Colorado TV meteorologists explain the importance of living where they report

The news behind the news in Colorado

Jan 24, 2025

Across the country, local TV meteorologists this week feared they could lose their jobs if a large broadcaster outsources its local weather forecasting to a “hub” based in Atlanta.

“The layoffs at roughly two dozen local television stations stretching from Massachusetts to Hawaii will impact at least 50 meteorologists,” CNN’s Liam Reilly reported this week, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The news exploded across the broadcasting industry. Last Friday, some longtime local TV meteorologists offered tearful goodbyes on air.

Days later, however, following an uproar, Matthew Keys, who covers the broadcasting scene for his site The Desk, reported that the company, Allen Media Broadcasting, was backing off.

“AMB has decided, based on viewer and advertiser reaction, to scrap the project on a company-wide basis,” the broadcaster told a western Kentucky newspaper on Thursday. “The decision is universally supported by the company leadership in all AMB TV markets."

Allen doesn’t own any local TV news stations in Colorado.

But the controversy left me wondering about the importance of local TV stations relying on weather forecasters who actually live in the communities where they report. Especially in a geographically diverse state like Colorado.

Alex O’Brien, the weekday evening meteorologist for KOAA News 5, grew up in Colorado, earned her meteorology degree here, and now forecasts the weather for the local NBC affiliate in Colorado Springs.

“With my Colorado-centric education and experience, I am well attuned to mountain/terrain influences on storm systems,” she said via email. “I have a good grasp of how weather models perform in Colorado.”

O’Brien added that she has access to her viewers — her neighbors — who can provide real-time reports and photos. Her station has a network of cameras that reporters can access to check on weather conditions.

“I bring up these points, not to toot my own horn, but to emphasize that local weather has value,” she said. “If I were asked to create a forecast for a city in a state I have never been to, it would be basic and without much detail. It takes time and resources to learn about the weather in a specific area.”

News of AMB’s potential big consolidation led some local news outlets from Alabama to Iowa to report on the possibility of layoffs in their communities.

At one station in Illinois, local meteorologists were reportedly “safe” after an AMB “decision reversal.”

Whatever eventually shakes out at Allen Media, which is owned by the businessman and comedian Byron Allen, the company said in a statement that its new format would “dramatically improve reporting capabilities, especially in high-stakes weather situations.” The initiative, the company said, “aims to transform the way local weather is reported—ensuring the most accurate, timely, and engaging forecasts for communities across the country.”

Carl Parker, a longtime storm and climate specialist at The Weather Channel, would lead AMB’s new Atlanta-based hub, Chandelis Duster reported for NPR.

In Denver, Chris Bianchi is a meteorologist on the Weather Impact Team for the local NBC affiliate 9NEWS. He said that almost every TV market area in the country has unique meteorology and geography that a national forecaster simply can’t understand.

“That’s not to bash national forecasters — they’re excellent in most cases — it’s just a practical reality,” he said. “It’s why there are 122 different National Weather Service offices spread out across the country rather than being all centered in one common area.”

Broadcast meteorologists work the same way, he said.

“If a national voice was forecasting for Denver in a local TV news way, you’d know it. Having a 14,000-foot rock just to our west makes forecasting here a fun but difficult challenge, along with the many other smaller but vitally important geographic, topographic and meteorological aspects of the Denver area,” Bianchi added. “A national voice can’t lend to those big and small influences that can drastically alter a forecast.”

Allen Media owns more than two dozen TV stations in 21 markets.

“The process began several weeks ago when local TV weather forecasters in some small markets received notices that their positions were being eliminated, according to eight sources who agreed to speak with this publication on background,” Keys had earlier reported for The Desk.

This year’s SPJ’s regional conference is in Denver. Its title: ‘Fundamentals and the Future’

“The world is changing, and the fundamentals of journalism are being challenged as never before. So how do journalists face the future?”

That’s the message for this year’s regional conference of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which I’m a state chapter board member.

This year, the Colorado Pro chapter gets to play host and is doing so in downtown Denver at the Slate Hotel on April 5.

Students will get free admission to all panels and sessions during the day — but they must register at this link. As Colorado SPJ Pro Chapter Co-president and Education Chair Doug Bell says, the conference is “a networking bonanza.”

The board is currently at work lining up experts for the eight panels we’re planning.

You’ll hear more about this year’s April 5 conference in this newsletter in the lead-up to it, but do mark your calendars now and get your registration out of the way.

Learn more about the chapter here, and find out how to join here.

🚨 Heads up: Our state SPJ chapter has extended the deadline for our annual Top of the Rockies awards entires to Jan. 30. Enter here.

‘A different animal down here’: Jeff Bieri on retiring after 35 years at KRCC in the Springs

For 35 years, Jeff Bieri has essentially been the Voice of Colorado Springs.

As Colorado Springs Independent reporter Noel Back put it in a recent Q-and-A with him following his retirement earlier this month, Bieri’s “smooth, basso profundo yawp” has “boomed over the local airwaves for the past 35 years.”

Black sat down with the former KRCC station manager for something of an exit interview for the biweekly paper.

In it, Black sought to illuminate some of the tension that might occur when a large statewide radio station like Colorado Public Radio absorbs a smaller one as it did with KRCC in 2020, calling it a partnership. Bieri largely didn’t take the bait, but he did offer some insights.

Here’s an excerpt:

Independent: Did it end up being a partnership? Or did it end up being more of a takeover?
Bieri: It started as what felt like a real partnership. But … it feels more like a southern bureau at this point, which is probably, you know, financially responsible if you’re running a statewide organization. You can’t have duplicate services between the two markets. I mean, a lot of it is centered in Denver at the corporate offices. And so, we’re taking directive from Denver, where, in the initial partnership phase of this, we were sort of calling the shots and saying, “All right, we’re doing this, help us with it.” But changes in technology are changing the way radio is having to market itself. The broadcast industry is contracting, right? So hard decisions are having to be made about personnel and things like that.
Independent: You took it in stride.
Bieri: Yeah, it’s difficult to give up control when you’ve had it. But I also see the practicality of it, too.
Independent: Are there things that you feel like CPR needs to do that it isn’t doing?
Bieri: You know, Colorado Springs is growing by leaps and bounds. So, I think it needs to be paid attention to. And it’s growing in ways that are entirely different from Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins. This town is going to grow by another quarter million in 15 years. It’s going to be huge, and it’s booming. One thing I’ve been arguing for is just a half-hour newsmagazine once a week that we could repeat and podcast. And I’ve advocated that we run it in place of this show that they’re producing up there called “Real Talk.” It is so Denver-centric that every time anybody hears it here in Colorado Springs, it’s like, “Uh, that’s not us. That’s Denver doing their Denver thing, but it’s a different animal down here, man.”
Independent: And do you feel like they haven’t quite gotten that?
Bieri: I think it’s really about manpower at this point. I mean, when I leave, there will be five KRCC employees. And, you know, you compare that to 160 up in Denver, and [El Paso] is now the biggest [county] in Colorado. So, I have a problem with that. There needs to be a little more equity in resources if we’re going to connect with this community and represent it and engage with it — we need to have more. But I think everybody that I work with up at CPR — I really like them. They’re public broadcast dweebs. You know, we’re all kind of cut from the same cloth.

Notably, Black used to work for KRCC where he hosted an excellent hourlong investigative radio segment called “Wish We Were Here.” A former station manager killed the show purportedly for financial reasons. (Thankfully, its archives still exist.)

Find plenty more nuggets from the excellent interview, including an epic photo of Bieri, here.

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No suit for you: Colorado Court of Appeals sides with Denver7 in defamation case

Justices of the Colorado Court of Appeals this week ruled in favor of Scripps Media, the company that owns Denver7, after a healthcare staffing company sued the TV station for defamation.

At issue were four investigative stories over the course of nearly a year that scrutinized the company for the way it treated its workers.

The company in 2021 had received from the state health department tens of millions of dollars to distribute vaccines, according to court documents, and a TV reporter got a tip that employees were not being paid on time.

The company accused the reporter and TV station of fourteen instances that defamed the company.

A district court dismissed the case after Denver7’s First Amendment attorney, Steve Zansberg, filed an anti-SLAPP motion arguing that the company could not demonstrate a “reasonable likelihood” of proving at trial that the stories were materially false.

For background: The acronym SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, and Colorado passed its anti-SLAPP law in 2019. Such laws, which not all states have, set up a preliminary hurdle a plaintiff must clear before legal costs start to pile up for a defendant, often a news organization or journalist. For the past six years, the law has led judges to dismiss early several libel lawsuits against Colorado news organizations. Importantly, when defendants prevail on an anti-SLAPP motion and a judge dismisses a lawsuit, the defendant can also collect attorney fees. That alone can often dissuade a potential plaintiff from going forward with a libel lawsuit in Colorado.

The healthcare staffing company appealed the district court’s ruling, but the Colorado Court of Appeals (pardon the pun) slapped it down.

The justices agreed that the plaintiff “failed to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood of prevailing at trial.”

Notably, one justice, Michael Berger, said he found a discrepancy in the way Colorado courts are evaluating standards in how to apply anti-SLAPP motions. He urged the Colorado Supreme Court to address and resolve what he called a “split in authority.”

Zansberg, who defended Denver7 in the case, said he doesn’t see anything particularly novel or groundbreaking in the higher court’s ruling.

All three appellate judges agreed that the company’s libel claim against the Denver TV station was “unmeritorious because the station’s news reports were not shown to be materially false — in other words, the reporting was accurate and true,” he said. “Hopefully, this published ruling, and others like it, (including the mandatory award of attorney’s fees and costs to the station), will discourage other targets of unfavorable press coverage from filing similar meritless claims.”

🌿 This week’s newsletter is proudly supported by PR firm Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency™, founded by Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, ex-Rocky Mountain News, and current Colorado Public Radio board of directors). We understand journalists because we were journalists — and we’re here to help. Need expert sources or compelling stories? Our diverse client roster includes beloved Colorado institutions (Naropa University and Illegal Pete’s), innovative wellness brands (Boulder County Farmers Markets, Naturally Colorado, Eden Health Club), bold natural products businesses (Wild Zora, Flatiron Food Factory, Flower Union Brands), and other purpose-driven organizations. As creators of the Colorado Journalist Meet-Up and longtime champions of quality journalism, Grasslands recognizes the essential role reporters play in our communities. Our team is ready to connect you with sources, data, and unique perspectives that elevate your reporting.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

🤖 Are you working in a Colorado newsroom that’s embraced or rejected artificial intelligence and are willing to talk about it intelligently on a public panel this spring? Get in touch with me and let’s talk. Just reply to this newsletter or email me at my address at the end.

📺 “A dozen people stood outside the Mesa County Justice Center in sub-freezing temperatures [last week] to show their support for a Grand Junction TV news reporter who according to law enforcement was physically attacked outside KKCO 11 News last month,” Sharon Sullivan reported for the nonprofit Colorado Newsline digital site.

💨 Jason Van Tatenhove, the reformed Oath Keeper militia spokesman and local news Substacker and podcaster in Estes Park, wrote this week that he is “stepping back from nonfiction journalism and public political commentary” to focus entirely on fiction and book writing. “This choice wasn’t easy, but it feels necessary. Personal safety concerns have made it clear that continuing in my current capacity is no longer safe nor sustainable,” he wrote.

🗓 Colorado journalists, mark your calendars for the evening of March 13 for the Grasslands Journalist Meetup in Denver that seeks to create a “fun space for all active Colorado members of the media to eat, drink, learn, network and reconnect with their media communities.” This appeared in an announcement this week: “Note: In keeping with the spirit of this Meet-Up, non-members of the media are not invited and will not be admitted.” More details to come.

🎙 The Peak News, a Colorado Springs-based radio show hosted by Chaim Goldman, who says the outlet is “dedicated to providing reports and commentary with a conservative worldview in a straight-forward and entertaining way to our open-minded listeners and readers,” is hosting a “Journalistic Ethics and Media Vocational Training and Internship Program for Pikes Peak-region High Schoolers and Homeschoolers” on Thursday, Jan. 30.

⚖️ The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition has “asked the state’s highest court to affirm that when a public body fails to properly announce the ‘particular matter’ to be discussed in an executive session, the recording of that closed-door meeting becomes a public record,” the nonprofit transparency organization reported this week. “It would greatly benefit the public, press, and all public bodies … to confirm that this is how the COML (Colorado Open Meetings Law) works,” reads a friend-of-the-court brief it submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court.

🆕 Complete Colorado, the news and commentary arm of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute think tank, has a new look. “What happened is that 1995 called and wanted its website back,” wrote the site’s editor, Mike Krause.

😤 A remarkable number of people in a large Colorado Springs Facebook group are fuming about how hard it is to manage or cancel their subscription to the local newspaper or get anyone to understand their concerns. “I am planning on taking this to the local news,” one said.

📍 Universities, including in Colorado, are mapping “where local news outlets are still thriving − and where gaps persist.”

🏛 Colorado Press Association members “are invited to the Colorado Press Association's 2025 Legislative Reception,” on Feb. 3, the organization announced this week. “This informal networking event is a great opportunity to meet legislators, build relationships, and share key issues facing the press.”

⚔️ Dave Perry, the editor and publisher of the Sentinel, wrote in a column this week that the weekly newspaper in Aurora “will not back down from its editorial opinions calling the plays as we see them, built on facts and data, not partisan politics.”

☀️ Writing in the Colorado Sun, columnist Mike Littwin urged progressives “who have taken a vacation from the news” that Monday was their “wake-up call.”

⬆️ The Colorado-based Climate Democracy Initiative announced the appointment of Natalie Montecino as its executive director this week. “I am heartened that CDI, under the new energetic leadership of Natalie Montecino, is targeting disinformation as a top priority in 2025,” said board member Roberta Baskin in a statement.

🎓 “After I began my first year at the University of Northern Colorado, I learned many things about journalism that my mind hadn’t opened up to before,” wrote third-year journalism major Jameson Rembert in The Mirror. “There was style, methods and general lessons, but one thing that I ran with was the idea that the press is designed to serve as a check to governmental power.”

🎙 A former executive of Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems “may proceed with his defamation lawsuit against the owner of a conservative talk radio station and one of its hosts, Colorado’s second-highest court ruled,” according to reporter Michael Karlik of Colorado Politics.

🐕 The Dog Writers Association of America is inducting Colorado journalist Jen Reeder into its Hall of Fame. “Reeder began narrowing her focus as a journalist to pets after she and her husband adopted a Labrador retriever mix, Rio, in 2010. … Her articles and essays about dogs have garnered numerous awards from writing organizations,” the DWAA reported, adding, “Fun fact: She’s also won numerous awards from the Cat Writers’ Association.”

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I’ve reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project, where I’m an advisor, is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter hit me up.) Follow me on Bluesky, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.

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