URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MEDFORD OR
207 PM PST MON FEB 26 2007

…WINTRY WEATHER TO CONTINUE THROUGH TUESDAY…WITH SNOW LEVELS DROPPING AGAIN TO MOST VALLEY FLOORS TONIGHT…. UP TO 1 TO 3 INCHES OF SNOW CAN BE EXPECTED TONIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW MORNING OVER LOWER VALLEY LOCATIONS……..

We get that sort of message from the weather service periodically during the winter months. The above arrived this afternoon and warned of snow on the valley floor for tomorrow. It’s big news around here, but if I have my way, you won’t read this in Tuesday morning’s Mail Tribune. No, not because I’m keeping secrets from our readers, but because the only thing worse than a wrong weather story is a weather story that you can tell is wrong by looking out the window.

An impending storm suggests news is on the way and that causes newsrooms to get jumpy. We don’t just want to get the news, we want to get it first. So our competitive impulse is to write a story with a lead something like this: “Weather forecasters say you should expect to be trudging through the snow on your way to work or play this morning.” The problem with the snow story is that by the time readers see it in the newspaper, “this morning” is now and if there’s no snow on the ground, the story — and the newspaper — seem pretty lame.

So we qualify our stories with words like “possible,” “likely” and “predicted.” But the bottom line is that we don’t want to say something is going to happen when we don’t know for sure — especially when our readers can tell in a glance if we were right or wrong.

One other weather-related pet peeve for me — Saturday’s paper on Page One said, and I quote: “A new storm system moving in today is unlikely to drop snow on the valley floor, forecasters say.” Saturday’s paper on Page 8A said, and I quote: More snow is expected in the Rogue Valley today and tonight, with as much as 1 inch accumulating … .”

I guess there is a way to predict a snow storm accurately — say it will snow and say it won’t snow, in the same paper! Sigh …….

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under From the Editor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.