15 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes change from what The Weather Channel was then. At the time, most legacy media companies in television viewed their online and digital properties as just a way to showcase clips from the linear television broadcast, and I would argue that’s not the best way to serve the digital audience. We brought on our own digital-only meteorologist. Our first was Ari Sarsalari, who understood what we were trying to do. We didn’t have a studio for him – we would shoot him on the newsroom floor and edit in clips. What we recognised would make us different is that, where television wants to engage conversationally for as long as viewers can be engaged, we wanted to create visually driven short clips that were dense with information. So a large part of what we did, at the time, was find clips that people had shot of weather and get their permission to use them in our forecast. Whereas the TV model – which was very successful, it’s not a criticism – was to use maps and people interacting and talking to each other. We had to think about how to convey information if the digital user didn’t have the sound on their desktop or mobile device, which got us in the business of 45-second to one-minute videos, visually driven, with a clip for each story, versus the very long clips from TV. FEED: How are you analysing and presenting the huge amounts of data available on climate? GREG GILDERMAN: First, we have IBM’s proprietary algorithm for forecasting. The Weather Channel uses it for consumers and for business clients. But part of data journalism is being a data translator. There’s an enormous amount of data and information about everything right now, and there’s a ton of it about climate change and different aspects of climate change. How do you take all that information and present it in a way that a large audience who are interested in the news will be able to understand and enjoy? That’s where our writers, our off-camera meteorologists (who work behind the scenes and write articles or prepare the on-camera meteorologists) and the on-camera meteorologists (who all have background in meteorology and atmospheric science) – really shine. KEVIN HAYES: I have the absolute luxury of calling one of my colleagues, who’s a meteorologist, and saying, ‘What’s the deal with this? How is weather behaving in southeast Georgia? Because it looks like farmers there are having a hard time’. Then
FEED: Can you tell us how you began at The Weather Company? Greg, do you want to start? GREG GILDERMAN: Sure. I’ve worked in digital-only news, at a newspaper and in broadcast TV news. Then I moved to digital video in the mid-2000s. I launched the video unit for The Philadelphia Inquirer , then was at The Daily Beast – and that’s how I got my start at The Weather Channel. KEVIN HAYES: And I was at CBS News for about a decade, mostly on the TV side and primarily with the show 48 Hours . Then I spent a couple of years on the digital side, came over to The Weather Channel and I’ve been here for six or seven years now. I started off building out vertical coverage and photo coverage for the site and the app. I’ve transitioned now to overseeing feature coverage and enterprise coverage, largely with climate change as a focus. FEED: Can you set us straight on what The Weather Company is, and how it is separate from The Weather Channel? GREG GILDERMAN: The Weather Company is owned by IBM, and The Weather Company includes The Weather Channel digital properties – so The Weather Channel app and Weather.com, as well as Weather Underground. The Weather Channel network is no longer owned by The Weather Company, but IBM does still own the brand, so The Weather Company licenses the brand back from us. We still work hand-in-hand with them to be sure the brand is protected and discussed correctly for our users, because the user should not see a difference between the brands. But it is interesting that the back-end business is owned by two different companies. In point of fact, The Weather Company is actually more than those consumer properties like The Weather Channel and Weather Underground. We also have a large B2B side of things where our weather data and our meteorologist teams work with clients across many vertical mini industries, such as aviation, government, insurance, retail and energy – anyone who is impacted by weather, which – as we say – is everyone. FEED: How has weather coverage developed since you’ve been there? GREG GILDERMAN: When I started, we began by doing original editorial video with a digital audience in mind, which was a
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