Saturday, October 23, 2010

Dear Channel 12

I wrote the following email to Channel 12.  I sent it to the Station Manager, James Smith:
jamessmith@ksla.com
Dear Channel 12,
We really do understand that when severe weather is in the area, you need to alert people.  We understand if you have to interrupt the LSU/Auburn game for 30 or 45 seconds to give an alert.
After that, a simple graphic on the screen would suffice to keep us informed.
That seems to work for your competition, and the people who watch them are as well informed as the people who had the ball game interrupted.
You also have a responsbility to carry sports broadcasting that the network feeds you, especially when just about everyone in the local area is watching it.
Now, if an actual tornado forms, and then if, god forbid, it touches down, we would understand another interruption.  This was not the case.
How many times did your weather person go back to the beginning and give us a history of the entire sequence of the system, from the first drop of rain to the END OF THE GAME.
We get it, we really do.  We're just wondering when you will get it?
Sincerely,
Jim Wells

16 comments:

  1. i say boycott KSLA. I'm NEVER watching them again, ever. Regardless of the effect, it will make me feel better. Although, id be happy if they just fired that ignorant weatherman.

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  2. Jim,

    I guess we have different perspectives of what happened . I took the opportunity to use it as a learning experience. By the time the guy got finished with meteorology school I was ready for my final exam. Although he covered what I thought were all the aspects of weather phenomena, the impromtu professor failed to cover the history of the fujita scale, causing me to fail the test. So, I won't be changing careers after all.

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  3. The Saints game tomorrow is on KSLA

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  4. @Anon: I hope it isn't raining in Ashdown tomorrow.

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  5. They have a 24/7 weather channel on 12.3, and it has always seemed to me that they could run a crawl on 12.1 and 12.2 to alert the viewers and direct them to 12.3. I have often had the movie that I was watching on "this" interupted over storm warnings that were more than 50 miles from my own house. They need to understand that they are covering a large area here.

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  6. He even gave a three day forecast after about 20 minutes. That was when I realized this guy has nothing else to say. Also, if they have such a great weather tracker, why didn't they give a single wind speed or amount of rain fallen during the entire debacle?

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  7. I only watch Jennifer Gray on KTBS when she wears her khaki pants anyways.

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  8. Anon @ 11:00,

    Pervert! But I understand completely.

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  9. it's because they haven't had anything to do for the last three months. after weeks of saying "sunny skies, warm, and no chance or rain" they needed something to affirm their existence.

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  10. That weatherman had all the personality of a potato. He had to hijack the entire second half of the game just to score a little attention. It was like the TV version of ambien.

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  11. I am not going to watch a bunch of grown men playing childish games, anyway, but I just ran through the channels and saw that they are doing the same today except they are showing the NFL in the corner of the screen.
    What I always wonder when they do preempt something that I want to watch, "What do they think we can do about the weather even with all the information they are giving?"

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  12. After around 50 attempts, I finally got through to a real person, today during the Chargers/Patriots game. The girl said it was their "policy" to interrupt broadcasts when severe weather was present. I explained, "We really don't mind a severe alert, BUT when the weatherman says the SAME thing 20 times, it's overkill. Besides people living in these affected rural areas probably all have satellite t.v. which likely had no signal during the storm, hence no one was watching the KSLA weather report." She did mention that they had received a large number of calls similar to mine.

    Reminds me of a line from Return of the King..."Do not stand between a Nazgul and his prey."

    Channel 12, do not stand between football fans and their teams!

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  13. I think wheeler might be right. Dude had so much pent up weather in him that he couldn't hep hisself!

    I swear man...he was at it again yesterday. I don't know who makes the calls on things like this, but it truly was silly. I have always liked KSLA news, but honestly since this weather guy got there it is hard to watch. That incessant "Storm Tracker 12!" deal that he slurs through gets on my nerves.

    Why didn't they just show a rerun of "Heidi?"

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  14. I kept an eye on it last night - went all the way through Amazing Race and into CIS.
    I was watching the game on Channel 6 - they broke in a couple of times for a short time and had a graphic on the screen the rest of the time. It was much more useful than a closeup radar screen - who had any idea where it was?
    They were hemming and hawing and talking to people in the background, playing with computer, etc.
    It was embarassing.

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  15. Nyuk! Yeah, the close-up radar screen deal stumped me, too. I thought it was just ME that couldn't figure out which part of north Texas was getting rained on.

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