In recent years New Zealand’s news media industry has gone through some monumental changes. Many reporters have been made redundant, or absorbed other workloads, and many news outlets have cut resources to newsrooms over the past decade.

The result now is a very tabloid based news industry that goes for big headlines often over substance.

This year WeatherWatch.co.nz has seen a steady decline in the quality of weather news journalism from the mainstream players. 

Here are a few examples:

90km/h winds in Wellington described as ‘fierce’ and ‘slamming’ the city.

Half a news story about drizzle falling in Auckland

Snow storms that will ‘cover the entire country’ but only affected the deep south

Not to mention the overuse, or misuse, of these terms: Slammed, Hit, Blasted, Pummelled, Batten down the hatches, Storm, Weather Bomb, Severe Gales, Vicious – to name a few. 

This isn’t just WeatherWatch.co.nz getting frustrated – it’s about serious public safety concerns with everyday Kiwis getting ‘tired’ of being warned about ‘storms’ that rarely seem to eventuate.

Then the forecasters, like WeatherWatch.co.nz and MetService get blamed.

Often we see news outlets take MetService warnings running headlines like “Severe Gales coming for Christchurch, winds up to 150km/hâ€. Wow, that’s significant right? So why is it the next day there’s no follow up story about all the wind damage in Christchurch? Because the warning was really for inland Canterbury, the foot hills, the rural areas. This is both up to the forecaster to explain and the journalist to ask the right questions and understand how warnings and watches work. Instead journalist sees “warning”, so makes a big headline, runs story from press release, then quotes random isolated weather stations – like the ones on the top of mountains – to back up the story. The result is an ongoing distrust of weather forecasts.

In the past we haven’t been perfect either – in our earlier days several years ago we ran a couple stories that had big headlines…but you, our readers, quickly smacked that out of us demanding higher standards which we’ve been trying to meet since 2009. 

The reason this is an important issue to us is simple – it’s the boy who cried wolf. MetService weather warnings should be taken seriously – but a mix of too generalised warnings by them and reporters who don’t understand what they are writing about then hyping it up for ratings is making for weekly news coverage about “major storms†that are rarely backed up with actual damage reports following the event.

Not all reporters are fall into the above – and thankfully WeatherWatch.co.nz has reliable, intelligent, reporters and management contacts at most news outlets in New Zealand and a few in Australia, the US and Canada too.

So are we right in our assessment? Or are we being too harsh? Let us know by voting – and posting a comment below. 

– WeatherWatch.co.nz