Charles Apple

Behind the scenes at Weather Central

While we news design types are deciding the sexy parts of our paper’s presentation each night — what goes on A1, what photos and graphics we’ll run, what to promo across the top — a team of people in a darkened room in Madison, Wisconsin, are putting the final touches on one of our most visual and most-read pages: Our weather pages.

Weather Central supplies weather maps and pages to about 145 daily newspapers. It’s the dedication and professionalism of these folks — not to mention their technical expertise — that the weather page is, for the most part, an automatic function for most of us.

We download it from an FTP server, slap it on the page and let it rip. No worries.

However, screw something up on that page — have a font drop out or accidentally run the previous day’s page — and your phone will ring all day. That’s when you find out just how important your weather page is to your readers.

Weather and crossword puzzles — smart designers know you shouldn’t screw around with either of them.

So who are these folks who put together our weather pages? Weather Central is more than just an FTP site and a friendly voice at the customer service number.

To put a face on the operation, Pat Weeden — Weather Central’s Customer Service Manager for Newspaper Services — agreed to answer a few questions for us.

Pat Weeden at his desk

Weather Central’s Pat Weeden
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Q. Your offices are located in Madison. Why Madison?

A. Weather Central was founded in 1974 by Terry Kelly, who, at the time, was the on-air meteorologist for Madison’s ABC affiliate, WKOW-TV, and by Dr. Dick Daly, a professor at UW-Madison. We recently added a second office in Eagan, Minn. and have offices in Europe and Asia. Besides, Madison is one of the Best Places to Live in Americaâ„¢.

Beautiful downtown Madison
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Q. About how many weather pages do you produce daily?

A. We have about 160 newspaper clients, and roughly 145 of those are daily newspapers. The rest are weekly or bi-weekly. I count six of the top ten and 45 of the top 100 newspapers by circulation in our client list.

A few years ago, I added up the Sunday circulation of all of our clients and got something like 25 million. I like to use that figure to intimidate new employees.

Weather Central central, or “the ops room.” In front of the drop-down chroma-key greenscreen is WKOW-TV meteorologist Brian Olson doing his 11:05 standup on Aug. 9. “There is a robotic camera just above the shot,” Weeden says. “The rest of the crew is off camera, so they just keep working.” The big flatscreen on the left wall shows what’s on the air. The monitors on the right show Super Doppler radar and a roof cam.

(From left) Meteorologists Andy Snyder, Tom Carlson and Ashley Korrer work on forecasts to be used later in the day for newspaper page production. “We are in the process of moving to a new building,” Weeden says. “About 70 percent of the company has already moved over. This place used to be really hopping with all the seats filled all the time. Looks a little dead today.” The rest of the company moves in December, Weeden says.
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Q. I’d imagine that because of time zones, deadlines are staggered throughout the day. What is your peak time of the evening?

A. Peak production is between 4:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Central time as most of the pages are for morning papers. We have stragglers throughout the day and have somebody here producing pages 24 hours a day.

Q. What percentage, would you say, of the pages you produce daily are color and what percentage are black-and-white?

A. About 70% color and 30% black. Many papers get both every day to have last-minute flexibility depending on color ad sales for the day.

Meteorologist Tom Carlson works up forecasts for western papers. “Production shifts start at 2 p.m.,” Weeden says.
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Q. How many folks are on the production staff there? Do you have certain folks who are meteorologists and others who are production folks? What is the breakdown, approximately?

A. Weather Central employs 165 people and of those, 24 are in the “Weather Services” department that creates or supports print weather pages. With the exception of V.P. Chuck Sholdt and me, all are degreed meteorologists.

Over the years, we have found that artists get bored very easily with weather pages. Once the initial design is done with a particular client, nothing changes, sometimes for years. There is also the problem of teaching new hires the unique aspects of our business.At risk of offending the primary audience of your blog, it is much easier to teach a meteorologist how to be proficient in InDesign than it is to teach a graphic designer how to create and proof daily weather content for customers on three continents with any reliability. We have tried various mixes of artists and mets and have found that “all mets” gives us the most flexibility, particularly in cross-training and crew scheduling.

Chuck Sholdt has something like 40 years experience working for newspapers in various capacities and for the Institute for Paper Chemistry.

Vice President and co-owner of Weather Central, Inc., Chuck Sholdt is an”Apple Script guru and Adobe master,” says Weeden. “He keeps the place ticking.”
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Before I came here in 1995 I worked as a press operator and in hands-on, old-school pre-press (you know, gallery cameras and tray developing and stripping plate negatives) at several newspapers and commercial printers in southern Wisconsin. I happened to take several weather classes in college just for fun, and it ended up helping me tremendously here.

For design work, we have several professional newspaper design people that we work with on a contract basis.

Q. How does a daily page come to exist? How much of the day’s report in inserted via scripts or automated plug-in applications? What percentage has to be input or tweaked by hand?

A. It’s pretty cool, actually.

Once a page design is finalized and approved, we break down the text and graphic elements of the document. The maps that change each day are made into blank Illustrator templates. The smaller regional maps are drawn by hand. The national map is done by Apple Script by applying certain elements from our master U.S. map each day. The elements are scaled to fit, styles applied, forecast temps added from a data file and saved in the proper format. The map is proofed before it goes to page production.

A couple of my favorite weather pages. Above, the Hartford Courant. Below, the Denver Post.

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The text files are all managed by a 4D database server. Things like temperature listings are created by a routine, pulling the actual numerical data from our National Weather Service data satellite stream, adding typesetting tags and exporting to a text file. These files are imported by Apple Script into an InDesign or Quark template. Customized forecasts, like regional narratives, are entered into 4D by the forecasters and imported into the template with the proper tags again.

Senior meteorologist Ron Schwarz “does all the 4D data programming,” Weeden says. “Singularly, he’s the most important guy in the building.”
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Most everything with assembling a page is scriptable, especially with the InDesign docs. Maps are placed, positioned and scaled, fever charts are drawn from a data file, text styles applied, folios created, weather icons placed, etc.

Only after each page is created and assembled does somebody proof it. At this stage, some final elements need to be done by hand on a few pages.

All of this is managed by a custom app we had created called Flight Control. Each work station has a window listing all the pages that that employee needs to create in his/her shift, sorted by deadline. All the elements needed to create a particular page are noted as being ready or not (maps drawn, forecast entered, today’s data from the N.W.S. is in and complete) and when all is OK, the person tells Flight Control to run the assembly script.

Meteorologist Ashley Korrer prepares to proof the Denver Post weather page.
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Page assembly is done behind the scenes on a headless Mac. That page is then shown as ready to proof. After proofing is complete, it is marked “OK to send” and another script assembles all the files (or makes a PDF), packages them and moves the file to our FTP server. After the move is verified, that page is marked finished and goes away from the list.

Obviously, we rely heavily on Adobe products and Apple Script. Weather Central has been recognized by both companies for our workflow automation.

Q. What kind of equipment do you use? Are you a Mac or PC shop?

A. We’re 95% Mac. All production is done on 20″ iMacs and the work stations all have a second Mac Mini for support functions. Forecasters use a mix of old and new Macs for data entry.

Data servers and file servers are XServe rack mount units. A couple headless G5’s do the automated graphic functions.

We have a handful of PCs for proprietary weather data display functions and two SGI machines running our own OS for creating satellite and radar imagery. The PCs and SGIs are built on-site for our television customers. We have had very few cross-platform issues since OS X has matured in recent years.

In Weather Central’s “Cold room” are “Two brand-spanking new G5 XServes, at top left below the row of red lights,” Weeden says. “The rack at far right has two G4s at top, two G4 XServes in the middle and a G5 at bottom, all for newspaper production. There are more unseen Macs in another rack in back. Everything else runs data acquisition and processing for TV clients.”

Meteorologist Eric Edge mans the Data Quality Control Desk. “He’s watching everything that’s going on in the cold room,” Weeden says. “Except Mac stuff.”
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Q. During The Virginian-Pilot’s recent redesign, we designed our own weather page, sent you a prototype and you rebuilt it to work with your production system. What percentage of your customers design their own pages? What percentage ask you to propose something on your end?

A. It’s about a 50/50 split, with an amazing spectrum of what people want.

For instance, your design was accompanied by a phone book sized document produced by Bob Voros showing every last detail of type spec, color, position and such. That made it tremendously easy for me and removed all guess work as to what you needed.

The Pilot’s daily weather report. At left, before the June 6 redesign, the report was a half-page. The new weather page is a full broadsheet page, printed sideways. This particular sample is from Aug. 9. Click on the thumbnails for a larger view.

Voros produced a 10-page guide to assist Weeden in building the Pilot’s package. Here’s a small excerpt:

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Other clients will say something like, “…just make it look good, we don’t really care.” We get a lot of requests for samples so people can get an idea of what is available. Many will use our off-the-shelf templates with no modifications. Others will send a complete document and ask us to reproduce it as best we can. The latter is usually from larger papers with full design staffs.

Q. What is the strangest or most unusual [or, perhaps, most clever] thing you’ve been asked to add or design into a weather page?

A. We do a full-width planet chart for the Milwaukee Journal, showing the rise and set time of each visible planet, plus sun & moon, all against a background that fades dark to light with the approximate sun brightness of that time of day and hour-by-hour temperature, wind and humidity forecasts. Hard to explain, really, but it looks cool in print. We didn’t design it but had to automate it and make it work.

Milwaukee’s weather page, redesigned earlier this year by Journal Sentinel graphics editor Lou Saldivar. (Thanks, Ed Brud, for sending us this page.) The element Weeden is referring to, of course, is across the top. Among the things it graphs are the rising and setting times for the sun, the moon and all the visible planets. For a closer look, click on this thumbnail:

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Another paper has a mascot called the Luck-E-Duck and each day, my forecasters have to pick a duck icon based on the forecast. Is the duck on the beach or is he inside watching it rain?

Q. Now that up-to-the-minute weather information is so readily available via the internet, one could argue that the time has come for newspapers to cut back their daily weather report. What are you doing to keep your print products current in the internet age?

A. Great question, and a couple points come to mind.

Almost all internet based weather sites use computer generated forecasts. Print weather, at least in our case, uses all custom forecasts, so we’re likely to be much more in-depth and accurate.

Another thing that most newspapers provide over internet weather is extensive climate, or previous day data, along with other minutia like area river stages, activity based forecasts and other custom content. We have a sister company called MyWeather that provides weather data to populate newspaper and TV stations’ weather sites. By referring readers to the paper’s own website for updates, we keep the forecasts consistent and can keep the viewers on the papers’ website instead of directing them to the Weather Channel or some other third-party site.

An example of a MyWeather microcast, with which users can sign up to customize their own weather info pages.
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Q. Do your meteorologists have any pet peeves? Are there any typical mistakes that the newspaper business, as a whole, could avoid?

A. 1) Ten day forecasts - we really don’t like going out more than five days as accuracy plummets beyond that point. 7-day and 10-day forecasts are guesses at best. It may look good, but is not useful in our opinion.

2) Papers that want extended narrative forecasts for five days out in areas of the country where the weather never changes. There are only so many ways you can say, “Sunny and warm” in southern California or “Partly cloudy, afternoon thunderstorms” in south Florida.

3) Fonts!

My personal favorites, from readers:

4) “Your forecast doesn’t match the Weather Channel. Why are you wrong?”

The assumption being that the Weather Channel is the only entity on Earth that creates forecasts.

5) “The sunrise (or sunset) time hasn’t changed for a week. You’re not updating the times.”

This happens during the week of the summer and winter solstices every year when in fact, the sunrise/set times do not change for over a week.

Q. What suggestions would you make to a newspaper looking to improve its daily weather report?

A. The trend seems to be toward local weather, instead of huge lists of international cities and big national maps. Readers want to know if they can go fishing at the lake but don’t seem to care what the high temp is Barcelona is tomorrow.

Q. If there are questions you wish I had asked, I’d welcome the input…

A. I hope I gave some useful information. I’m not trained as a designer so I usually have more questions for you guys than the other way around.

One thing that has always fascinated me was the wide range systems in use for pre-press these days. Its impossible for me to provide meaningful troubleshooting for 100 different systems, most of which I have never seen or used. I wish I could see more of that in actual production.