Clear Skies for Weather Channel After Stormy Years

Hamburgers or chicken? On summer nights when a thunderstorm threatens to break the heat, Steve Kotchko consults an unusual expert to set his dinner menu: He turns on the Weather Channel.

Kotchko scans the radar screen that flashes every 10 minutes for tell-tale blotches of rain. If those green blotches have moved past the New York border 60 miles from his Connecticut home, he has little time to waste. Slap some fast-cooking burgers on the barbecue and get ready to eat indoors.

If the storms are still in New York, Kotchko can relax. He can grill chicken without worrying about being drenched.

Laugh if you must, as many people did when the network started in 1982. But the Weather Channel--24 hours of temperature charts, low pressure systems and satellite loops--has become a television institution.

The channel has succeeded despite the doubts--who would watch a one-minute segment on the evening news expanded to all day?--because it takes weather seriously, says its chief executive officer, Michael Eckert, who signed on as an advertising salesman before it even went on the air.

“In many ways, the Weather Channel has a higher calling, and that drives a lot of our people,” Eckert says.

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Never is that more evident than when the weather gets really bad. On those days, the channel--housed in an office building near a highway crossroads north of Atlanta--buzzes like a newsroom on Election Night.

Meteorologists sift through data from satellites and airplanes, plotting the march of advancing storms. Correspondents rush into blizzards, running their hands through newly fallen snow with the excitement of children packing the season’s first snowball.

Tony Kornheiser’s family knows it’s useless to fight for the remote control during stormy weather.

“If it’s really juicy and there’s a big storm, they have all these colors up on the screen,” the Washington Post sports columnist says. “It’s just great. It’s fabulous. To me, it’s a combination of very sophisticated technology and, ‘Hey kids, let’s go out to the barn and put on a show.’ ”

The Weather Channel lost $10.6 million in its first year, and came perilously close to demise. The network didn’t make money until 1985.

But its reach has steadily expanded to where it is now seen in 67 million homes, or 98% of homes with cable. Officials say the network is “very profitable,” but won’t disclose any details.

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On the air, the Weather Channel’s meteorologists are usually careful not to become absorbed in weather wonkdom. They are trained to emphasize the practical effect of weather on people’s lives: Whether your children will need a coat for the walk to school, say, or if a trip will be disrupted by snow.

The channel’s look is conservative too. The basic weather maps have changed little over the years, and the network has resisted the whiz-bang technology used by some local news stations to make viewers feel like they’re floating above cloud formations.

The channel moved into a new studio in March with barely a mention so viewers wouldn’t feel dislocated.

This is one of the reasons why Kotchko, a radio executive, feels more comfortable watching the Weather Channel than his local Connecticut news station during a big storm.

“The local weather has gotten so wrapped up in the ratings game that I can’t trust it anymore,” he says.

The Weather Channel runs occasional documentary specials--it capitalized on the interest in tornadoes when the movie “Twister” was in theaters--but its basic programming lineup follows the same schedule hour after hour.

There are looks at weather “hot spots,” forecasts for the next five days, and even hourly peeks at what’s going on in Europe. But the schedule is designed so that viewers never have to wait more than 10 minutes for a local forecast.

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Many viewers watch like Kotchko: stopping briefly on the channel during a remote control surf. Advertisers recognize this and sometimes try to get their message across by wrapping an ad around an on-screen weather map.

As expected, the channel’s ratings zoom when a hurricane or big snowstorm is bearing down on a population center. They also jump each day in the early morning, when people who work outside tune in to find out what the day will be like. Gamblers are heavy watchers; they want to see if horses will be running on a fast or muddy track, Eckert says.

Many viewers are like Jack Evans, a retiree from Vermont who calls in snow measurements to the National Weather Service. He has children in Florida and Seattle, and he watches to see if raindrops are falling on their heads.

The Weather Channel calls these people “trackers.”

“As you put all these lifestyles together who are using us for different reasons, you start to build a mass,” Eckert says.

The Weather Channel’s research also reveals this oddity: One in five viewers watch the network for as many as three or four hours at a sitting. It means they watch the same thing over and over and over.

These people are called, politely, the “weather-involved.” Kornheiser stops short of putting himself in this category; he has a life. But he understands the temptation.

“You’re glued to it,” he says. “To me, it’s transfixing to watch the Weather Channel. I just like it. I don’t watch it every day, but once I start with the Weather Channel I tend to watch it for 40 or 50 minutes at a time.”

Eckert is so reluctant to make changes that he resisted a few years back when some of his staff members wanted to send correspondents to the site of hurricanes, floods or other weather disasters. He thought the network should focus strictly on what will happen in the future, not the present or past. Eventually, he relented.

The Weather Channel also has branched out by producing books and videos, and instituting a service that provides a wake-up phone call with a weather forecast. But Eckert says the network will pull back from these efforts, and maintains its narrow focus could teach other networks a lesson.

“MTV is not all music videos,” he says. “CNN is not all news like it originally was. We stuck to our niche. We’re passionate about it, and we continue to stick heavily to it. I think consumers know that.”