34 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
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
THE WEATHER BOYS The Weather Company’s Greg Gilderman (left) and Kevin Hayes (right) are innovating in climate change reporting
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 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
PART OF DATA JOURNALISM IS BEING A DATA TRANSLATOR
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?
THE TIDE IS HIGH Climate change stories often have political angles, such as rising sea levels seeing young Marshallese migrate to the US
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