Challenges In the Changing Media World

The biggest challenge for television weather staff today is time. Your weather audience is fragmented across so many platforms that it has become impossible to serve everyone, everywhere, on their terms. Being accurate in your forecasting is already a challenging job. When you layer the need to be a great storyteller across a stratified audience to convey that forecast, the challenge becomes insurmountable.

TV stations aren’t going to be hiring additional weather resources to solve this problem. To make matters worse, weather consumers don’t want automated content to fill the void. In the weather business, we would call that the perfect storm.

Our broadcast weather workflow and expectations have changed significantly since the unveiling of the first iPhone in 2007. It has become impossible to serve the television and digital channels in the way that end users expect. Our mass market has been fragmented to the point where there is no mass market or common end user workflows. Think about all that has changed in the last ten years. What does this mean for broadcast meteorologists and how will their jobs change in the next ten years?

Let’s start with the thing that many people in the broadcast weather business fear, AI (Augmented Intelligence). Many are thinking this is going to take jobs away. I have a different perspective. AI will help us be successful in serving our fragmented audience. If the digital audience wants human curated content but stations can’t hire resources to do this, we need to find a way to align these orthogonal objectives. The answer is automation that produces content that looks human curated. AI isn’t something to fear. It’s a necessary capability to help us with an otherwise impossible task. AI will leave the meteorologist free to focus on the important weather stories of the day while AI driven content takes care of the lower priority weather stories.

Digital consumers have an expectation that the content they are getting is relevant to them. That means a video that is talking about rain that is happening in the northern part of a station’s DMA should only be seen if you are in that region. To take that even further, seeing that content on the hourly page of a mobile app puts the rain in context to where they are in the app meaning the videos are finding the users (not the other way around).

The next challenge is knowing how to drive the automated and human content that will really keep people engaged. As I mentioned earlier, this happened over decades for television and the rate of change for digital is much faster. The new digital audience is pickier about their experience. Doing this well is a composite of creativity with some basic understanding of psychology. You have to do two things: the first is capturing someone’s attention at the speed of swipe. That means you have about two seconds to stop someone from scrolling past your content. The second thing is keeping the audience engaged through the whole video: shifting colors, animating things (but not too much), slight movements and even an insertion of imagery that is different enough to keep someone’s mind active in why that particular imagery is in play. You want to make it easy for someone to understand your weather information but make the user’s brain work on non data related content to keep them engaged (this is the psychology aspect mentioned above).

We get paid for what we know, which makes us knowledge workers. To be a valuable knowledge worker we need to become a student of the craft. Doing this isn’t hard. Finding the time is the challenge, but what does it mean to be a student of the craft? Publish something to Facebook that you think will get good engagement and then check on how it performed. It’s a process where you publish, consume it yourself on the platform, engage with people responding to your post and watch how it performs. Then factor that into the next thing you publish. The great thing about these digital platforms is how quickly you can see your own performance. Now, take it a little further. Check your competition’s posts, look at their best and worst performing content, and factor that into what you do. Repeat this for all platforms. Instagram users have different expectations than Facebook users. I commonly use Facebook and Instagram and my expectations change depending on which platform I’m using, as do my posting habits. I know you are probably thinking ‘I don’t have time to do all of this’, but it’s where your audience is and what your audience expects and it does get easier over time.

In conclusion, the expectations from digital consumers are changing fast and furiously. What we know now is already being disrupted and unlike the broadcast knowledge we gained, it’s on us to stay on top of audience expectations. Two things need to come together to address our stratified digital audience. It’s not humanly possible to create enough content, so AI will need to fill the gaps. Secondly we need to be committed to serving this audience. We can no longer say we don’t understand or don’t have time. Digital acceleration is necessary – the time is now.