As y’all may have heard, we had some serious snow here on the East coast yesterday.
The local news kept us apprised of that fact nonstop from about 5 AM until 6:30 (when they stopped for the national news, which also mentioned it), then did another hour from 7 to 8 PM in case there was someone in the immediate area who hadn’t heard.
This struck me as excessive. We knew it was snowing. We knew it was bad. We appreciated the news that the Schuylkill (major local highway) was closed, but didn’t need to see pictures of no-one-driving-on-the-Schuylkill. We also didn’t need you reading from the station’s Facebook page, or to see not very good digital pictures of dogs next to snowbanks sent in by viewers, or hear the recipe for a soy-milk-and-chai beverage named for a regular customer at the only coffee place open in Center City, even if said regular customer was present and available to taste it and pronounce it as exactly the same as every other time she had had it.
People were home and bored – wouldn’t it have been more of a public service to put on your regular programming?
The 24-hour blathering got old really fast. Give me the occasional road updates and show me the radar once in a while as things move. Otherwise, talk about something else.
And I really don’t need to see other peoples’ yards. They look just like mine - white, with bumps of things under the white. Unless you snapped a pic of a family of Yeti performing their snow ritual in your yard, it’s not newsworthy.
In in Portland, Oregon, where predictions of snowfall cause school shutdowns and massive traffic jams, and the five local stations compete to see who can come up with the best newstheme involving the word “-Storm (insert year here)”.
I grew up in Minnesota and presently live in Kentucky. This makes me extremely unsympathetic to “Ack! it snowed two inches, must close school for 2 days”. Although, in fairness, there is a lack of plows and such, and some of the more rural counties (which I do not live in) have crappy roads and enough hills and hollers to make it difficult for people to get to work/school.
And for reasons unconnected to the weather, we watched our usual Tuesday night TV on Wednesday-so the school closings were out of date as well as geographically useles.
Now, I wouldn’t have minded pics of major winter snow. But if it’s an inch or two, I can live with the crawl, but nothing more is really needed.
Can’t remember the last time I really had a major snowstorm.
Yesterday, O’Hare beat the record for snowfall accumulation on that particular day of the year since they started keeping track of such things.
The news, happily, was focused on the neato 3.8 earthquake we had here in Illinois, made even more interesting by the fact that it wasn’t from a known fault in the area!
Sure, there’s the usual crawl of what schools are closed and whatever, but hey, earthquake!
I haven’t seen the national news in a week now. Though the little ones have been watching the kids channel, but I know at least a few days they skipped it. I think we’ve had way too much snow news, they can do some extra programing, but not all day and night.
I think it’s worse when the weather people are all freaking out about the upcoming snowstorm and we (locally) only got 2 inches (though everyone around us got hit. I guess we were protected by mountains). It’s like they were coming in their pants about the possibility of snow. Got egg on your face, now, do ya, assholes? I never believe a thing they say.
I don’t mind quick updates between shows but I am more looking for how much has already fallen, where it’s fallen and how much more is coming. I don’t care about bigger updates or on site reporting I just want to know how bad it’s been and how much worse its going to get beyond that I’ll find out in the morning when I try to go to work.
I picked an extra half hour. The reason for that is because here in LA, we hardly ever get bad weather so when it happens, it’s actually news. I would feel different if I were in, say, Seattle or Minnesota
When I used to live in Greenville, SC, it was easy to predict the weather: any weather Atlanta got, we got. Outside of hurricanes, but that’s a different story.
And yet, somehow, two of the three major networks (this was before Fox affiliates had local news) managed to screw it up reliably.
Not only do I have a window that I can look out of, I have an internet that I can check on. Up here in CT we had close to zero accumulation yesterday, after local weather people estimated anywhere from 4-8 inches to 8-16 inches. And schools closed. When I went to the liquor store, the guy there said that people had called him the day prior, asking of he would be open (He was open because, as he explained, if everyone had to stay home all day without alcohol it would be hell). Of course, we did have snow last night, along with people out this morning who couldn’t handle it.
