Stormy Saturday

Social media is a real puzzle for old school media like FoxCT. If we satisfy people on Twitter or Facebook, where we make no money, will they stop coming to the TV station? That’s no trivial matter!

This has been an interesting weather day in Connecticut. Severe Weather, well forecast over the last few days, headed in.

I’m still stuck at home, but I had a text conversation early this afternoon with Dan Amarante at FoxCT. He was getting ready for a busy day and lots of cut-ins.

“I will handle Twitter,” I typed.

Social media is a real puzzle for old school media like FoxCT. If we satisfy people on Twitter or Facebook, where we make no money, will they stop coming to the TV station? That’s no trivial matter!

The prevailing wisdom is by engaging our audience on a variety of platforms you will come back to the mothership for your TV news viewing. That might be 100% wrong. I don’t think anyone really knows.

I started posting on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, the Fox On Fox page and @WeatherCT Twitter account.

The amount of data available at home is amazing. Radar, surface obs, computer guidance — yup. I even have an account on the Weather Service’s chat server. It is surprisingly valuable. Most of our competitors aren’t using it. They should.

The watches and warnings for Connecticut come from three Weather Service Offices and the Storm Prediction Center. It’s days like this where the lack of coordination between offices becomes a problem. Warnings artificially end where an office’s jurisdiction ends, even if it should extend farther.

I tried my best to relay them as quickly as possible. Living in a 140 character world is tough.

No tornadoes in Connecticut, though two were confirmed in New York City close to the Belt Parkway and JFK. Very unusual.

We had seven reports of significant weather related damage in Connecticut, though most people saw nothing worse than lightning and sporadic heavy rain.

On Twitter someone asked, “Do you get paid to do that?”

No. It’s just what I do.

4 thoughts on “Stormy Saturday”

  1. I saw several of your postings and it is great that it fills in the gaps. i am a tornado worry wart and I really look for that info.

  2. Hi Geoff,

    I’m only one data point but as a younger person I do not really watch the local newscasts on TV unless there is severe weather or something specific I’m interested in. I have streamed some local Fox news programming via their website at times. I prefer to get my weather information online either on the website or via twitter. Twitter being especially valuable when bandwidth is scarce because it often seems to come through when the mobile web or mobile facebook fails during power outages.

    I’m sorry I don’t do a better job of keeping you in business but I like to think that eventually the scales will tip and advertisers will pay more for Internet customers and less for the TV ones. Otherwise I’ll just consider myself subsidized and enjoy your good work and be happy others pay you for it.

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