A source of mine with a history of reliability poses the following scenario about ex-KELOLAND weathercaster Shawn Cable landing across town at KSFY-TV:

Management moved Patrick (Griesgraber) to weekends with the intent of keeping him and then they will let the new kid go when the time comes with the pretense that he isn’t cutting it and then,…BAM, Shawn does the morning show which will help their ratings. It makes all the sense in the world. Would Cable take the gig? Without a doubt. The other senerio is that by moving Patrick to weekends it would p*ss him off to the point of where he would want to quit thus putting (Derick) Fabert back to weekends and again, Cable goes to mornings. Anyway you cut it………Shawn signs with KSFY. What do you think? His non-compete is over July 31.

My thoughts as a long-ago KSFYer is that maybe KSFY would simply hire Shawn after his non-compete is over and rotate him in and out of the various weather slots like KELOLAND* does with their weathercasters. I’m not sure anyone needs to lose their job, but hey, it is broadcasting.

But I do think KSFY needs to bolster their weather coverage. During Thursday’s stormy night, Chief Meteorologist Phil Schreck was not part of the coverage. I like the KELOLAND Wx guys a lot but I think Phil is the best TV meteorologist in the market. Frankly, they needed Phil’s cool head and great store of knowledge. I got the feeling young Derick Fabert was overwhelmed and needed more help than he was getting.

Also, kid all you want about KELOLAND’s SuperDuper Live Dopper HD 10,000, but their weather graphics and radars are head and shoulder’s above KSFY’s. (KDLT’s weather radar looks like an indistinguishable blob on my 26” HD TV.) Now, is KSFY’s Titan system more accurate than KELO’s? Perhaps. But it looks bad on TV. The resolution is not very high and the colors all seem to blend together. I never had the same sense of where the storms were on KSFY compared to KELO. I also think that side view of Vipr with hail is really cool.

Further, with KELOLAND’s team coverage and better graphics, a stormy night turns into compelling TV. Jay Trobeck and company have been around together long enough now that they work well coordinating the radars, other gizmos, and field reports.

I also really like the live, streaming video from their car-mounted web cams that provide realtime looks at weather on location. Hearing a reporter on the phone is one thing; seeing it on your TV is quite another—and much better.

Do my buddies at KELOLAND go a little overboard at times? Yes. I’ve even been a critic. But I’ve also noticed that they’ve dialed things back a bit and will drop off coverage in a non-impacted areas (i.e., KCLO, KPLO) and return to regular programming once the threat has passed that area.

And my wife and I were no idle watchers Thursday night. Our town of Harrisburg was close to the path of the storms. The sky was about as green and ugly as I’ve ever seen. We were concerned that we could be at risk, so watching the weather coverage was important to us.

KELOLAND’s graphics simply presented the threat we might face in a better manner.  Their coverage was orderly, even among the chaos of a number of storms in various places across the region.

So, just a few thoughts on Shawn Cable (hey, I need the traffic bump) and local weather coverage.

*I am an unpaid blogger on KELOLAND.com.

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