St. Louis NBC affiliate KSDK is looking to keep its viewers safe and entertained now that it has come to the intersection of sports and weather.
With severe weather prevalent in the area and the city’s NHL team, the Blues, in the playoffs airing on NBC, KSDK is trying to figure out how to keep its viewers up-to-date on any severe weather in the area without annoying them.
“First and foremost, if we’re (showing) the Blues we’re not going to cut in unless it’s absolutely dire,” KSDK GM Marv Danielski told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The good news is we’re looking at Saturday as a perfectly sunny day so we don’t have to deal with that. Ultimately or job is to be responsible to the weather situation, to the market. We’ll always take that seriously. But there are ways to work around it.”
Severe weather updates are often a sore spot for stations. A couple of years ago, a South Dakota anchor scolded viewers who complained about the station’s severe weather updates interrupting their favorite shows.
“We certainly know we’re going to make some people happy and some people mad,” said Danielski. “We don’t cut in unless it’s bad.”
“If there’s a server thunderstorm and it’s right over Creve Coeur and it’s dropping grapefruit-size hail, we’ve got to tell people that,” he said. “Thunderstorms actually create more damage than tornadoes because they’re bigger, they’re more widespread. And there’s hail. So we come from that point of view. But ultimately all we can try to do is balance out what’s best for our audience we’re serving at that moment.”