THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 27, 1995 TAG: 9502250030
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Larry Bonko
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
IF YOU DIG WAVY's No. 1 weather guy, Don Slater, here's news that will make your day:
The NBC affiliate on Wednesday (March 1) starts up the Local Weather Station on Cox Cable 66 featuring Slater and his WAVY weather buddies, Jon Cash and Jim Lawrence.
If Slater's up-tempo, elbows-in-the-air, don't-get-your-pants-in-a-bunch style of reporting the weather curdles your milk, find the remote and prepare to pull the trigger now. The Local Weather Station is scheduled to operate 24 hours a day with frequent visits from Slater, who's been tracking the highs and lows in this market for 14 years.
He's already on the air for WAVY in the late afternoon, the dinner hour and at 11 p.m. Now this - wall-to-wall Slater as WAVY general manager Lyle Banks makes good on his promise to give this market, the 40th largest in the United States, a cable weather outlet all its own.
Slatermania!
Banks of late has been a whirlwind.
He recently completed a programming and marketing agreement with a full-power UHF station in Virginia Beach, WVBT, and helped that station line up an affiliation with the new Warner Brothers network. UVBT, which had been operating on cable as a shopping channel, now shows movies, reruns of network sitcoms and dramas, and shares some of Channel 10's syndicated programming such as the Jenny Jones and Montel Williams talk shows.
With WVBT up and running in the Warner Brothers family, Banks concentrated this month on launching the Local Weather Station. A cable channel with nothing but local weather reports around the clock? The weather story in Phoebus? Pungo? Why not, asks Banks.
``It seems like a good idea to me. One of our strengths is how well we report the weather,'' said Banks one day not long ago when he introduced the LWS at the WAVY studios in Portsmouth. On the LWS, you'll see your hometown weather forecast in five- to seven-minute long segments. At intervals throughout the day, Slater or Cash or Lawrence will pop up to round out the coverage.
It means more work for Slater.
Is he complaining? Not with his boss Banks in the same room. Slater said he'll do his bits for the Local Weather Station after he finishes up the 6 and 11 p.m. WAVY newscasts.
He sounds excited to be part of the LWS. And what local weather guy wouldn't be pumped to have the time at last to dwell on the fronts sweeping across the Eastern Shore, the Middle Peninsula and the Northern Neck as well as the cities on both sides of Hampton Roads plus Northeastern North Carolina?
No more cramming the weather into a crummy 3 1/3 minutes.
``You bet I'm excited,'' said Slater, who is in his 40s but still bounces around the weather set like a kid who's had too much Coke and candy.
While The Weather Channel on cable addresses the big picture - ``We're looking at snow galore in Buffalo'' - the LWS narrows in on the weather in our windy little corner of the world. There is room for both weather channels on the cable spectrum, said Banks.
There will be commercials on the LWS. Banks anticipates that other cable systems in this area will sign up for the LWS or a companion service that rolls out the forecasts without Slater's touch.
Think of the LWS and its bright-looking graphics and bouncy background music as an outgrowth of The Great Re-transmission Debate of a few years ago. Remember that? When the over-the-air stations won from Congress the right to charge cable companies for carrying their programs, many deals were forged between broadcasters and cable operators.
Fox asked for and got its own cable channel. fX. Cable operators found room for new channels (ESPN2 and America's Talking) backed by NBC and ABC. WAVY's owners, LIN Broadcasting, negotiated for local weather channels.
The viewer wins here. You have more channels than ever before to zap past with Cox Cable planning to add at least five more in a few months.
The Weather Channel has also expanded its horizons.
In league with CompuServe, TWC recently launched The Weather Channel Forum for folks with personal computers, offering ``discussions, libraries and special conferences with weather experts.'' America is nuts about weather. by CNB