* NPR last week…

Meteorologists at 27 local TV news stations are facing uncertainty about their jobs after Allen Media Group announced a new local weather initiative with The Weather Channel.

The group, which owns TV stations in 21 markets across the country, said Saturday it is rolling out a new format for weather coverage that will have “additional visual storytelling capabilities” across its stations in 2025. […]

The plan involves meteorologists at The Weather Channel in Atlanta producing content for local stations across the country. The team under the new initiative will be led by Carl Parker, a meteorologist at The Weather Channel, and include some meteorologists from local TV stations moving to Atlanta, the media group said in a statement.

* WTHI-Indiana meteorologists Patrece Dayton and Kevin Orpurt announced their layoffs last week with a tearful goodbye…

* Yesterday The Desk, a tech and business publication, reported Allen Media reversed its decision to lay the local meteorologists off, at least partly…

Allen Media Group has reversed some of its plans to lay off more than 100 local television meteorologists and outsource regional weather forecasts to its production facilities in Atlanta, The Desk has learned. […]

The overwhelming majority of Allen Media’s TV forecasters were to be laid off as part of the plans, and some meteorologists had already received pink slips. […]

“After receiving significant feedback across various markets, Allen Media has decided to pause and reconsider the strategy of providing local weather from the Weather Channel in Atlanta,” a sales manager at one of the Allen Media stations told The Desk by e-mail.

Less clear is whether Allen Media intends to hire back some meteorologists who were already laid off before the plans were announced. A spokesperson for Allen Media declined to comment when reached by The Desk on Thursday.

The company is still moving forward with plans to build a regional production hub out of the Atlanta studios of The Weather Channel, which Allen Media fully acquired last year.

A few stations (WSIL, WAAY) have announced they will be keeping their meteorologists.

* WREX Rockford was one of the of the stations facing layoffs. I spoke with Congressman Eric Sorensen, former Chief Meteorologist at WREX for his reaction early this morning…

Sorensen: I worry that this is going to be something that these big corporations are going to consider in the future. As you know, the big corporations are, they’re working for the shareholder and not for the consumer of the product. And so they are going to look for ways to cut costs, you know, at any price.

And I saw that in my career, in my 22-year career as a broadcast meteorologist, to see the TV stations that I worked for, they would cut positions and not replace people. Instead of having 100 people working in a newsroom, you had 50, and then you had 20, and then you had 10.

And it concerns me because as we look forward, if we don’t have these trusted sources for information, then it’s just going to open us up to risk of people who, who don’t have a degree in meteorology, people who don’t have journalistic ethics could lead us in our communities astray.

Isabel: What was your reaction when you heard this news?

Sorensen: My first thought when I heard that the TV station that I watched when I was a kid, WREX Rockford, Illinois. As a kid, I watched Eric Nefstead do the news. He did the weather. He talked with me and got me through the fear of weather to the point where I wanted to emulate him. I wanted to be him. That TV station was -that allowed me to create a dream in my head as a small child, and I wanted to be a meteorologist.

And so I strived through school to become a meteorologist. I worked in Texas for five years, and then I had a call, Eric, do you want this job at WREX? And I said, yes, absolutely. And so I got to work at the same TV station that that the person that guided me as a child. I worked there.

It was a little bit of a gut punch, because I left WREX in 2014 when I moved to Moline, Illinois, and WREX had the same chief meteorologist since the person that replaced me is still working there as the chief meteorologist, Alex Kirschner. And so it hit me like a gut punch when I heard that this corporation was considering getting rid of all of their meteorologists. And I thought, wait a minute, does that mean I’m the second to last chief meteorologist WREX will ever have? How close was I to not achieving my own dream? And so it was personal to me. And I thought to myself, you know, my community, my hometown, deserves better than that.

WREX has yet to issue a statement about whether its meteorologists have been spared. I’ve reached out to the station’s lead meteorologist. I’ll update with any response.