Appropriately, I drove through rain, snow, sleet, horizontal wind-whipped rain, mountain-top mist and a bit of sun from Pittsburgh to State College, Pa. and my destination, AccuWeather.
Appropriately, AccuWeather is located on Science Park Road, not far from downtown and Penn State.
“Look for the building with all the satellite dishes,” my AccuWeather colleague suggested. Easy to find. Satellite dishes all over the roof, and spilling out to the lawn. Too many to count.
In a digital content environment topsy-turvy with information overload, here’s a company that focuses on one thing we all care about – weather (and does it so well) – and how it impacts our lives.
For those not familiar, AccuWeather is a home-grown institution, the creation of Dr. Joel N. Myers, who taught at Penn State, then 50 years ago decided to start a weather forecasting business that initially focused on commercial weather forecasting needs of businesses.
What does that mean?
Picture a train headed across the plains, with storm clouds gathering all around and the day darkening. Who’s giving guidance to that engineer, as he begins to seriously worry about the weather, and the safety of his multimillion-dollar cargo, the train and its personnel?
He gets a call from his dispatch center with a directive. “Stop now.” He does, perhaps unsure because his time-sensitive cargo is now halted on the tracks.
And he watches as a tornado dips from the clouds and passes across the tracks in front of him.
That’s a true example of AccuWeather’s commercial weather forecasting.
Today it is still a huge part of AccuWeather’s business, but now the company also serves the media, and the public in general with a vast quantity of targeted content, forecasts, radio clips, TV broadcasts and digital efforts. Web site traffic surpasses that of most traditional media sites.
Walk the halls of AccuWeather and you’ll see a tiny portion of what they believe is the world’s largest private collection of weather-forecasting equipment, including ancient barometers and thermometers.
Walk through the massive newsroom and you get a sense of that past, but the future too. TV anchors with the movement of a mouse direct the camera filming their broadcast in an amazingly simple and efficient one-person broadcasting and reporting operation. Editors and forecasters with not two, or three, but four monitors track weather systems’ development. Other monitors keep an eye on the Twitter-verse, competitors and news from around the world.
Companies at the top of their field stay on top by always looking over their shoulder.
AccuWeather’s approach is to think of weather both narrowly (your street, your house) and broadly (lifestyle, travel and other categories of news as they relate to travel). And to factor in social media as a key part of their efforts.
Also, to deliver accurate, vetted and valuable content to any device a user might have in a purse, briefcase or pocket, short of a rotary phone.
That’s how companies stay at the top of their field.
Headed back to Pittsburgh, the sun was shining.