He may not know it, but Elmer Gruber is a "weather weenie."
That is the affectionate nickname people at the Weather Channel use for their most devoted viewers. And Gruber is a true devotee."Lots of days, the entertainment programs are so bad, I just turn on the Weather Channel and watch," Gruber, 80, said in a telephone interview from his home in suburban Cincinnati. "We watch the local weather on the 8s -- 8 after, 18 after, 28, 38 and 48 after," he said, the other half of "we" being his wife, Eugina. "Five- and seven-day forecasts are on at 20 after," said Gruber, a retired surgical appliances executive, who estimates that he watches the Weather Channel at least an hour every day. "And some days more than that."
But the Weather Channel has not become one of the cable industry's most widely distributed and profitable programmers on the ratings of retirees alone. The "weather involved" -- another of the company's labels -- includes people whose work requires them to keep tabs on the elements.
One is Joe Dier, head of media relations for the Mississippi State University baseball team. ("If we know it will rain in the third inning, the coach's strategy might change.")
Another is Steve Bruce, a floor broker for grains at the Chicago Board of Trade, who watches the Weather Channel from the trading pit. ("If there is a hurricane expected to hit New Orleans, it plugs up the river system; that's a problem.")
And then, of course, there are the voyeurs who are simply fascinated by the weather, particularly when nature displays its telegenic fury. These are the types that the Weather Channel celebrates in its popular TV ads, which feature weather fanatics who hang out at a fictional place called the Front and carry on as if they were fans in a sports bar.
Dier might fit right in at the Front. He grew up in hurricane-prone Florida, moved to typhoon territory -- Okinawa, Japan -- and then lived in Alaska, land of weather extremes. "I went into public relations, but I might have ventured toward meteorology," said Dier, who once sent fan mail to his favorite Weather Channel weathercaster, Vivian Brown.
Reaching 70 million homes and offering programming that may cost less to produce than almost anything else this side of C-SPAN, the Weather Channel is "a cash machine," in the estimation of Jessica Reif, a media analyst at Merrill Lynch.
The financial figures are not reported, because the channel is privately held, owned by Landmark Communications, a family-controlled company in Norfolk, Va., whose other media holdings include The Virginian-Pilot, The Roanoke Times, KLAS-TV in Las Vegas and WTVF-TV in Nashville, Tenn.
But a person familiar with its finances said that the Weather Channel generated about $100 million in operating profits in 1998 on revenue of $200 million that came primarily from advertising, as well as from fees paid by cable operators. With a remarkably high profit margin of some 50 percent, the service could probably attract a buyer willing to pay as much at 15 times cash flow, or about $1.65 billion, according to Derek Baine, a cable analyst at Paul Kagan Associations, the media consulting firm.
The Battan family, Landmark's owners, reportedly has no plans to sell the Weather Channel, though.
"If you have 50 percent margins, why sell it?" Reif said.
The operation is run out of a sleek eight-story office building just outside Atlanta. There, 80 meteorologists analyze weather data provided primarily by the National Weather Service, supplemented by other sources that include military weather feeds.
In the course of any 15-minute segment, a Weather Channel viewer can get national, regional and local coverage that includes maps, charts and other data. The national weather programming, transmitted by satellite, appears on all local systems. For local forecasts, cable operators have hardware and software systems that can sift out the relevant information from the Weather Channel's data feed, to present the local weather in text and graphics during local breaks in the national program.
Nationally, many of the 30 on-camera meteorologists have become celebrities in their own right. Cheryl Lempke, for example, is about to be featured in a fashion shoot in Mirabella magazine.
With so many meteorologists, the Weather Channel can have specialists, like John Hope, the channel's 79-year-old hurricane maven, who works only during tropical storm season, from June to November. His is a popular beat with viewers.
"They want to talk to me all the time," Hope said, "but I can't take all the calls."
Founded in 1982 and profitable by 1985, according to the Weather Channel's president, Michael Eckert, the meteorological service is able to repackage its material for other media. The channel, for example, provides weather reports to 250 radio stations across the country.