All right, let’s talk about the weather ... and how we cover it

“Ah, the weather,” a famous saying begins. “Everyone always talks about it but no one ever does anything about it.”

Of course, the humor in that remark lies in the fact that there’s really not much to be done about the weather beyond experiencing it. Its fundamental truth, though, is that people really do like to talk about the weather, so much so that Oscar Wilde proclaimed conversation about it to be “the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

We devote a full page every day to the particulars of the day’s weather and predictions of what’s to come, but, as informative as it may be, that’s likely to produce good conversation fodder only for people who really like to talk about the meteorological phenomena. Periodically, though, weather conditions graduate from merely convenient filler in social situations to actually top-of-mind concerns.

In such times — and this week may be one of them — newspapers face certain persistent challenges. One is how do we prepare readers for what’s to come? I found it interesting on Tuesday that when my son asked our Google Nest what the weather for Friday would be, she pronounced with great confidence that we could expect 9.9 inches of snow. Yet, when our reporter Rosie Newmark spoke in person with a meteorologist from the National Weather service just moments earlier and asked about specific expected snowfall totals, he said it was not possible to predict snowfall totals accurately so far in advance.

That’s an unusually circumspect response from a weather man, it seems to me, but an honest one, and one that really cuts to the heart of what it means to report reliably about future conditions. When extreme situations are possible, we want to tell people what to expect as far in advance as possible, but we risk seriously damaging our credibility with headlines that may be alarming, eye-catching and, ultimately, wrong.

How many expected “stormaggedons,” after all, have turned out to be run-of-the-mill winter snowfalls? And how many such predictions do readers have to experience before they simply ignore them, until, like the boy who cried wolf, an actual devastating storm hits and people find themselves unprepared?

So, we take seriously the responsibility to prepare people accurately for what to expect if extreme weather is possible, though I would add that it is probably true that we err on the side of over-preparing in the interest of safety. My son was particularly annoyed on Tuesday when the 1 to 3 inches of snow that had been predicted on Sunday turned out to be closer to the unimpressive 1 than the challenging 3 and he had unnecessarily gotten the snowblower primed and ready for action. But consider how he would have responded if he’d been told not to worry about a minor snowfall that turned out to require a snowblower that may very well not feel like starting.

In addition to preparing readers for what to expect, we also face the Wilde-esque challenge of giving readers information that can make their conversations about the weather that has happened more imaginative. Or, at least, as a chronicler of the events of the day, we want to report on the weather in a way that is both descriptive and interesting.

This was a particular challenge when I worked many years ago for a newspaper outside of San Diego, where the weather was almost literally 70 degrees and sunny every day. Even in those conditions, it was not unusual to hear elevator conversations begin, “Nice day out today, huh?” and feature pictures of people out basking in the sunshine could always liven up a slow news day.

Here in the Midwest, we have greater opportunities for reporting on weather events, but that doesn’t significantly ease the challenge of making the commonplace worthy of intelligent conversation. If it snows in January or February, is that news? Maybe not, but people still inevitably are thinking and wondering about it. They like seeing and holding evidence of the trials and, sometimes, pleasures that noteworthy weather experiences bring.

Fortunately, expecially in the winter, extreme situations present the opportunities for interesting and memorable pictures, and we can rely on our photographers to capture images that convey the events of the day.

For our writers, the assignment can be a bit more difficult. How many ways can we write the “what you need to do to be prepared” story, for example, or the “how to be safe on the roads” story? True, not many. But then again, it’s also true that people need that information when storms come, and it’s of little value to them that we wrote a simiar story last year at this time.

So, we’ll keep writing that story when circumstances require it. We’ll look for new angles, too, and we certainly welcome ideas you may have. There may not be much we can do about the weather, but hopefully, we can at least making talking about something that might surprise Oscar Wilde.

jslusher@dailyherald.com