News-Record.com

For a couple years now, I've been half-heartedly discouraging editors from doing much in the newspaper with stories about impending weather. Are we telling readers anything they don't already know? TV and online have won that battle and newspapers have lost. I doubt many people look to the paper for a prediction about an approaching storm when the blanket "team" coverage is ubiquitous -- and more timely -- on television and the Internet.

Ever since I've been in this business, reporters have hated writing weather stories, primarily because they seem so silly and predictable. When we were at the News & Observer, Howard Troxler wrote an "impending storm" story as if it were an investigative piece, full of skulduggery and secret sources at the weather bureau. It was bounced back to him by a dour and unappreciative editor. Twenty five years later, here comes Meranda: Raise your hand if you hate writing weather stories....It's like writing about traffic lights changing colors. Everyone knows it's going to happen, and they can kind of figure out for themselves what comes next.

We try to write them compellingly, but there are only so many ways to write an interesting weather story and an armless man can count them on his fingers. No, that's harsh. There are a couple ways, but not many. To put it another way, how many times do you need to see a TV reporter standing by the side of the road with a yardstick preparing to measure the inch of snow that's fallen and hear her tell you not to drive if you don't have to?

Deepening the issue is that, despite meteorologists' boasts about accuracy, weather predictions are notoriously wrong. Last night the forecast was for it to be snowing right at this minute. Not happening. It's 38 degrees.

But it's a newspaper tradition that's hard to shake. As the storm approaches, it becomes what people talk about. Schools let out. Businesses close. How can a newspaper not write about it? Besides, with everything focused on a snow storm there isn't much else going on to write about.

* We need to log the coming storm in the paper in a small way somewhere, but it's an online story. Now, after the storm hits and power is knocked out, schools are closed and life is changed, then that's a different story.