The Weather: a natural phenomenon that we have been fascinated by since climbing out of primordial ooze and feeling chilly.

Talking About the Weather: a necessary conversation topic since the invention of elevators.

Watching People Talk About the Weather: probably became a thing when news outlets figured out that they could get people to watch the news by teasing, “find out what’s in store for you tomorrow.”

Really Watching People Talk About the Weather: blame the Hurricanes, the Weather Channel and the fact that it is really entertaining to watch people in 100mph winds say “it’s pretty windy outside, Bill, no one should really be out here.”

Cut to Los Angeles, a city most loved for that fact that year-round it generally has nice weather. It’s a place where you save money not having to buy winter gear. A place of very few tanning salons and very many places selling ice coffee.

With the exception of the odd fire or two, it would be pretty difficult to make the local news weather segment interesting.

Or so I thought.

Los Angeles, a vast city of 503sq miles is home to many different areas of slightly different weather.

So many different areas in fact that it takes Dallas Raines, the ABC affiliate’s Weatherman approximately five mins to go through all the different regions. That’s almost a quarter of the broadcast.

Weather is not a baseball cap, it’s not one size fits all – and this region of 500sq miles has mountains, and beaches and deserts – each one deserving of it’s own time.

With gusto he goes through the different topographical maps, and then wraps it up with five different slides giving you the weekly weather for exactly where you live.

For someone who has always been in a “one slide, maybe two” region this was fascinating – and potentially useful, what if you lived in the desert, but worked in the mountains – an app wouldn’t give you that necessary spread – maybe by going indepth and old school, the local news was making itself necessary and saving itself from extinction?

Maybe, it was giving people in an area where weather doesn’t change that much, something to talk about.