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Storm Chasers’ Deaths Show Dangers of an Exploding Field

June 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Today, interest in storm chasing has surged, and a preponderance of amateurs with video cameras and a thirst for YouTube fame now jockey with seasoned professionals to see who can get the closest and most dramatic images of churning storms, causing some veterans to worry about a growing safety threat.

The risks became apparent on Sunday when relatives confirmed that Mr. Samaras, 55, along with his 24-year-old son, Paul, and his colleague, Carl Young, 45, were killed while chasing the storms that ravaged parts of Oklahoma on Friday.

They were among at least 13 people killed in the storm, which spawned several tornadoes and caused flash flooding in the region around Oklahoma City. A tornado also picked up a truck carrying several storm chasers, including a meteorologist for the Weather Channel, and tossed it into a field, causing injuries but no deaths.

The deaths come as storm chasers have reached a kind of pop-culture zenith, similar to that achieved by celebrity chefs and interior decorators on numerous reality shows. Mr. Samaras was well known for his appearances on the reality show “Storm Chasers,” on the Discovery Channel, which ended in 2011.

Many other networks use vivid footage of storms. The Weather Channel has programmed regular series like “Full Force Nature” with storm chasers providing video of severe weather.

Advancements in video and Web technology mean storm chasers are now able to provide a live play-by-play of a tornado’s destruction. But with Friday’s deaths, the first in many years, veteran chasers said, some experts question whether the push to get closer and closer to storms has dimmed perceptions of the dangers they pose.

“When a veteran storm chaser as cautious and experienced as Tim Samaras dies, I hope it is a lesson to all the storm chasers of just how potentially dangerous storm chasing is,” said Greg Forbes, a meteorologist with the Weather Channel. “There is some chance you could die.”

The circumstances surrounding the deaths were still unknown Sunday. Dr. Forbes said the tornado Mr. Samaras was tracking made a sudden left turn, perhaps catching him and his team unaware and leaving them nowhere to run. Others speculated that engine trouble or perhaps a traffic jam could have left them stuck in the tornado’s path.

Mr. Samaras’s brother Jim posted a statement on his brother’s Facebook page expressing sadness but giving no details. “They all unfortunately passed away, but doing what they loved,” the statement said.

Colleagues who worked with Mr. Samaras described him as extremely cautious and more apt than most to abandon a storm in the face of obvious danger. He was a scientist first and foremost, colleagues said, whose interests traveled far beyond the hunt.  

He founded an organization called Twistex to study the births, lives and deaths of tornadoes. With probes of his own design that he would place directly in the tornado’s path, he measured wind speeds and barometric pressure at the base of the storm, where such data are hardest to get. Another probe was equipped with video cameras capable of providing detailed imagery from inside the tornado cone.

He contributed research to organizations like the American Meteorological Society and National Geographic.

“He was out there for the science and he was going to get that,” said Tony Laubach, a meteorologist and friend of Mr. Samaras. “He wanted to answer the questions people thought were impossible.”

Others said Mr. Samaras had expressed concern about the increase in amateur chasers on roads, and had occasionally called off a chase if he thought traffic would be too heavy.

Over the last decade, the number of chasers converging on the Great Plains for the start of tornado season has exploded, particularly in Oklahoma, where the first devilish wisps of a new tornado can cause traffic jams as chasers race into position.

Ginger Zee, a meteorologist and veteran storm chaser with ABC News, said the number of storm chasers had “boomed” in the last decade. “Any time you’re in Oklahoma and you have an outbreak, you have chaser convergence,” she said “And it’s gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Some referred to the emergence of a “Twister” generation of chasers inspired by the 1996 movie starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as swashbuckling storm chasers in a pickup truck.

Tornado tourism is also on the rise, with several tour companies offering to bring paying guests into the churning heart of dangerous storms. At least one, called Extreme Chase Tours, allows guests as young as 12.

Experts said so many eyes trained on the storm could have benefits. Most warnings are issued based on Doppler radar readings without visual confirmation and frequently cause false alarms, leading to complacency among residents, Dr. Forbes said.

“The more human verified it is, the more people are likely to take shelter,” he said.

Mr. Samaras was on the lookout on Friday. He sent out a Twitter message at 4:50 p.m. shortly before the storm hit along with a photo of ominous, thickening white clouds.

“Storms now initiating south of Watonga along triple point,” he wrote. “Dangerous day ahead for OK — stay weather savvy!”

Bill Carter contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/business/media/storm-chasers-among-those-killed-in-oklahoma.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder Blog: Weather Channel’s Challenge: Predictable Programming for Advertisers

April 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Eyebrows usually rise when the Weather Channel makes upfront presentations, sharing with marketers and agencies its programming plans for the coming television season. As one reader of this blog commented on a post on Tuesday that mentioned in passing the Weather Channel’s 2013-14 upfront, “I can’t wait to see which hurricanes they’ll be covering this summer. : )”

Kidding aside, the Weather Channel, part of the Weather Company, has been adding original scripted series to its schedule for several years for one primary reason: Although weather is mercurial, marketers and agencies crave regularity.

So for next season, the Weather Channel will add six series to its schedule, along with three online-only series that will be streamed on the channel’s Web site, weather.com. The new shows, along with additional changes that will include a new look for the channel’s regular programs, were outlined by senior executives at the 2013-14 upfront presentation on Wednesday morning.

At the center of the plans is a renewed commitment to the channel’s core audience, the dedicated viewers who were described by David Kenny, chairman and chief executive of the Weather Company, as “weather enthusiasts.”

Mr. Kenny took pains to reassure the marketers and agency executives who attended the presentation that those viewers are not couch potatoes who watch weather forecasts because they have nothing better to do, thus making them poor targets for commercial pitches.

Rather, Mr. Kenny said, weather enthusiasts are “over-indexing on weather because they do stuff,” which makes them “an audience worth investing in.”

So worthwhile is that audience, Mr. Kenny said — whether they consume Weather Channel content on cable, online or on mobile devices — that the company is urging marketers and agencies to “Own the weather.”

David Clark, president of the Weather Channel, described plans to further localize the content of the channel.

For instance, there will be a revamping of the forecasts known as “Local on the 8s,” Mr. Clark said, and a customization of coverage so that while viewers in markets affected by severe local weather are watching coverage of that news, viewers in other, unaffected markets will be able to continue watching regular programming.

As for the programming lineup for 2013-14, he added, there will be, all told, 20 “new original series” on the channel, “up from eight in 2012.”

The six newcomers are: “Coast Guard Cape Disappointment,” “Freaks of Nature,” “Secrets of the Earth,” “Storm Warriors,” “Strangest Weather on Earth” and “Weather That Changed the World.” They will join new original series that were previously announced, among them “Breaking Ice,” “Lava Chasers” and “Reel Rivals.”

The three original series to be available on weather.com, scheduled to start in the summer, are “Brink,” “The Bucket List” and “The Explorers.”

Curt Hecht, chief global revenue officer of the Weather Company, discussed how he wants to “make our analytics and our data more available to” marketers and agencies so they may, for example, better use location targeting to reach the right consumers in the right place at the right time.

There was also an announcement of a deal between Twitter and the Weather Company – owned by Bain Capital, the Blackstone Group and the NBCUniversal unit of Comcast – to create customized content around weather-related activity on twitter.com. The content, which can be sponsored by marketers, will include video clips of local forecasts

At the end of the presentation, the hosts of the event, Jim Cantore and Maria LaRosa – two of the on-camera meteorologists-cum-personalities on the Weather Channel – offered the weekend forecast for the New York area. (Temperatures, they predicted, will be near-average, in the 50s.)

Ms. LaRosa jokingly reassured the audience that despite the presence of Mr. Cantore, who has become known for his coverage of extreme weather like hurricanes, “there is no major storm” in the forecast.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/weather-channels-challenge-predictable-programming-for-advertisers/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

USA Cable Channel Woos Back Some Viewers

September 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Compared with the summer of 2009, its highest-rated so far, the channel lost 4 percent of its prime-time viewers and, more troublingly, nearly 10 percent of the 18- to 49-year-old viewers that advertisers pay a premium to reach.

So this summer, the channel spread the new seasons of its sunny and optimistic dramas across more nights than before and added two shows, “Suits” and “Necessary Roughness,” that were slightly more provocative than past shows.

The summer ratings, formally tallied this week, show that USA has recouped about half of 2010’s losses among 18- to 49-year-olds and all of its losses in its total viewership. The channel is expected to renew every one of the seven shows it featured this summer — giving its new parent, Comcast, early proof of its big bet on cable programming.

USA’s strength is emblematic of cable’s robust summer ratings overall, part of a generation-long trend away from broadcast viewing and toward cable viewing. Total time spent viewing television has risen again this year, even as slight minorities of people forgo owning televisions or subscribing to cable for economic and cultural reasons. And the reason is largely cable programming.

“Cable numbers are growing more than broadcast is eroding, which is why the overall number is growing,” said Jack Wakshlag, the chief research officer for Turner Broadcasting.

HLN, formerly known as Headline News, had its highest rating ever in July when the Casey Anthony verdict was announced; the Weather Channel attained a viewer record last Saturday when Hurricane Irene made landfall in North Carolina; and MTV had its highest rating ever last Sunday with the Video Music Awards.

For all of these cable channels, including USA, the challenge is to hold onto a core audience while broadening out to attract new viewers.

“This is a place that has built its success one show at a time,” said Jeff Wachtel, a USA co-president, in an interview at the channel’s West Coast office adjacent to the Universal Pictures studio here. He objected to suggestions that USA is a repetitive factory of dramas — “There is no formula!” was written at the top of his typed talking points for the interview — and instead said that the channel has a filter for aspirational, stylish shows.

That filter, said Chris McCumber, USA’s other co-president, creates expectations that benefit new shows. Referring to “Suits,” he said by teleconference from New York, “even if they don’t know anything about it, they’re more likely to check it out.” He added, “We didn’t see that kind of response six years ago.”

Under Bonnie Hammer, USA became the single most profitable asset within NBC Universal. After she was promoted to chairwoman of the company’s cable entertainment and cable studios, Mr. Wachtel and Mr. McCumber were named co-presidents of the network last March, two months after Comcast took control of NBC Universal. Already, USA has given Comcast an early success to extol to investors. Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said on an earnings call in August that “Suits” and “Necessary Roughness” were ordered “after the deal closed” and that they “now promise to be important new franchises for USA for many years to come.”

For years, USA’s closest competitor in prime time has been TNT, the drama network owned by Turner Broadcasting. But this summer, the History channel rose to No. 2, the result of hit reality shows like “Pawn Stars,” “American Restoration” and “Mounted in Alaska.”

History has posted 30 to 40 percent gains in audience two summers in a row, a remarkable feat. Nancy Dubuc, the president and general manager of History, said in an e-mail message that the ratings were “a clear indication we know what History viewers want and that we’re giving it to them.”

TNT, meanwhile, is down 2 percent among 18- to 49-year-olds in prime time this summer. TNT had a bigger new show this summer — the sci-fi show “Falling Skies” drew almost 3.3 million 18- to 49-year-olds each week, more than any of USA’s shows — but the rest of its schedule did not hold up as well.

Mr. Wakshlag said that repeats of acquired shows, like “Law Order” on TNT, are not as reliably popular as they once were, perhaps because such shows are replayed in other places and because there are so many original series competing for attention. USA attributed its declines last year to the same trend.

On the reality side, the only cable channel with a bigger hit than History is MTV, which has benefited hugely from “Jersey Shore” for the second summer in a row. It has had an average of 5.8 million viewers ages 18 to 49 this summer, more than 2 million more than History’s “Pawn Stars.”

Arguably the most notable decline on cable this summer was TBS, the comedic sister of TNT, which was down 20 percent in prime time among 18- to 49-year-olds. The channel is optimistic about the repeats of “The Big Bang Theory” that will come onto its schedule in the fall.

USA is moving into comedy, too. It is also developing reality shows and long-form events that allow it to be “a little bit edgier,” Mr. Wachtel said.

“It’s like any good financial adviser will tell you,” Mr. McCumber added. “You’ve got to broaden the portfolio.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dc27d5ec0841692798ca62f9f9d43c63

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