Stormy weather

By Rosalynne Harty, associate editor, The State Journal-Register.
This column originally appeared in the SJ-R Feb. 6, 1987.

Harty

Newsrooms are funny places. When we have fire alarms, we have trouble prying people away from their desks. We've had power blackouts, visiting small bears, U.S. senators and once, a firefighter complete with rubber raincoat and ax. The reporters barely looked up.

But just let an editor mention the word "weather story" and the place clears out. Reporters who would unflinchingly go to crime scenes with gunmen at large have been known to whimper for mercy when assigned to write about damaging winds.

Let's face it. There are a lot of things that newspapers do better than anyone else. But covering the weather isn't one of them.

If you want to know whether or not to put the battery charger on the car tonight, is your first reaction to rummage around and find the morning paper? If you want to know whether to send little Billy to school with galoshes or a jacket, do you keep him in pajamas till the newspaper arrives?

No, you either turn to the otherwise useless electronic medium of your choice, or you do as I do: look out the window. Actually, I think the chief value of a newspaper in weather-monitoring is to get you outside in a bathrobe so you can personally assess the situation yourself.

And yet, those of us on this side of the paper bravely carry on, doing the best we can, often throwing our bravest and brightest reporters into the face of the storm, as it were.

Now, there are some remarkable people who go into newspapering. Some see it as a chance to be a watchdog on government, righting wrongs and exposing bad grammar in high places. Some see it as a way to polish their powers of observation and description before writing The Great American Novel.

Many prefer it to having to go out and get a real job.

But practically no one goes into it because they wanted to write about weather. I've yet to meet one reporter who said, "Oh, of course, I'd be glad to start out covering state government, if I have to. But what I'd really really like to do is cover frontal systems."

But almost invariably, on some bleak day or another, it's frontal systems they get.

Actually, on this paper at least, we try to avoid calling them frontal systems -- sounds like a two-dollar word for baby bibs. We also zealously avoid any and all references to "shower activity." We call it rain.

You'd think that would make weather stories easy to write, but they aren't. For beginning reporters, weather stories are like final exams. For a typical weather story, a reporter might easily contact 20 sources, from utility companies to law enforcement agencies to farmers and business owners. At 30 minutes to deadline they have notebooks full of things like this:

Mr. Wils. 47! cg trucks can't. xjgr aalw. 555-924?

Naturally, faced with such an array of information, the beginning reporter falls back on the only tool left for churning out a story on deadline: cliches!

The beginning reporter reaches happily for familiar phrases and images. Old Man Winter and his July companion, Ol' Sol. The rain fails to dampen. The snow is always dumped. The temperature either soars or plummets. Streams are perpetually swollen. The fog rolls in, like a pastry cart on wheels.

Hail, of course, is always golfball-sized. This is such a hallowed rule that once, when we heard a TV report about pingpong-sized hail, we almost scrambled for rulers to see precisely what was the difference.

One editor here grouses that hail isn't news unless it's at least volleyball-sized.

Then there's always winter's icy grip, which either tightens -- argh -- or loosens its stranglehold on the traffic arteries of the city. Actually, winter's icy grip is probably one of the last great investigative stories left in the field of weather journalism.

If winter has an icy grip, does that mean winter has a thumb? Does it have a warm grip too? Can a storm have both eyes (as in hurricane) and teeth (as in "biting winds") as well as a grip? How big does an icy grip have to be to get a stranglehold on the traffic arteries of the city?

And is there any way we can get sports to cover this?