News
Good mooorning, Nashville. For you, the forecast today calls for scattered showers and an overnight high of 55 degrees. For Jeff Ray, WKRN-Channel 2’s meteorologist, the forecast calls for brush-ups on counterinsurgency tactics, sub-prime loans and the dire effects of congressional gerrymandering and corporate sponsorship.
Wait a sec. These are subjects that have approximately zip to do with whether you should wear stilettos or galoshes, or whether the citizens of Bellevue will be chased to their cars by grapefruit-sized hail. And yet fans of Ray’s unusual blog—Weatherjeff.com—check in to see what obscure topic he’ll take on next, rain or shine.
“Writing is better than a cup of coffee,” Ray says during a commercial break in the morning newscast shot live from the Channel 2 newsroom. “It works as a focusing mechanism that helps me blossom linguistically.”
And blossom he has.
Ray, a Mt. Juliet native, has been blogging since January at Weatherjeff.com, part of WKRN’s ambitious new-media plan to expand content beyond the tube. But anyone expecting only rainbows and thunderstorms will be surprised. Besides never posting pictures of costumed cats or “adorable” babies, Weatherjeff.com is remarkable for its balance, reasoned analysis and intellectual breadth—stuff nobody expects from the guy who, for all viewers know, just sticks his arm out the window to tell if it’s raining.
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“I don’t just blog about the weather,” Ray says. “My God, I’m boring enough.”
This last statement is not altogether true. While at work on a recent morning—he gets there at 4:30 a.m. every day—he studies weather patterns on a dozen different computer screens simultaneously while doing live forecasts, analyzes raw data from the National Weather Service, writes in his blog and keeps up a conversation with a reporter.
“Have you been reading about ocean acidification much?” he asks. Apparently he mistakes the reporter for Jacques Cousteau. The blank stare sets him straight.
No matter. Ray launches into a concise definition of the term (it refers to the changing pH of the earth’s oceans) and its effect on oceanic microorganisms (“small mollusks can’t create their shells…”) just as a voice from across the room begins a countdown from five. Ray times the lecture perfectly, ending it (“Four!”) with a rhetorical question (“Three!”) just as the countdown (“Two!”) is complete: “You wanna really screw with the environment? Mess with the ocean.”
“One!”
Without missing a beat, Ray turns to the camera and tells thousands of early risers to be wary of low-hanging fog in three counties south of Nashville.
This kind of intellectual multitasking is what makes Weatherjeff.com so enjoyable. Last week, for instance, he wrote about the trade imbalance with China. For most people, this topic is as lively as watching mold spores form—only without the exciting finish.
But Jeff Ray made his case simply, directly and to the point. It’s an argument those who follow trade debates have heard before, but his presentation was uniquely simple and easy to follow. He even managed to demonstrate historical precedent in an interesting way. Try to imagine Willard Scott explaining the nuances of Beijing to a 100-year-old grandma.
The breadth and diversity of knowledge that Ray draws from for his posts is also impressive. His prose is peppered with references to thinkers from Francis Bacon to Aldous Huxley. A true renaissance blogger, he can write earnestly about the dearth of quality science education in public schools, a kind of honey that will make you go crazy or a trip to the zoo with his kids.
Most compelling, though, are the posts in which Ray talks about weather not as a feel-good placeholder between news and sports but as a matter, quite literally, of life or death—as when killer tornadoes ripped through Middle Tennessee last April.
“It will be a long time before I forget [Channel 2’s] live shot Tuesday morning,” he wrote on April 5, 2006, in an entry called “The Debris Field.” He wrote of seeing “the grown children of a missing 80-year-old standing in the morning cold, staring down at a pond being drained as rescue workers looked for their mother’s body.”
In an entry startling for its candor, he wrote a few days later about blowing a forecast—an easy-to-make flub that still left him feeling responsible, perhaps in an irrational way, for some of those who died.
“I try to think about what went right and not get compressed under the weight of what went wrong,” Ray writes. “Telling people all morning it would be an evening outbreak south of Nashville when people died north of Nashville in the afternoon.”
He calls it “unbearable to think that someone in that [tornado’s] path heard it coming and said to themselves ‘Don’t worry, Jeff said it wouldn’t be till tonight.’ ”
Ray describes being wrong on this scale as “a fist pressing hard against your breath, taking your leg strength, sinking you to the floor.”
Surprisingly, even some of the more mundane forecasts he’s responsible for create tremendous anxiety. While discussing the intricacies of weather prediction—millibars, saturated columns, etc.—in detail that glazes over a layman’s eyes, his latest worry is revealed: the possibility of snow on Christmas. Apparently, given the meteorological indicators, he thinks there’s a chance that it just might happen this year.
“It’s what I’ve been agonizing over the last few days,” Ray says. “It’s only happened eight times in the last 130 years.” But if he makes the call for snow and kids end up bawling over their sleds in 60-degree drizzle, every parent within a 100-mile radius will want his head on a ski pole.
“If I do turn out to be wrong about the forecast,” Ray writes in his blog, “the ferocity of the hate email can catch you by surprise.”
Unfortunately, the blog itself rarely elicits such impassioned responses. Channel 2 hosts a number of blogs and websites, including the local blog aggregator, Nashvilleistalking.com. Compared to the others, Ray says, Weatherjeff.com is “the least popular website we run.” Even his colleagues aren’t big fans. “I tried to read your blog,” others in the newsroom tell him, “but it hurt my head.”
This may say more about those in the TV news business than it does about Weatherjeff.com. But Ray isn’t complaining. He’s been a weatherman for more than 20 years. He knows that it’s a fickle and demanding trade that doesn’t always reward intelligence.
“I’m just one 26-year-old blonde away from unemployment,” he says. Then, just as quickly, he launches into a dissertation about the latest topic to catch his attention. Tomorrow’s forecast: Noam Chomsky and the global economy.