Spring Rubber

Sure enough, TWC added a bonus hour of coverage tonight at 8pm ET because the SPC put out an Enhanced Risk for all of the big cities in the northeast (which most of the threat seems to have flopped and/or been super mild), yet last week when the weather in the midwest was extreme, TWC wasn't there to cover it. The Northeast bias continues...

Looks like as of today, Fox Weather added a Steadicam to their main studio setup. They have been using it to do broad, sweeping transitions between the OCM standing at the large video wall and the OCM standing at the small monitor, and they have been also using it for "action" shots at the large video wall where the camera is constantly moving back and forth while the OCM presents at the video wall. Still images don't do a Steadicam justice, but here's an example from the Steadicam today.

I'm not sure if their coverage was paywalled. Maybe someone else might know?

It was a bad week for TWC. They went to long form programming promptly at 8 PM ET both Wednesday and Thursday nights when major severe weather (with multiple tornado warnings) was firing off throughout the northern plains. I don't get how you make the decision to disregard a major derecho with 90+mph straight line lines with multiple embedded tornadoes and say, "No thanks, we're good. We gotta get to long form at 8 PM no matter what." In 2021 and prior, when Weather Underground was a 5pm-8pm ET program, they would very regularly at least add one extra hour of Weather Underground from 8pm-9pm ET. It was an extra 4th hour of the show, because the show was 3 hours long, and adding a 4th extra hour was no big deal. When Weather Underground became a 4-hour show last year from 4pm-8pm ET, they stopped adding the extra hour at 8pm. I'm guessing there's a clause in the OCM contracts that they can't add a 5th hour to their shifts willy-nilly; they're probably capped at 4 hours. Now with Pattern being introduced to the schedule, Storm Center is now the same as old Weather Underground, 5pm-8pm ET, only three hours, yet despite this, they simply will not add the extra hour at 8pm ET, even when horrible severe weather exists, if they didn't pre-schedule "extended coverage" ahead of time to last to 1am ET.

I guess that means that someone gets to be temporary #1 analyst this season, knowing that they won't get to keep their role unless Fox goes with a 3-man booth in the future.

If it lasts longer than 30 days, we can call it a huge success, right?

Ah, I was totally unaware that existed. In that case, looks like Fox Weather ripped off TWC's format, then. I would say that TWC's format is more efficient in how quickly the information is presented. I understand that the point of Fox Weather's Night Light is to be slow-paced and calm for the overnight hours, but it's sort of frustrating just how slowly the information is presented. It takes forever to get from one city/region to the next, and there's not much information being delivered at any given time.

Wow, that feels like almost a direct rip off of Night Light.

What's interesting this year is that almost every severe weather outbreak this spring (except for the early March Iowa outbreak) has occurred on a weekday, which at least allows TWC to be guaranteed live until 8pm ET. I'd hate to see how they'd handle an event like today if it occurred on a weekend. They were also woefully inconsistent with their handling of Pattrn. They completely pre-empted it yesterday, yet they aired the full two hours of it today despite multiple tornado warnings being in progress during the show.

TWC wound up not doing extended coverage last night, despite the box in the lower right corner saying that they were going to do so. Guess what, they're not doing extended coverage tonight either, despite the fact that there's a 10% tornado risk, and multiple active tornado warnings, including a confirmed tornado actively on the ground. They promptly went to long form at 8pm ET despite the circumstances.

Good Day Chicago to see a new lineup starting next week: https://www.robertfeder.com/2022/05/06/robservations-wls-890-taps-steve-cochran-morning-fill-fox-32-shuffles-morning-anchor-lineup-marcus-gilmer-joins-crains-chicago-business/#more-33386 Looks like this might be why the press release about the hour(s) Anita Blanton would anchor was always a bit vague. Feels like they kind of had her in mind to take on this larger role from the very beginning.

I'm surprised that they're even scheduling nighttime coverage tonight, considering how much the severe threat is diminishing, until it flares back up again tomorrow. Edit to my previous statement: apparently the severe weather is supposed to flare up again tonight after a brief lull, so maybe there will be something of an outbreak, especially of damaging winds, to cover.

Because nothing makes sense with TWC's program schedule, for some reason, the America's Morning Headquarters branding holds up for the 12pm ET hour, and the Weather Underground branding holds up for the 1pm ET hour, yet when the Storm Center team continues their coverage into the 8pm ET hour, they drop the Storm Center branding for that hour, change all of the studio lights from yellow to blue, and brand that hour as "Severe Storm Central". I guess this has something to do with ratings manipulation?

In a strange move, no Storm Alert music / red logo on the Local Forecasts tonight. Heck, they didn't change the live on-air graphics to red until the new crew took over at 9pm ET. They were blue the whole rest of the day until then.

His Twitter bio still says so. Don't really have anything else to go on. Doesn't look like he has a public LinkedIn or a public presence on any other social media platforms.

Well that didn't take long. Mark Elliot made his debut as a freelancer at TWC a few moments ago. Glad to see he'll still be freelancing there in his spare time.

Fox Weather made an interesting decision on a Moderate Risk day to replace the 1PM ET hour today with a pre-recorded Fox Weather Reports long-form show about the 5/4/2007 Greensburg, KS EF5 Tornado. Greensburg, KS is the hometown of Kendall Smith's family, and much of the show was spent talking with her relatives there, recounting the events and the aftermath of that tornado. I'm assuming they have had this long form hour planned to air today for quite some time, and because the severe weather hadn't yet started as of the 1PM ET hour, they made the decision to run with the hour-long show anyway. America's Weather Center started at 2PM ET and will end an hour later at 5PM ET. I guess this will give them the benefit of running all of the shifts one hour later tonight to cover the severe weather, which will be most prominent in the evening hours.

When they launched the second part of AMHQ w/Jen and Alex last summer, they did away with the setup where Kelly Cass used to partner with Alex Wallace on Mon/Tue while Felicia Combs & Dr. Postel would host with him Wed-Fri. Now the whole weekend team is left without consistent weekday roles. I'm curious if they were given any behind-the scenes roles on weekdays to keep them full-time (when not called to fill in). I can't even remember the last time Paul Goodloe filled in on a weekday...

One TWC Expert didn't stick around for the big 40th anniversary. Turns out Mark Elliot departed in late March to take an off-air job at AT&T. I've noticed a trend since Entertainment Studios took over; they haven't been hiring/replacing any of the Experts that have left TWC. When NBC was in charge, they hired and promoted an absurd number of experts, especially around like 2014-2015 when they first debuted The Lab. Now only Dr. Rick Knabb, Dr. Greg Postel, and Carl Parker still remain. All three of them are now used as pseudo show hosts at this point. Dr. Knabb is a host on Weather Underground; Dr. Postel is a host on Weekend Recharge and fills in Wednesday-Friday mornings as needed, and Carl Parker hosts extended coverage hours during severe weather. Entertainment Studios definitely wants to streamline their on-air positions and doesn't see the value in having Experts that aren't also hosting shows. Also, this afternoon on Weather Underground, they did a quiz question of "How many hurricane experts has TWC had in its history?" The answer they provided was three: John Hope, Dr. Steve Lyons, and Dr. Rick Knabb. I think they literally wrote Bryan Norcross out of their network's history because he's working for the competitor now.

I fully expect it to be one day only, tops. They might even switch to Storm Alert music later today when the severe weather outbreak occurs.

Happy 40th Anniversary to TWC. Looks like given the Moderate Risk area for severe weather, TWC is going to be forced to spend their entire 40th anniversary covering severe weather instead of showing long form tonight.

I'm noticing that Corey and Dawn have switched back to a traditional Monday-Friday shift, based on what I'm seeing on their website. How long ago did that happen?

Nice catch! I didn't notice the watermarks before. On a separate note, I recorded AMHQ today. Jordan was present, but Stephanie was not there. Colleen Coyle was filling in for her. On Pattrn today, both Jordan and Stephanie are on the show. Jordan is wearing the same thing he was wearing this morning, so I assume this is still live/live-ish. I didn't catch AMHQ any of the other days this week, so I have no idea if Jordan and Steph were there or not. Anybody know?

Looks like TWC is set to launch The Weather Channel en Español on or around May 2, to coincide with the main network's 40th anniversary. TWC's last Spanish-language venture shut down way back in 2002, the network's 20th anniversary. I didn't hear anything about this happening, but I just caught this tweet from this past Monday. Based on the way this set looks, I'm speculating that this is likely in the studio that was most recently used as a second studio for isolation purposes during the height of COVID, previously used from 2015-2019 as the Weather Underground basement/bar set. I can't find any articles confirming the exact launch date, but the tweet references two weeks from 4/18, so that should take us to 5/2. I did find these other articles talking about TWC en Español. Nothing here seems to really answer if this is going to be on cable, on streaming platforms(s), or both. Can anyone else find anything? https://www.mediamoves.com/2021/08/sussy-ruiz-hired-to-help-relaunch-the-weather-channel-en-espanol.html https://deadline.com/2022/03/byron-allen-allen-media-group-promotes-nora-zimmett-1234962360/

Sky Dome was split-hosted by Craig Herrera in NYC Studio W and Katie Garner in Orlando today, as Amy Freeze had the day off. America's Weather Center is in the main Studio W instead of the small Studio K today. Oddly, the lighting on the LED strips in the studio is the same light red color that's used on Sky Dome, rather than the blue color that was used for America's Weather Center when it used to call Studio W its main home. The control room wasn't ready for the fact that in Studio W, Kendall and Stephen sit in opposite positions than they do in Studio K.