The goal of the newsletter is to inform planning and enhance “situational awareness” of extreme weather risks in any combination of places readers care about, “whether it’s their vacation places, or where they have kids or parents or loved ones,” Keefe said. “It was just a perfect example to say, ‘look, they’re good at forecasting these things we can help bring that information to our readers,’” Keefe said. Several hours after he made that pitch, a tornado hit the city’s outskirts. When he pitched the idea to the Times, Keefe said he used an example of New Orleans, which the National Weather Service showed having an elevated risk of tornadoes that day. “To our knowledge, we weren’t aware of anybody doing it like that - where you could say, ‘Hey, let me know when one of these blobs, basically, is over a city I care about,” Keefe added. “We just thought, hey, this would be great to bring the readers,” he said. While anyone in the weather business relies on this data constantly - and the Times would use the data internally to determine whether and when to check in with reporters across the country - it was not being distilled and brought directly to non-experts, Keefe explained.
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“We were talking about how incredibly accurate they are, and how no one is really using that data to its full potential,” Keefe said.
Keefe, who was previously a senior data and visuals editor at CNN (and who has also written for Nieman Lab), told me that he recalled talking with Times meteorologist Judson Jones about the National Weather Service’s “multi-day outlooks,” which the service uses to predict severe weather in what Keefe called “blobs” of regions across the country. This newsletter is the brainchild of the Times Weather Data team, which the organization began building last year by hiring John Keefe as editor of weather data last summer to lead “a new team in the newsroom focused on making The Times a destination for extreme weather coverage.” You can plug in a specific address - which will result in weather alerts for a 2.5 square kilometer area around that place (drawing on census classifications) - or an entire town or city. The color categories consolidate and simplify National Weather Service designations, which vary depending on the type of weather phenomenon, and draw on the service’s data and risk detection, which is why the geographic range is limited to the contiguous United States. JReaders only receive an email if there is a “lower” (yellow), “medium” (orange), or “higher” (red) risk of extreme weather in one or more of these places, and they can change their four selected places whenever they want. Sign up today and we’ll let you know when forecasters see a risk of tornadoes, hail, high winds or excessive rain. The New York Times has launched Your Places: Extreme Weather, a newsletter about extreme weather risks in places important to you. It’s the latest example of the Times’ push into personalized newsletters, and of the Times’ experimentation with and emphasis on weather data. Readers do not have to be paid Times subscribers to get the Your Places: Extreme Weather newsletter.
The New York Times believes such a system could be useful to you this week, the organization launched a newsletter that allows readers to select up to four places in the continental United States and receive a morning email if there’s a risk of any of four types of extreme weather in the next three days - excessive rain, tornadoes, high winds, or hail. What if you received a brief email alerting you to a chance of extreme weather, and explaining the level and type of risk, where your daughter is working a summer job, or where your father lives in a retirement community, or where you’re planning to travel for a weekend? And what if you could get a single email summarizing any low, moderate, or high level of extreme weather risk in all of those places?
And you might not only be preoccupied with the chances of extreme weather where you live, but also in places you’re traveling, or where your friends and loved ones reside. As the warming climate causes extreme weather events to become more frequent and severe, your everyday concern about weather risks may be growing.
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