I was recently asked to come up with three significant challenges that I believe the broadcast media industry will face over the next few years. I’ll separate each into an individual post. Here’s part 1.
My second challenge: generalists vs. specialists.
Of course, anything written about the future has to include something about AI, and this is little series is no exception. I even have a goofy music-related subtitle for this post: “(Don’t) Rage Against the Machine.”
Computer modeling of the atmosphere continues to improve with better initialization and more powerful supercomputers. AI and machine learning are being tried out to see how pattern recognition can augment human forecasts. We’ve gotten to the point that models often beat humans for things like temperature forecasts a week out. All this leads to the question of “how do we handle ceding some of the forecasting – the core of what we do – to models?”
It’s no secret that AI eats generalists. But it can help specialists, and that’s where an evolution is necessary. We have to accept that we usually don’t need to fret over the details of the forecast beyond four days out and should use that time to do more productive work, both in crafting a better message daily and for improving our work over the long-term.
Meteorologists can no longer be generalists, simply making forecasts for various platforms. That ship’s sailing off fast. We need to have more specific knowledge on things like hazard communication, psychology (e.g. cognitive biases, interpretation of colors), climate change, agriculture, and so on. No, we don’t have to experts in all those things, but we can’t just put a checkmark next to “meteorology” anymore and call it good. This will require an investment in continuing education, an investment that goes beyond one conference each year (not to say those aren’t super valuable!).
Perhaps a bottom-up and top-down approach ought to be considered. Empower individuals at the station level to focus on a couple of topics of interest that will bring more value and context to the content they produce, while also having a big, broad view of these things at the corporate level and distill them down into actionable plans at each station.
Fragmentation has been viewed as an enemy, but it’s clear there are niche audiences and they can be quite loyal. Look at the proliferation of podcasts on just about any topic under the sun. Becoming specialists will cater to the audiences that have different needs when it comes to weather information. They need content that’s for them, and providing what they need (even if they don’t know it at first) is imperative if we’re going to be valuable.