You clearly don't know how the television industry works, do you?
You clearly don't know how weather information is properly disseminated, do you? In case anyone has forgotten what this means, this is a
Weather Channel fansite. TWC has a mission and a purpose. Being just another television channel or a cash cow is not one of them. If it was we wouldn't be here today, and TWC wouldn't have been created in 1982. Your adopting of the mentality of "if you can't beat them, join them", along with a few others here, leaves me disappointed in the people at TWC Today. I choose a different course, of standing up and being counted in favor of the Weather Channel I have known and loved since early childhood. My stubbornness in and of itself will change nothing, but it's not as if your pessimism is helping to improve the Weather Channel - if anything it gives them more license to destroy it. Should they have commercials? Probably. Do they need commercials? Yes (as opposed to, say, Turner Classic Movies). Should commercials take precedence over local forecasts and weather coverage? Absolutely not, and this is where my point lies. There are other schedules they can adopt that have both LF's and commercials, if they need extra coverage time. They've done it many times before, notably during Storm Alert mode. Shaving off a few ads wouldn't hurt them given the extra ratings. Broadcast networks that are totally dependent on commercials manage to air 90 minute events uninterrupted and still come out with a quarterly profit, and TWC doesn't even need to go as far as shunning all commercials. This goes back to my original point about them being desperate, greedy, or both. If they put their mission first, as they did years ago, you would have seen local forecasts during that timeframe, just as you saw local forecasts during past mega-storms.
I only watched a little bit of TWC coverage this morning, but Stephanie's "inside jokes" with Mike Bettes were, in my mind, completely uncalled for. 
I understand she's probably running on little to no sleep, but she was acting like a teenager. Before the top of the hour (9 AM), she was supposed to give more information on the storm and just said something (I don't even remember what) that both Mike and Maria gave stunned reactions to. Heck, TWC even had to cut her off.
I like Stephanie, but not when she does things like this. 
I didn't see any of that, but from what I hear her conduct was uncalled for. OCM's should have more personality than they do at this time, but that's the wrong kind of personality. They would have been better off to highlight some of the unusual upper-level winds and temperature differential associated with Sandy, or perhaps the cold snaps occurring all over the Northern Hemisphere. Given how entrenched those two jokers are, I can only hope that the executives will have an epiphany, fire Abrams, and send Al Roker back to NBC where he belongs.
