dumping Accuweather

[Sara Hendricks]

We've discontinued our AccuWeather package. Because we considered reader comfort, we are building the page with identical information. It's taking our copy editors a minumum of 2 1/2 hours to build. Has anyone else been through this? Any free services that would help us build the page? Right now we are going to several sites for the information. Help!

[Daniel Hunt]

Sadly, you gotta pay a little something to have a weather page automated, and there's no best provider out there. For the record, I've been at papers that use INaccuweather and WeatherUnderground, which did a better job at '70s style terrorism than it does now at predicting the next day's forecast.

One idea would be to have a programmer (someone like me, perhaps) create a Web page that aggregates information from all those sources into one downloaded Web page or PDF. This can be accomplished through PHP or Perl. Prices vary, but custom programming will set you back about $50-$100 an hour, with about 5-6 hours of work.

The Lawrence, Kan., paper used to do it for its print and online platforms, but that was in the days of Rob Curley. I'm not sure what they do anymore.

[JunO]

At my paper we use http://www.hometowncontent.com/ . It costs, and I'm not sure how much, but there is "complimentary content" we can use for other sections.

Before that, we did our own weather page, with the forecast and state map sent by AP, local data sent by the K-State ag center, and some different weather icons I'd made in Freehand. It took maybe half an hour at most.

The programming option might sound expensive, but sounds like it could pay off if it saves you a couple hours of work every day.

[Powderhorn]

We went in precisely the opposite direction at a nine-person newsroom I managed in 2003. The fact that building the weather page was taking so much time led to an Accuweather package, which ran $48 per week and was certainly more cost-effective than 12-plus hours of manual labor. Some things, as line items, seem like a waste, but the aggregate cost of putting it all together far outweighs the expense of having it ready to go.