently, the degree part was optional, as they hired an English major who fit the “new profile” well. Of course, it didn’t matter she had no meteorology training and minimal experience. She can always just read last night’s forecast, it can’t be that out of date. Anybody who’s ever dealt with mesoscale meteorology will find the humor and sarcasm in that one.

News 10 Now, the cable news outlet, is based in Syracuse, and to their credit, they have meteorologists on duty, but they’re based in a central hub and forecasting for Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany at the same time, with minimal focus on the small markets. On top of that, their forecasts are pre-recorded “jukebox” style, and there’s no telling when those pre-recorded forecasts were taped.

So, when local school district superintendents are up at 5:00 in the morning trying to determine whether or not to close school… when workers are trying to plan their day around the next round of snow… they won’t find an expert, they’ll find top-40 DJs and the like going through the motions. Meanwhile, the real meteorologists will be either out of work or doing minimum-wage level stuff, waiting for that elusive call-back from an honest station manager who understands why they have weather reports in the first place.