Transcription of Keith Carson for the show Faces of Maine Broadcasting #275
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Today I get to do something I have always wanted to do, which is to interview someone who does something really interesting on the air with weather. This is Keith Carson, and with 10 years of media experience, meteorologist Keith Carson has covered everything from tornado aftermath in Oklahoma to blizzards in Chicago.
A native New Englander, Keith leveraged social media and on-air presentation to reach the Weather Channel at the age of 30; now he has returned to WCSH TV in Portland where he is spearheading a new level of online and live reporting presence for the top rated local news station. Welcome back to Maine.
Keith Carson: Well, thank you. Great time of year to come.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it’s beautiful. You’re a Massachusetts native originally?
Keith Carson: Right, so I spent most of my life living in New England one way or another, from Massachusetts. Went to school in Vermont and then took a job in Vermont as well. I had this cold weather experience most of my life.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in why one decides to study the weather. I’m sure this is not the first time you’ve been asked this question.
Keith Carson: No, and you know I think for most people that you ask this question, not just on-air meteorologists, a lot of meteorologists behind the scenes, it starts at a young age. For me it was the Blizzard of 1993. I was 10, so if you’re good at math you can quickly figure out how old I am, but that was the thing for me; it was a huge super storm all the way from Georgia up into New England. It was a big snow storm here.
I just remember standing in the driveway and just, I don’t know, being obsessed with the level of snow we were getting, and then it rolled from there. My parents saw this, so they’d bring me into TV stations to get the tours, I spent some time on Mount Washington in high school as a volunteer, so they were very supportive of the idea, “Do something you like,” and it never stopped being what I liked. That’s kind of how I ended up studying it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: What is the educational background of someone who is a meteorologist?
Keith Carson: Well, it’s a four year degree. It’s mainly physics and calculus. That’s the base of it, so for the first two years of most meteorology programs you’re doing just… if you wanted to switch and be an engineer your junior year, it’s not a huge departure. It’s that kind of stuff. Then you get into the actual forecasting classes, usually junior and senior year, so because of that, a lot of people go in, they love the weather, and they drop out of meteorology because they don’t realize how heavy it is on this kind of stuff.
I believe my class at Lyndon State, which was in Vermont, there was a 60-something attrition rate, 60%, because people just didn’t like how they had to get to the degree.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Right, that makes sense. When you decided to go to college for meteorology, were you certain that this was your path, were you certain that you wanted to this and do it on-air or was this something that you thought, “Well, I like science, I like the weather, let’s see how it goes?”
Keith Carson: I was hoping it was because I was actually someone who naturally is better at the verbal side of things. For example, when I was going to look at colleges, my SATs were much better in verbal than math, so I was kind of going into a weak zone for myself. I knew I wanted to do weather; I think everybody at a young age looks at the TV side, and that’s all they know about.
I was open to other paths; in fact for two years I did behind the scenes forecasting, but I think at the end of the day, yeah. I mean, that was the only thing that got me through classes like Thermodynamics was the idea that I really wanted to do this, because there were easier majors that I could’ve delved into, and I just never did that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: That’s similar to me with medical school and having to make it through things like calculus, which was definitely not my strong suit, but all doctors have to have some level of calculus and physics, actually. You have to have your eyes on the prize and keep moving forward because otherwise you get could get really bogged down and I guess questioning yourself and the direction you’re taking.
Keith Carson: Usually things that you want to do aren’t easy, and you know, physics, I don’t know what your experience was; I enjoyed the first probably course and a half of physics because of the theory behind a lot of it, and then it gets into the weeds after that. I think the last one I had to do was Physics 4, and I remember just being like, “You know what? I’m just going to get by. I’m not sure I entirely understand everything that’s happening here,” but the idea of meteorology is that they’re giving you the background for what the computer models are doing, a super computer; it’s to try to give you an understanding of it.
Like a lot of things in college, do I have to do those physics in a real world setting? Not really, but the idea is you have some sort of background there.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, and I think that’s actually what happened with medical school; there’s a lot of stuff that I have never ever used again. I could probably go back and figure it out if I went way back in my memory banks, but I just don’t really need it. If you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t have the vocabulary around what you’re doing.
Keith Carson: Right, yep.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You went up to Vermont, and you’ve been here in Maine, but you also spent some time down in Atlanta.
Keith Carson: Mm-hmm. What happened there was, I was pretty happy here at Channel 6 in Portland, and I had been there three years. We work under contract most people on TV, so you know, in my case it was a two year contract and then I signed a one year extension, so we’re coming up to the end of that, and I’m trying to decide what to do.
Now part of me, you’re always looking because you don’t know what the station’s going to do anyways. I had a pretty good idea that they were going to retain me, but at the time Joe Cupo was still there, Kevin Mannix was still there. Here are two guys that have been here forever. I just looked and said, “I might stay on weekend mornings for a long time. Lifestyle wise, I’m not sure that’s for me.”
I started to poke around, but I was pretty set on the idea of coming back to channel 6, or I was going to stay at channel 6, and then I got this email out of the blue from the president of the Weather Channel. I still remember because it was a specific day, it was Valentine’s Day, and it was extremely casual. It just said, “Hey, this is David Clark, president of the Weather Channel. I’ve seen your stuff, I’d like to talk to you.”
My first reaction was, my friends were just being jerks. I was like, “Can you fake a weather.com email address? Is that something you can do?” Long story short, I went back to Channel 6, we talked, and the basic feeling around the office including the general manager was, “Hey, we’ll do what we can to keep you, but we really think you probably should take this anyway.”
It’s the equivalent of if a reporter gets a call from CNN; you go to the Weather Channel and do that whole thing, so we moved south for three years.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, contrast the two jobs for me. What was it like to be, say, at WCSH and then at the Weather Channel? What was that like?
Keith Carson: Well, in local, I’d do the forecast, I make the graphics, I get up and present it. Usually you have three to four minutes. At the Weather Channel, they have other people doing the forecasts, they have this whole group of scientists that does it, they push it to the app that everybody has, it all goes to the same place to make sure it’s uniform. They don’t want people on TV giving you a different forecast than their app says.
Same data set, so I don’t forecast anymore. I don’t make the graphics anymore either. We have about 15 people who, their job is to make really good looking weather graphics. Essentially, I became a host. I’d come in with professional makeup, which is unusual in most markets; you go in, you read some scripts that have been written, and you still do the weather, but it’s not yours.
I had to learn how to become a host, which was new. I’d never read teleprompter, I never really interviewed people, so if you were to watch the first couple of months of tape, it was probably not great because I didn’t know how to interview people, and we were interviewing sometimes fairly big people. I remember we had Drew Brees on one time and I’m like, “Am I the guy that really should be interviewing this person? I don’t know what I’m doing,” but I learned.
I became a better host, but as far as the control, like the weather person in me, it’s a little hard to have somebody else, and they’re very good somebody elses, do the forecast. You lose some control over that whole aspect.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Then, when you decided to come back to Portland, you’ve only been back for a few months, is that right?
Keith Carson: Right. Yeah, so what happened there was basically, I knew the news director from last time. We started, in today’s day and age, very formal texting about, “Hey, is there a possibility that I could come back?” and I was weighing other options. Some of them had us moving to California; we were probably going to move because we felt like long term, that job wasn’t for me, as great as the people were and I was happy to have them try to retain me, but I just felt like it wasn’t for me long term.
Essentially, we went back and forth for a couple months and we didn’t think it was going to get done. The weather team’s pretty stacked over there right now, we have Todd Gutner who used to be a chief in Boston, we have Tom Johnston who used to be down in Jacksonville, so you have all these technically higher market kind of guys in this mid-market place. It just seemed like maybe it wasn’t going to happen.
They came up with something, and we started talking about schedule and making it a good lifestyle move. That was the big thing for me is, if I’m going to come here, let’s make it really nice. There aren’t many good shifts in television, so let’s make this one of them, where I’m working not early and not late, and kind of in sync with my wife’s schedule, and that would be a big benefit to coming back here.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: What does your wife do?
Keith Carson: She’s in public relations, so she works a normal… when we were in Atlanta, she worked at this University called Kennesaw State, which was actually about 30,000 undergrads and she was doing PR for them, so she had very what I called state hours. She would be back at 4:30 or whatever, and I was working all kinds of crazy shifts, so we were just thinking going forward, she was going to have a normal schedule, she has for years, and I’ve never had one.
I’ve either worked weekend mornings, or weekend nights, or at the Weather Channel, I worked eight or nine different schedules over the course of three years. That was starting to become a point where we’re like, “Okay, we’ve got to figure out a way to make this not so dissimilar.” We don’t have children right now, but you know, if we did, this whole thing doesn’t fit.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems like people like Joe Cupo, Kevin Mannix, and actually lots of newscasters in this area, there’s some people in this particular market who stay for literally decades, because I remember them from when I was young.
Keith Carson: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: That’s different than I think many other markets.
Keith Carson: Yeah, it is. Cupo, I think retired with 37 or 38 years; it was the only job he’s ever had. You know Pat Callaghan and Cindy Williams, they’re there. I don’t see them leaving; they’re not that old first of all, and they’re going to retire there, that’s the plan. I think it’s Maine.
The station is great to work for, that is a plus, and being a dominant #1 does make your life easier because no one’s trying to accomplish that much. I mean that in the best possible way; like they’re going to do good stuff but they’re not trying to catch anyone, and if you’re in a second or third place station, it’s a different environment. It’s, “What can we do to undercut these guys?” That’s just not the case at Channel 6, and it hasn’t been since I’ve been there.
I really think ultimately it’s Maine. I think people fall in love with it and don’t want to leave, and most of the people who are long tenured, except for Mannix, are not actually from Maine. That’s what’s interesting; Cupo is from New York, and he still had a New York accent 37 years later, which I always gave him a hard time about. “How’d you not lose this in this period of time?”
They fall in love with the state, and then they find the job that they like and they say, “There’s really no point in leaving, what am I going to get out of it?” I think when I decided to leave, there was a little smirk and a “we might see you again” kind of a situation. They were right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I’m guessing that the weather itself, like the actual weather around outside, may not be quite as diverse as the New England weather that got you into this.
Keith Carson: Right, and you know, it’s funny. When we moved to Atlanta for the job, our biggest concern was, “Are we going to like Georgia?” I figured, definitely love the job. Life never stacks up the way you think; we actually came to like Georgia. It has seasons, that’s the biggest thing for me. I don’t think I could do a Florida thing, especially central and southern Florida where really, there are very little variations.
The thing about Georgia that’s interesting is that, people don’t realize if you haven’t spent much time there, they have fall foliage. It just so happens that it’s in November; it’s later. They have winter, and it may mean they average two or three inches of snow a year. For me, it was just enough season to keep it interesting; what you add to it is more severe weather.
I remember the first time a tornado siren went off in our neighborhood. My wife’s like, “Whoa. What do we do about this?” Luckily, the answer was me looking at the radar and saying, “Nothing.” It’s a new experience, so you do add tornado threat to it, but there are a lot of hardcore meteorologists who couldn’t step away from big snowstorms because that’s what they love, particularly in New England.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems like I’ve heard of people who are tornado chasers. It seems like there are certain types of weather that appeal to different people. If that’s true, what’s your favorite kind of weather?
Keith Carson: You know, I do like a good snowstorm, but tropics also interest me because of how long you’re watching the storms, and obviously the magnitude of impact they can have. Even the worst snowstorms do not do what a category three or four hurricane does. I mean, this one right now, there’s this storm we’re watching right now and I think those two things interest me.
I think the passion comes from where you’re from. We had hurricane experts at the Weather Channel, that’s what they did, and our main hurricane guy was from New Orleans, so it would make sense that was his passion, right? He was from New Orleans. Our severe weather people, one of them was from Georgia. I think it’s what you grow up with, and what catches your attention, and then our winter weather expert is from Buffalo.
I think all of this lines up. What you experienced as a kid that awes you, I think is what sticks with you. In New England, it’s going to most likely be snow. For me, I’d say it’s snow, tropical weather, and then severe’s probably third, partially because I just didn’t deal with it very much. I did only at The Weather Channel when they sent me you Missouri or Oklahoma.
I also think the violent, destructive nature of that takes some of the fun out of it for me, if that makes any sense, you know. We had gotten a lot of tornado aftermath, and you understand what’s happening here to these people, so it makes it less interesting… I don’t know, to me, because you know what it can do.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I would think that would be really hard, that you can say, “Ah, that’s so fascinating that this phenomenon has occurred, something I’ve studied all this time,” but then if you’re on the ground, and you’re seeing smashed houses and people that don’t have water or electricity, I mean, there’s something very real about that.
Keith Carson: I got sent to a tornado in… it was in Missouri, I’m trying to think of the town now. I think it was Columbia, and basically, this tornado had occurred on the 23rd of December. I got a call at five o’clock, we got a crew together, we went out there. We arrived basically on Christmas Eve morning, and it was a three dead, houses destroyed situation; there were first responders on the scene, but that was about it.
That one really hit hard because they were people… it was Christmas, and these people were like digging through stuff. Also, as a weather person, it’s interesting, that was tough for me because that’s not what I do. I think a lot of reporters could go in there and stick a mic in someone’s face and ask them about it, and that was very difficult for me.
I could talk to people, but didn’t really at that moment want to say, “Hey, do you also want to be on national TV about this?” It was interesting, it showed me… in weather, you don’t have to do that very often, but that one stuck with me because of the timing and the intensity of it, and frankly in a lot of places where these tornadoes hit, a lot of times are not wealthy areas, so that does make it worse too, is that it’s not like, “Oh yeah, I’m sure they have insurance and someone to stay with,” it’s not always the case.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It also seems like these things hit, and then people are dealing with this years and years later. I mean, we’re still dealing with the aftermath of Katrina.
Keith Carson: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: This newest thing has happened in Haiti, I mean they’re still dealing with an earthquake that happened quite a long time ago, so these natural disasters, they happen, and then it’s not like we can have FEMA that can come in in the United States and just clean everything up, and then it’s all good.
Keith Carson: Right. In New Orleans too, part of what happened is people don’t want to move back, so even once you try shore it up a little bit and clean it up, we went there last year, and there’s still entire areas that are abandoned, and I think it’s just a matter of, it was too scarring of an experience for people to want to be back in the same spot.
The truth is, as much as New Orleans protects itself with levees, it’s still vulnerable, it’s still very low, it still sits in the Gulf of Mexico, so at the end of the day, you could build a house there and you can’t guarantee that’ its not going to happen again. I think that scares people, and in other countries, yeah, it’s often even worse. They have no kind of relief mechanism, and even Wilma hit down toward the Yucatan peninsula years ago, and I remember we had gone on vacation in that area like four years later, and it was still… they rebuilt the tourist stuff fast, but the rest of it was still leveled.
Yeah, it takes years and sometimes when these things pile up is when places don’t recover, which is why I like snow. Snow doesn’t really… doesn’t devastate the same way. It may be annoying, and there are car accidents, but other than that, you could have some fun with snow, and it’s not, you know, as bad.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Now I’m thinking about the ice storm that many of us lived through, and I can’t remember what year. Maybe 1996….
Keith Carson: 1998?
Dr. Lisa Belisle: 1998, somewhere around there. I’m not great with dates; I always date it by how old my children were. I know I had small children….
Keith Carson: You were in the ballpark.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Exactly. Even though we don’t have the same devastation from snowstorms… I mean this was an ice storm, and this was major and massive… I was working at the hospital as a resident at that time, and there were people coming in, they had no way to plug their oxygen machines into the wall, they had no heat, they had no electricity, and we were all impacted by it.
I was amazed by the number of people who came from other places, specifically like the electrical companies that just sent people up here until it was all taken care of. Have you experienced that same good heartedness and compassion and willingness to help?
Keith Carson: Yeah, I think in most areas they do band together, and you’re right. Ice storms really are the biggest thing, I mean other than us somehow getting clipped with a tropical system which is pretty hard to do. Ice storms, nobody likes those, right? Nobody is like, “Oh great, there’s ice, I can use my snowmobile or whatever.” I think for the Northeast, that’s your most vulnerable, crippling kind of thing, it’s usually in a power outage standpoint.
Yeah, I mean they have these systems. When I first got out of school, I was forecasting at this company Massachusetts, and they do aviation forecasting; they also do energy forecasting. We’d have clients like Louisiana, we had one, Entergy, we’d call them and tell them, “All right, your risk of power outage is blah-blah-blah.”
They had this co-op situation where it’s almost like a fire department where they say, “Okay, this is a six alarm, we need to send all these crews,” and then the expectation is, you know if it happens in their area, you will send people too, and that helps a lot because sometimes they can’t get the trucks out of the way, and the trucks are actually disabled.
That’s one of the biggest things we try to do for them forecasting is they would say, “Do we need to move this fleet out of the zone and then come back later? If they get destroyed, then we can’t help.” Yeah, I see a lot of good stuff out of these disasters, no doubt. People would still rather it not be a thing, but we worked with this guy who basically had made a lot of money at a young age, and he went into just creating this fleet in which they’d go to these disasters.
It’s called First Response Team of America, and they basically just go as a non-profit, and they help obviously these bigger organizations that are there to begin with. I give people like that a lot of credit, and they need it. I mean people need help in this scenario, and part of it is mental, too. A lot of the stuff they do is just pick up stuff, even if it’s… people are going through rubble and the Red Cross will come by with sandwiches.
You know, it seems so small but at the time, that helps, and it kind of brings people together.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I’m wondering how the whole conversation about climate change has impacted you because you were educated during the time where we started talking about this, and you’re like, you’re there. I’m not sure that everybody who’s done meteorology over the years has really been at the frontline the way that you are now.
We talk about climate refugees for example; people who left the Katrina stricken areas and never went back, essentially. Some people could call them climate refugees. What are your thoughts on that?
Keith Carson: You know, my thing is first and foremost, the earth is warming. I don’t know why people even debate that, that’s just the science of it. You can argue if you want what or whom is causing it, but it really doesn’t change that much other than… you know, I liken it to, maybe you wear a bike helmet, and you don’t feel like you need to.
Well, what’s the worst case of wearing that helmet? That’s kind of the same thing with some of the emission things they’re doing based on global warming. What is the argument for polluting more being a good thing? Either way, that needs to be curbed.
I think what happens with global warming is it becomes this political thing. There’s a lot of things like this in the country that shouldn’t be political, and they are, and that’s near the top, but I still know meteorologists who push back on the whole thing, and it’s because it’s become divided.
In my opinion, obviously we’re warming; I don’t like to attribute it to specific events, though. That’s the only time I have a problem, and you’ll see it in the media, and I can say that because I’m in it. Say, Hurricane Matthew turns into this big thing and hits the east coast, “Well, this is global warming.”
I mean, there’s been a lot of big hurricanes over the years, and even if you look at New Orleans, the area that didn’t flood as bad was the French Quarter. That was the oldest part of the city. Guess what? That’s because they built it on the relative hill of that area because they were aware they were at sea level.
I think trying to attribute specific events to global warming I think is, you getting in trouble with that. You’re talking about general rise in temperature which is happening every year, polar melting, all that, that’s real, but I don’t like them to say, “Tornado outbreak, that’s because of global warming,” because now you’re mixing meteorology with climate; they’re not the same thing.
It’s why I can’t go out and argue one way or another on global warming because that’s not my specific zone. You understand that on a doctor standpoint, it’s you have specialties, and being a meteorologist, is you’re doing 5 to 15 days out, you’re not doing years and years. You have to defer to people who do that for a living, and I just wish it’d be less political because it’s in everybody’s best interests to fix this problem.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I think that’s a great answer. I like the thoughtfulness that you put into that. Well, I encourage people to, well, obviously, watch Keith Carson on WCSH 6, I guess 6 in this area and other….
Keith Carson: 2 would be….
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Up in the Bangor area.
Keith Carson: Yes, we take over their signal. Yep.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: To maybe learn a little bit more about what Keith does and meteorology, and this has really been a fascinating conversation; I actually wish that we had another whole hour because I feel like there’s so much we could talk about. This has been really great.
I have been speaking with Keith Carson, who with 10 years of media experience, has covered everything from tornado aftermath in Oklahoma to blizzards in Chicago, and has now returned here to WCSH 6 and 2 TV here in the Portland and Bangor area. I appreciate your coming in and having this conversation, it’s been great to talk to you.
Keith Carson: Thank you, I really enjoyed it, and I’m happy to be back in Maine.