Weathering Success

It’s fine to snicker at The Weather Channel. People were doing that even before it went on the air in May, 1982. John Coleman, then forecaster for “Good MorningAmerica,” spent more than three years trying to interest media executives in hisidea for a 24-hour weather channel and got “laughed at from coast to coast.” Not long after its debut, says Frank Garland, now the channel’s vice president for advertising, a salesperson called a potential client and said, “ ‘I’m with The Weather Channel,’ and the man replied, ‘The Leather Channel? What does that do?’ That became kind of a standing joke around here.”

But almost since the day it debuted, The Weather Channel has been a success, selling $3 million in advertising its first year. It now reaches 62 million homes, about two-thirds of American households with televisions. Paul Kagan Associates Inc., a media research firm based in Carmel, Calif., estimates that in 1995 The Weather Channel generated $82 million in total revenue. During the past three years, Garland says, the channel “has doubled its sales.”

Garland says the audience breaks down into two groups. “There’s the weather enthusiasts, the people who find weather fascinating. The second group is the busy planners, the people with a hectic lifestyle. They come to us for convenient information to plan their activities--whether it’s getting the kids off to school, planning a golf date or traveling for business.”

The typical viewer, according to The Weather Channel, watches for 15 minutes. The programming--regional, national and international forecasts--is broken into segments six to 10 minutes long. Six times an hour, viewers get current local weather conditions and the forecast direct from the National Weather Service. Among a staff of 300, the channel employs 65 meteorologists, 30 of whom work on-air, another 35 of whom do forecasting. From the first, on-air meteorologists were famous for using specific local landmarks when they talked about the weather across the continent.

The channel, owned by Landmark Communications of Norfolk, Va., plans to launch aEuropean version of the service this year. In the States, says senior meteorologist Ray Ban, the channel is undertaking an ambitious plan to use the new information provided by the National Weather Service’s modernization to create a “virtual picture” of the weather almost everywhere in the country. “It would,” he says, “provide photo-realistic, real-time weather visualizations,” giving TV weather “a look unlike anything seen up till now.”