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James Brierton from Carolina Weather Group

[00:00:00] Gabriel: Howdy folks, and welcome back to another episode of the Chaser Chat Podcast. I am Gabriel Harber, and I am joined by someone that I have been waiting about a year to have on the podcast, actually. This is a person who I worked very closely with on a project that super near and dear to my heart last year, the WX Pods Telethon of 2023. James Brierton from the Carolina Weather Group. How’s it going, my man?

[00:00:24] James: I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me, and if I’ve only kept you waiting a year, it’s good to know I didn’t keep you waiting that long.

[00:00:31] Gabriel: There’s also a lot of expectation built up here as well. So you better perform well.

[00:00:35] James: I guess so. I’ll try. I’ll try my best.

[00:00:39] Gabriel: Which is a particularly mean thing of me to say, considering when we first started the recording, we were having a little pre show chitter chatter. You told me that because of the nature of your job and the time of year that we’re in, you have basically been running on fumes for the last few days.

[00:00:55] James: Yes that is a good disclaimer, I think, to get out there ahead, because the next conversation is going to be a really interesting one. I, in addition to my work on Carolina Weather Group, my day job is in television, and you and I are recording this the day after election day, which means I haven’t really slept in two days. So I’m at that point at exhaustion where I have no filter and things are just going to come out of my mouth, which is going to make this really entertaining. And I do want to preface just because I’m busy doesn’t make me important. Gabe, it makes me crazy.

[00:01:32] Gabriel: I think that’s probably a disclaimer all of us podcast hosts could add into our bios on Twitter.

[00:01:37] James: Yeah, I think it is a shared flaw we all have and your mic is just starting to show the early signs of going robotic on you.

[00:01:47] Gabriel: Okay, God, I hate that so much.

[00:01:49] James: I just knew it was going to get progressively worse, so that’s why I was like, I’ll just say it now.

[00:01:54] Gabriel: And just for all of you who are listening and are suffering from election fatigue, do not worry, because you’re probably listening to this episode a couple of weeks after the election is actually over. You thought to yourself, Twitter is back to normal, my podcast feeds are back to normal, we are not going to be diving into a political podcast, even though James does work for a television station. So I wanted to make that abundantly clear and wash any concerns that those of you listening might have.

[00:02:21] James: I agree because I’m already happy to stop talking about it here in 48 hours later. Actually it’s a great time Gabe because by the time your audience goes out if they’re looking for something else to get into, we are doing a 500th episode celebration over on our audio podcast the Carolina Weather Group.

[00:02:36] Gabriel: Heck yeah, I love that too, by the way. You can tell that I’m interviewing a podcast host. The way you segued that just not chef’s kiss.

[00:02:43] James: I’m here to plug things.

[00:02:46] Gabriel: Absolutely wonderful. I love it. So you know, like you have a storm chaser who’s out and they get the perfect shot of a tornado and then other chasers are in admiration of what they’ve done. I listen to something like that and I get the same feeling.

[00:03:00] James: Everyone’s got their thing that makes them happy in life, right? And whether we’re getting paid to do it or just purely out of love.

[00:03:09] Gabriel: Tell me a little bit about how you actually got interested in the weather.

[00:03:13] James: It’s one of those things that I don’t know if I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with weather, but much like the movie “The Butterfly Effect” or any of those like time travel movies, I can pinpoint a particular fork in the road for me where I can nail down a lot of things. I was a dork, always been a dork, still am a dork, but this particular dork era comes in high school, and I was living in New York, and we had an ice storm come through, and this would have been circa 20… it was 2007 ish? Social media’s still young, and that’s relevant because news networks like CNN were doing a call to action for people to upload video to them. They wouldn’t just go to Twitter and download storm chaser videos. They would actually say, Hey, if you see news happening near you, please send it to us. So I came home from high school. We were in the midst of this ice storm and I went outside, my mother was my cameraman and we recorded it on the home video camera that’s still at the time recorded tape, Gabe. And I stood outside and talked about the ice storm for 90 seconds and uploaded it to CNN.com and thought never going to hear a word out of this ever again. And went to school the next day and I got called to the principal’s office, because my parents had called to say that CNN had called and they wanted permission to use the video on television. I was like, what? To make a long story short that’s the fork in the road for me where I knew that I had something going here between broadcasting and weather and news because that eventually led to an internship and it led to where I went to school. I studied both weather and journalism at school, and so everything else in my timeline trickles down past that point in my life.

[00:04:52] Gabriel: Really interesting. Always cool to hear about the inflection points in people’s journeys. And what really struck me with what you shared was that you seem to have caught on way before the networks did when it comes to the future importance of social media to weather, but just news in general. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to that. Like, how did that influence the trajectory that you went down as you got your education in college and your internship and you started making your way into your career path.

[00:05:23] James: I think the one commonality, just try to speak humbly about myself, is every job I’ve ever had, I was the first person doing that job. And I think that’s… comes from a place where I was just always comfortable with experimenting with technology. And so I was always playing with, and I presume still am, playing with what is the new thing, right? In this case, it was trying to get into user generated content as social media was coming about. I know it sounds silly, because all we do today is take our phones and upload video and share it with the world, but the time that story came about, we barely had 3G on our cell phones. So the idea of shooting video on our cell phones was still very young. And then I eventually went to school and eventually made my way into the television industry. And my first job at a school, I was a television station, first digital producer. I was a department of one, and this was in a small town in Georgia. Yep. And then every job I’ve had after that in television, I was always the first person to do some newly created job. Whether it was again the station’s first digital producer, the station’s first digital manager, whatever it might be it just worked out for me that my comfort with technology and my interest and skill set with news and weather did come about at a really good time. Sometimes I think about, man, if I had been born at a different time in place, I may not have had as much luck as I’ve had now, just because I’ve been able to market those things, I think, when it comes to trying to get myself hired someplace.

[00:07:00] Gabriel: That makes a lot of sense as well. When you talked about what was it, 500 episodes coming up for Carolina Weather Group?

[00:07:05] James: 500 episodes, yeah. And I can’t take credit for starting this thing. Scotty Powell on our panel is the last remaining original member of our show because as you might imagine over the course of 10 some odd years, people come and go and they invited me to come join them. So I had been doing a fill in on air weather at the Fox station here in Charlotte and I was transitioning at this point in my life out of daily TV to a more desk job. But this goes back a couple of years before I reentered the television market. And as I was leaving the Fox station, they had said to me, Hey, why don’t you come join our podcast? You can scratch the itch and keep a foot in the weather world, and that’s how I ended up on Carolina Weather Group. I was first a guest, then I was invited to join them as a co-host. And, again, to any technology nerds that are out there, when I joined, we were streaming on Google Hangouts to YouTube. Actually, rather, we were streaming on Google Hangouts to Google+ that’s where we were at.

[00:08:03] Gabriel: Oh, wow.

[00:08:03] James: And since then, our show has evolved from purely talking heads to we, we try to produce it a little bit more for YouTube, right? So we’ll have video, we’ll have graphics. There’s so much more we can do. I’m sitting in my car, Gabe, talking to you right now, recording on your podcast. That wasn’t a thing we had the technology to do a few years back, not to take any of it for granted.

[00:08:24] Gabriel: And by the way, I can really appreciate the amount of work and effort that goes into producing a show that’s more geared towards the YouTube crowd instead of just the podcast crowd, because as I’m trying to break Chaser Chat more into YouTube, and we have some like background imagery and some dynamic captions on the YouTube videos instead of just a still image, and admittedly it is doing a little bit better than it used to do, but you really have to put… it’s an exponentially larger amount of effort to work on the video side of things than it is to just roll out your audio. And I’ve been finding that lesson out a lot the past year or so.

[00:09:03] James: You’re starting to sound a little robotic again, but I will acknowledge your statement while you toggle whatever it is you toggle there. And one of the benefits of audio is you can record conversations like we’re having now. I would not be a very entertaining video podcast to watch me driving in the dark right now on my way home. And I appreciate what you said and can respect what your guys are going through as well, too, because you’re right. You need that visual eye candy when you’re trying to gear for YouTube, and also, YouTube is such a changing platform. We used to just produce a 30 minute video for YouTube, and that was the show. But now, with TikTok, Instagram Reels, I find that we’re making a show and then once we’re done making the show I’m then chopping it into all these tiny little vertical pieces to put on all of the different platforms. And so there’s an endless waterfall to how many things can you do with your show and how nimble is it?

[00:09:57] Gabriel: Yeah, let’s tug on that repurposing content thread a little bit because, selfishly, that’s something that I’m actually really interested in. What sort of ROI have you seen on cutting up those shorter clips and taking pieces of the podcast and distributing them other places?

[00:10:13] James: The biggest ROI we have seen is actually utilizing a AI tool to go through our show, which might be 30 to 60 minutes long, and chop it into these vertical bits that might be 30 to 60 seconds long, and then we can post those on all the different platforms. In terms of ROI, that vertical video does not make a lot of money. Honestly, YouTube in general doesn’t make a ton of money until you’re a huge channel, but in terms of comparing one of our 16×9 videos to one of our vertical videos, that’s to say one of our long form episodes to one of our shorts, the short video is probably not going to make a ton of money, but what it does do is it introduces us to a whole new crowd. There’s a lot of discoverability there. It’s really a marketing tool. It’s like a billboard on the side of the highway. So if I post a short and I get 10, 20, 50, 100 new subscribers from it, or, new people discovering the channel, that’s overall really healthy for us. Not to get too nerdy, Gabe, into the digital media strategy of things.

[00:11:15] Gabriel: No, I think that’s going to be really interesting for a lot of the listeners because being a storm chasing focused podcast, a lot of people have a multitude of content that they would like to put out there. And of course, the ever present question is, how do I get eyeballs on my content? If you, I think, want to have a really easy way to generate a presence on TikTok and what is it, Instagram and, X and YouTube shorts at the same time, you can repurpose that one piece of content and you can post it across all your various platforms. And it’s boom you’ve basically done in a half an hour, what you used to take. I can remember back in the day when everything we had to do on social media for any sort of marketing was almost exclusively manual with the exception of social media scheduling tools, and it just pales in comparison to the amount of effort versus the value that you can get back with the tools that exist nowadays. It’s quite incredible.

[00:12:08] James: Yes. And if I can bring all of this full circle with the disclaimer that I’m not an expert who has all of the answers, the number one shortcoming I see as a news producer who’s looking for that content on social media, or maybe even a viewer who’s trying to find chasers or find content out there is when you post that content, do not skip over making a rich text description in your post. And what I mean by that is if you go to Twitter and you post a 30 second video of a tornado and you just write in the text, I can’t believe I caught this today, that’s going to make it a lot harder to find than if you write, I can’t believe this happened today. This tornado in Wichita is unbelievable because now you’ve got the words tornado in Wichita. So as people are searching for those things, or even as the algorithm is trying to understand what it is that you’re posting, that will make your performance better.

[00:13:00] Gabriel: I feel like I am completely naked at the moment, and you have seen that, because that is exactly what I have been doing with the short clips that I have been putting on X, and I actually just made a note to myself to go through our social media queue on Buffer, where we have everything scheduled, and to put rich descriptions in every single piece of short content we have scheduled to go out.

[00:13:27] James: Yeah, the more words the better. You still want it to read well to a human but there’s a bit of an art to it when you’re trying to also sneak in these keywords, as we call them, that really help with that search discoverability.

[00:13:41] Gabriel: And I have to say that, this has all been great to hear, but none of it surprises me because after getting a chance to work with you on the WX Pods Telethon last year, you were the one who ran everything behind the scenes. A lot of people might not know this if they only tuned in for a couple of segments, donated a little bit of money, which by the way, we are still incredibly grateful for, they might not realize that it was actually you and your team that were making the magic happen. We absolutely, like we could have done it, but it would have been like you said earlier, a crappy little stream on Google Hangouts being pumped out to one platform like Google+ or something like that. And you allowed all of us who didn’t have any technical acumen, you made it super easy. You basically gave us step by step instructions and you had all, you had this giant well oiled machine for every single person, whether it was the Stormfront Freaks people, myself the folks over from the So I have to tip my hat to you on that because you absolutely showed that what’s going on and it was really cool to see that in action.

[00:14:37] Kay: Hey everyone, Kay here from Rough Skies Ahead and Chaser Chat. I wanted to give a quick shout out to the new Chaser Chat YouTube page, where you can find all your favorite episodes uploaded in video form with a transcription to follow along with. The link is in the podcast description.

[00:14:53] Gabriel: You’re probably wearing clothes right now, and I know you like listening to podcasts. Why not combine the two and support the show? Head over to chaserchat. com or click the link in the podcast description, and you’ll find all sorts of items like t shirts, hoodies, beanies, ball caps, coffee mugs, and more.

[00:15:11] And if none of that sounds good, at least buy a freaking sticker. It’s only three bucks. Visit the merch store today and support the podcast by going to chaserchat. com or clicking the link in the podcast description.

[00:15:24] Gabriel: First of all, I appreciate that we were able to do that all together. I do have a funny story about last year’s 12 hour long telethon that I’ll come to in just a moment. But I got to give kudos to all the shows who came together to collaborate because we could all very easily be enemies and competition, but we’re not. We are all in this joint unified weather community. That’s what makes the two telethons we’ve done together so great. The one that we did a year ago, 12 hours long, the one that we did relatively quickly earlier this fall to help the people here in the Carolinas after Helene. Again, everyone at the Carolina Weather Group, our audience, our community, we really appreciate all of the love and support we got, not only from the shows themselves, but also your listeners who then turned out to help us raise more money to help the communities that are still hurting me here. We really appreciate that. When we did that 12 hour long marathon telethon last year with all the shows, you’re right, every show came together. They produce their own hours. You saw all the different hosts. They coordinated whatever content they were going to be talking about, but ultimately it needed some place to filter through to make one continuous show.

[00:16:29] And that was our Carolina Weather Group set up in my home office here in Charlotte, North Carolina. And by my favorite story Gabe, is that the weather brains was doing an hour in the afternoon and they had arranged for Jim Cantore to come on, the director of the National Weather Service Ken Graham, and also Mike Bettis, also of the Weather Channel, and they were supposed to be staggered. I think the roots were all going to get their own 20 minutes but due to the nature of schedules and whatever we ended up with all three of them on the air at the same time. And i’m sitting there because behind the scenes, we’re just on zoom together. And then hopefully what the audience is seeing is a more glorified zoom presentation with graphics and things that makes it more visual than just your standard corporate meeting. My team and I were sitting there like no one touch anything. We like, didn’t even want to move out of our chairs and accidentally trip over a wire because we had this amazing trifecta of guests that were on. And I was like, I can’t believe I’m on a zoom call with these people right now. What is happening?

[00:17:31] Gabriel: Yeah, you had Jordan, LeBron and Kobe all in the same room.

[00:17:35] James: Yes, if I understood anything about sports, I would know you’re talking. No, I understand. Yes.

[00:17:39] James: It’s actually really funny that you mentioned that as one of the highlights of the whole experience for you because the lovely Carly Anna from Carly Anna WX YouTube channel who joined us as part of that day, she afterwards had a very similar experience to share with me, which is that Jeff Petrowski, who was one of the last guests on in one of the last segments – and by the way, his segment was just incredible.

[00:18:00] James: That guy is a great way to end the night. Yeah.

[00:18:03] Gabriel: Yeah. He is just casually shooting the breeze with Jeff Petrowski sharing all sorts of crazy stories. Some of the stuff he’d never shared with anyone before. So that was absolutely incredible. And Carly is a huge Jeff fan, and so she’s, I’m just sitting there in this room hanging out with Jeff Petrowski. He’s just like casually, chatting it up with me. And I’m just like, what is my life right now? What is happening?

[00:18:26] James: Another funny zoom story, and I don’t know if you’re going to keep this in the edit or or not, cause it has nothing to do with weather, has to do with politics, but I promise whether you like Pete Buttigieg or not. I think it’s still a funny story. I’m a huge train nerd. I love everything about trains. That’s-

[00:18:42] Gabriel: Transportation secretary.

[00:18:44] James: -transportation. Yeah, that’s right. So I was at work at the tv station where I cover more than just weather, and one of my colleagues was like, Hey, the White House is doing the zoom later. They’re going to talk about infrastructure funding for trains. Can you just go and we’re going to record it and just take some notes, and we do this all the time. Like you get on and it’s like one of those big corporate town hall meetings where like you get talked at and you’re not really on a zoom, it’s more of a town hall format, right? So I was like yeah, sure. So I’m sitting there, I swear to you, I have a bag of Doritos in my hand like, the full like orange powder on my hand and everything and the zoom opens up- no, this is not, this is not a Pete Buttigieg is talking out to us at the tv stations… we’re on like a small intimate zoom with six of us and my camera is off. And all of a sudden I’ve got the transportation of secretary, you can replace him with any cabinet member from any administration if you don’t like politics. And I’m just sitting there eating Doritos and I’m like, Oh, this is embarrassing.

[00:19:39] Gabriel: That is why I never have my camera on for anything unless I absolutely have to. I’m terrified of a moment like that. I don’t want to be caught like picking my nose or wiping Dorito dust onto my shirt or something like that.

[00:19:53] James: But I got to ask the transportation secretary a question about trains. So that was my highlight.

[00:19:58] Gabriel: That is really cool. What a little unexpected boon to get in your day to day job activities that you weren’t expecting to have.

[00:20:05] James: Yeah, don’t eat Doritos when you go to join a Zoom call. You never know who’s going to see you.

[00:20:09] Gabriel: Very presidential of you, James.

[00:20:12] James: It’s very forefront of my mind currently.

[00:20:14] Gabriel: By the way I follow politics as well. Again, disclaimer, not going to discuss any opinions even approaching partisanship, but I do know from what I follow that Buttigieg is definitely someone who the Democrats could run out as a potential presidential candidate in the future. So how cool would that be if that story went from transportation secretary Buttigieg to 20 years from now you were in a tiny little Zoom call wiping Dorito dust off on your shirt with President Pete Buttigieg.

[00:20:43] James: I Zoomed with that guy and I had cheese powder on my face.

[00:20:47] Gabriel: That is awesome, man. That is too cool. Things that I wanted to chat about. I know you have a hard out here in about eight to 10 minutes. So first of all, let’s talk about what happened in Western North Carolina with hurricane Helene. Obviously Carolina Weather Group; you folks were impacted in an outsized way in terms of your viewership, your listenership. So what, I guess has just been the general vibe of everything here now that we’re a month or so out from the immediate aftermath, how are things going, where can people still go to help what’s still needed? Because a lot of this, unfortunately, because of hurricane Milton and then the election has really faded from the public memory. That’s just the nature of the way things happen with the news cycle nowadays. So I’m interested in learning a little bit about what’s still going on out there.

[00:21:38] James: I appreciate your question because I think it’s very timely. We’re definitely coming up at that point in the timeline where a month ago we said, Hey, don’t forget about the Carolinas. Now is the time for all the reasons you just outlined that we need to get it back into the headlines. A lot of the Carolinas are not in a repair mode. They’re in a rebuild mode, and that is especially true across some of the mountainous communities of Western North Carolina. It’s certainly true for Asheville. It’s certainly true for portions of Boone and Blowing Rock. Some of the bigger town names that you’ve maybe heard about. You’ve maybe even heard of places like Chimney Rock or Bat Cave, but there are so many tiny little communities that maybe don’t rise up to the headlines that are out there. These are towns that literally were washed away. And when I say they’re rebuilding, the power company is not just going back out there and stringing up new power lines.

[00:22:28] The power company is not just going out there and putting telephones back into the ground. The power company is going out there trying to find the ground because it’s somewhere under debris and mud. And so that’s it’s a slow going process. There was a lot of support that came out. We saw it with the weather pods. You guys so quickly came to our aid. We really appreciate that help to raise a couple $1000 for the American Red Cross, one of just several organizations that are out there right now, continuing to help. There are local organizations like Samaritan’s Purse that is based in western North Carolina that will take financial donations. They’ll take volunteers for anybody that feels like they want to get their hands dirty and roll up. So many supplies showed up in the immediate aftermath that at times people were like, please actually stop sending water bottles. We have too many. Oh, that’s a great problem to have. But the thing now, Gabe, as we come into the winter months is warm clothing for the cold winter months, because a lot of these places had electric heat. Or somebody might be without a proper home. And so trying to make sure they’ve got proper clothing, proper bedding to try to replace anything that was lost or damaged. That’s one of the most urgent needs. And again, don’t just send stuff randomly because there’s logistics involved. Try to find an organization that has a specific call to action because then you know that your effort will get into the hands of the right people.

[00:23:56] Gabriel: I had no idea Samaritan’s Purse was based out of Western North Carolina, and I’ve heard a lot of great things about them, so that sounds like a natural fit for people who are looking to actually make an impact.

[00:24:07] James: Yeah, they’re one of the many great organizations out there. I could start listing some, and I’m sure I’d forget some but, you’ve got the big guys, American Red Cross did certainly help, and you’ve got, again, some of these more regional organizations that are out there with boots on the ground that are going to be out there for months to come. I think it’ll be springtime, Gabe, before some of these places are back on their feet.

[00:24:29] Gabriel: And if people want to learn a little bit more about what you were doing in the immediate aftermath because I know you recorded that impromptu telethon, where can they find that if they want to listen?

[00:24:40] James: Yeah, thank you so much for that question. So the Carolina Weather Group, you can find us on YouTube. You can find us wherever you listen to your favorite audio podcast. I like YouTube in particular because as content creators, we have tools to help make the experience a little bit easier for the audience because we can make playlists. So if you go to our YouTube channel, Carolina Weather Group, we do have a playlist for our weekly show that comes out on Wednesday nights. But we also have a specific playlist for all things Helene, because as you might imagine, there was a lot happening and to wait a week before doing updates was not going to be adequate enough. So we were doing daily updates as things were happening, and so we do have a very specific playlist on our channel for Helene, whether you’re looking for updates going forward or you want to scroll back through that portion of our coverage, you can watch not only our live severe weather coverage from when the storm was coming through, but all of the special reports and all the stories that we were doing in the immediate aftermath. And we’re also pledging to our audience, Gabe, that we’re not gonna forget about these folks in our own backyard. And so going forward each Wednesday night, we’re going to continue to update our audience on the needs, the happenings of the Helene recovery.

[00:25:48] Gabriel: Yeah, one of the questions I was actually going to ask you here as we wind down the podcast was what would be the benefit of somebody who doesn’t live in that region of the country still choosing to listen and possibly subscribe to the podcast? And I think you just hit the nail on the head right there. People want to follow along. A lot of times people are very well intentioned and they say the same thing that we’re talking about now to themselves, which is I’m not going to forget about the Carolinas, but we have busy lives. The holidays are creeping up on us soon, and it’s easy for people to just forget about that in the shuffle. I think that subscribing to the Carolina Weather Group podcast is a great way to, even if you don’t listen to the episode every single week, to get that like weekly reminder that, Hey, these people are still out there. They’re hurting. They still need our help.

[00:26:29] James: Yeah. It’s a question we get asked time to time is Hey, I don’t live in the Carolinas, like why would I watch or listen to your show? And I won’t lie, there’ll definitely be times you’re like, I don’t care that it’s raining in Raleigh right now. That’s not pertinent to me. That’s fine. I get it. It’s part of our core identity and that is why we have chosen to affiliate that way and really cover our backyard. But we also talk about weather science and technology with impacts beyond the Carolinas. We did a whole special last year down at Kennedy Space Center for our SpaceX launch that whether you lived in the Carolinas or any place else on the planet, we hope you find interesting. And so just like you said, Gabe, I hope there’s enough in there that while we’re you know, really a hometown product for people who live here, we hope there’s also a lot of relevancy to what we’re talking about for folks elsewhere. And just to give you an example, you mentioned Milton. Milton made landfall Wednesday night, just so happened to be during our live show, and we had a Carolina based storm chaser who was in Florida. So in part, we were doing Milton Florida landfall coverage as part of the Carolina Weather Group.

[00:27:34] Gabriel: That is perfect way to tie things together, I think. And that leads me to the last thing I wanted to ask you about here, which is you are obviously a podcast, you yourself don’t go out and storm chase. You also work in the television industry and storm chasers are obviously working closely with both Carolina Weather Group podcast and the station that you work for. So could you maybe talk a little bit about the relationship between storm chasers on the ground and whether it’s new media like podcasts or legacy media like television stations and what could maybe some of our people who are listening that are trying to break their way into storm chasing, what would be some good advice for them to take away when they’re trying to forge relationships with these various media entities?

[00:28:16] James: Yes. So you’re right, I don’t do any storm chasing myself and I will end this by telling you the closest way I get to doing storm chasing myself, but in my day to day between the Carolina Weather Group and the television station I work for, I’m on the receiving side of taking in video, taking in storm reports and the content that storm chasers are gathering and bringing that back out to the public. In my day job, I have the privilege of working with Brad Panovich, chief meteorologist at WCNC Charlotte. And, people love to watch Brad on TV and Brad in front of a green screen with a radar map, you could watch it for hours, but even Brad himself will say, radar is just color. Seeing is believing I need video and I need pictures of what’s actually happening on the ground. And that’s where your storm chasers of course, come in. And so there have been times at work and also with our podcast where I’ll be sitting in the control room and sometimes my responsibility is just watching those feeds from storm chasers, watching those pictures that are being uploaded to social media by your average person, and curating them and going through them and finding the most urgent, the most relevant piece of content to then feed to the meteorologist who is on the air. The meteorologist who’s already looking at that radar data who wants to show you at home what’s happening, but also them themselves wants to know, okay, I can see on this radar map what’s happening at 6000 ft, but it’s not until I saw this picture that I actually knew what was happening on the ground. Storm chasing is not something I’ve had the privilege to do just yet. I hope to do it, it’s on my bucket list. But, what I’ve resigned myself to doing for now is playing virtual storm chasing on the computer. You can see some of it on our YouTube channel. There’s a new game that came out about less than a year ago called Outbrk. We’ve had the privilege of talking to the developers of that game, so if you’re like me and you don’t quite have the time, the money or the resources or the gumption to go out and chase these real storms you can tickle the fancy a little bit by playing the game on the computer, but let me be clear the real storm chasers have a much more difficult job than do than me behind the keyboard cat on the computer.

[00:30:29] Gabriel: I gotta ask have you zero metered and been rolled in Outbrk yet?

[00:30:33] James: I waited four years to play. I backed the game on Kickstarter when it first came out and the very first thing I did, you can see this in our live stream, the first thing I did within the first two minutes of playing is I drove right into a ditch and got stuck.

[00:30:50] Gabriel: Oh man. Oh man.

[00:30:52] James: It was very anti climactic.

[00:30:55] Gabriel: That is some compelling gameplay right there.

[00:30:58] James: I think I’ve gotten a little bit better at it now. I hope.

[00:31:00] Gabriel: I think a really compelling place for us to leave this podcast actually is with the image that you provided about how you are privileged to follow along on social media and look at the various videos and pictures that are coming in really sits in cool contrast to how we began this discussion where you talked about how you posting something on social media actually got a news station to take notice. But like you mentioned, news stations back in the day wanted you to upload content to their site. They weren’t pulling it directly from social media, and I think now it’s really cool that it’s come full circle and you aren’t asking, I don’t think anybody to go to CarolinaWeatherGroup.Com and upload it there. You’re just pulling it off a social media, right?

[00:31:39] James: Yeah. So here’s what I’ll say is whether it’s the podcast or the TV job there’s a lot of noise in the newsroom to break through both literally and figuratively. When I’m at work, I get seven or eight emails. So the trick, if you’re trying to get content broadcast, is to grab our attention. Sometimes, that’s picking up the phone. Tags do help, but anything to really grab our attention is super pertinent. Again, using those keywords helps us discover you. And I also know that there are a lot of folks who need to make a living off of this content, too. So I’m sure people listening to this right now also know TV stations in general have a reputation for asking people on Twitter, may we reuse your content that you had to pay to produce yourself with fuel and car insurance and all of that jazz. And it’s, I know it’s a tough industry to really break those sales as well, too because not everyone’s got the economic backing to buy the material. This is a two way relationship. Chasers are only going to be able to chase if they can make it work fiscally, and that’s why there are, I know particular groups out there that will broker deals or particular networks that will provide content back through. And so it is a bit of a negotiation tactic, and I don’t know that I have the magic answer to it. But I think what I’m trying to say, Gabe is I appreciate chasers for what they do for where they put themselves, but also for needing to make a living off of this is something I respect as well.

[00:33:12] Gabriel: That’s a great place to leave it, James. One more time, could you share with folks where they can find you on social media, where they can find the podcast, and again, just thank you very much for joining me here.

[00:33:22] James: It’s been a privilege, Gabe. You can find me on Twitter @JamesBrierton, and then you can find the Carolina Weather Group on YouTube, wherever you get your audio podcasts. Those are our two primary places. We always tell people, of course, you can find us on the other social media platforms as well, too, but we have a new episode each and every Wednesday night at 9 PM Eastern, and at other times throughout the week as the news and the weather warrants.

[00:33:47] Gabriel: Thank you so much, James. Appreciate you again, coming on.

[00:33:49] James: Thanks for having me.

[00:33:50] Gabriel: Thanks for listening. If you’re not already subscribed, hit that button right now and then make sure notifications are turned on so you never miss an episode again. There are lots of ways to show your support for Chaser Chat. You can pick up something from the merch store, leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, leave a comment and a like on YouTube, or just share the link to this episode on your preferred social media platform.

[00:34:11] Thanks again for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next episode.