Oh No…Snow!

It’s coming. It started building earlier this week. Tracking the monster. It starts thousands of miles away, and slowly creeps toward us. It gets bigger and bigger. The guessing and speculation begins about exactly when it will hit and how much will bury us. This is what local television news can feast on during these dark, cold winter months. People working in television news hate it, except for the meteorologists. It means long hours of all day coverage. Staying over night in a hotel so you can make sure you can get into work. Everyone else can use the excuse that they can’t get to work because they are snowed in. It’s the job of those TV news people to provide coverage for everyone else who is snowed in.

It takes a lot of work and coordination to provide that wall to wall snow coverage. Getting people in position in advance of the storm.  Twelve hour shifts for everyone. It’s really a long day for the reporters and crews who are standing out there for hours telling you it’s snowing. They’ll tell you you’re crazy to leave your couch and stop watching. They have an audience. You can’t go anywhere. Many business close so you’re stuck at home, and, of course, your kids are home from school. This coming weekend snow may be welcomed for people who are off on the weekend and don’t have to get to work. Kids would much rather a weekday snow and an extra day off from school.

But much of the coverage is based on fear. There will be stories about the rush to the supermarket where people run to make sure they have enough milk, bread, and eggs. It’s the standing joke in newsrooms that no one wants to run out of the vital ingredients for French toast. You will see the stories about making sure your car is ready so you don’t get stuck and stranded in the snow. Check your tires. Fill your tank. Have blankets, water, and a flashlight in your car in case you get stuck in the middle of the night. People stranded at the airport. Reports from the giant piles of salt, and Penndot telling you to stay off the road so their plows can do their job. A reporter will be standing on the boardwalk at the shore telling us about wind, coastal flooding, and beach erosion. The mayor will be opening the Emergency Operations Center and saying only vital city employees should come to work. The TV news business is grateful that the non-vital workers get to stay home and sit on the couch and watch. And, of course, the warning to avoid death by snow shoveling.

The stars of the coverage are the meteorologists. Which I always thought was an odd description of what they did. A meteorologist sounds like an expert on meteors. But meteorology is a serious science, and is much more exact and sophisticated with advanced computer modeling. But it’s the tone that some of them set that breeds this sense of impending doom. At first, they are hard to pin down on those two things we mentioned earlier. The two things people really want to know. How many inches and when. They are very cautious. I know they want to be right. But sometimes it comes off as a big tease. They stand in front that big angry map with all those blobs of blues, yellows, and reds rushing toward us saying it’s coming, and we can’t avoid it.

I always felt snowstorms were a very unsatisfying news story. It’s a good news story because it affects everyone. People want to know what to expect. The news media has successfully scared everyone, starting days in advance, about how bad it’s going to be, and how our lives are going to be disrupted and we better be prepared. And, of course the pictures are great. But, for news people once the storm stops, and you do the day after clean up stories, it feels like every other snow storm you ever covered. There is very little original reporting, and the story just melts away. But it is a story that brings people together. At a time when so much is pulling us apart, maybe we can find a day of peace buried under that snow together.