I believe 2019 will be the year that reporting on the local impacts of climate change will finally go mainstream, and I expect local TV meteorologists to lead the way in transforming how the story of climate is reported.
On Black Friday, a cohort of federal agencies released the National Climate Assessment. The economic impacts of climate change detailed in the report aren’t vague or far off — they’re widespread and personal, affecting everyone from farmers to skiers to beer-makers. In 2019, journalists will overcome the worry of “taking sides’ and show the courage to tackle this complex story.
But why your local meteorologist? A combination of threats and opportunity combine to make your favorite TV forecaster uniquely positioned to break through the politics of climate and make meaning out of the complexity.
First, the threat. Who needs the local TV mainstay of old — the 7-day forecast — in a digital era where “there’s an app for that”? Absent a redefinition of their role, local TV meteorologists are at risk of the same fate as TV traffic reporters, who can’t compete with the real-time, turn-by-turn personalized traffic solutions from apps like WAZE. As Rob Carlmark, local meteorologist for KXTV in Sacramento puts it: “Every day, I ask myself: ‘How can I be better than an app?'” That’s the right question, and here is where opportunity intersects with need.
Local newspapers long ago ceded weather to their TV brethren. It wasn’t “real news,” and its visual, personality-driven nature was a better natural fit to the medium of television. Fast forward to today: While overall TV news viewing is slowly declining, viewers still flock to local TV whenever a big weather event hits. The top local TV meteorologist is often one of the most recognized and trusted personalities in a community. In addition, many hold meteorological degrees and are certified by the American Meteorological Society. They are capable of far more than just telling you whether or not you’ll need an umbrella today. And they’re often masters of visual explainers. (Have you seen some of the new augmented reality visualizations?)
We’ve reached a point in climate reporting where we don’t need more studies. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. We need impactful, visual, explanatory reporting. We need storytellers who can connect the large and complex story of climate to the local community. Local TV meteorologists have the weather expertise, the trust of their local communities, and the visual explanatory skills and graphics tools to tell this story in a way that will have impact. They also have the audience. The past two years have seen strong tune-in for local weather events like hurricanes, blizzards, flooding, and wildfires. Local TV is at its best covering these highly visual stories that directly affect their communities. Climate news is hitting home, and hitting harder.
There are signs that this shift toward connecting climate change to the story of weather is already underway. Brad Panovich, a local meteorologist at WCNC in Charlotte, was recognized nationally by the AMS. in 2018 for his efforts. There are also resources available. Climate Central works to help local meteorologists to report on the effects of climate change.
This is the year local TV meteorologists reinvent their roles from merely weather predictor (remember, there’s an app for that) and reclaim their relevance by using their expertise, community trust, and visual skills to add meaning and context to the ways climate change is affecting their communities.
Frank Mungeam is Knight Professor of Practice in TV News Innovation at Arizona State’s Cronkite School of Journalism.
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
AX Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Rick Berke The year of loyalty