“Will my flight be affected tomorrow?”
“Think there will be decent skiing up north this weekend?”
“Mom, is there school in the morning?”
The answers to those questions often are found in the weather forecasts from MLive’s chief meteorologist, Mark Torregrossa. And now, we’re making it faster and easier to get those updates, and more, right in the palm of your hand.
This week we launched a Michigan Weather Insider texting service and are offering a free 14-day trial to check it out.
Subscribers will get timely and informative texts each day from our weather team, led by Torregrossa, Michigan’s most read meteorologist. With blustery weather this week, the timing couldn’t have been better.
“I think some of the most useful Weather Insider texts will come as severe weather updates – what’s going to happen with a storm in the next few hours,” Torregrossa said. “I can send that info out in seconds rather than the time it takes to write a complete article. For severe weather, speed of getting information to you is crucial.”
To start your free trial and begin getting weather updates immediately, click the link here to enter your phone number. Once the trial period ends, the service costs $1.99 per month.
The Weather Insider doesn’t replace any of our outstanding daily coverage of weather on the MLive.com website or across our social media channels, said Tanda Gmiter, the editor who leads our weather coverage. And it’s not all about severe weather. Often, she said, it will be the kinds of topics “weather nerds” truly get into.
“They talk about details only weather watchers would be interested in,” she said. “It’s more of a “Did you see …” or “Hey, did you know …” sharing of weather tidbits. It could be a cool nugget of information about an incoming storm, or even a neat kind of cloud formation only people living by the Great Lakes get to see.”
Weather Insider texts are two-way communication, allowing subscribers to ask questions of our weather team, and vice versa. We have similar texting services for our Detroit Lions and Michigan State University sports coverage, and the reporters use that pipeline for their reporting and podcasts.
Even when weather is serene, interest doesn’t abate. It’s our No. 1-read topic by MLive readers. And for the most avid readers Michigan Weather Insider texts will provide a sense of personal access and community.
“We aim to send you info you won’t get anywhere else,” Torregrossa said. “It’s kind of like if you fly a certain airline a lot you get to hang out in a cozy lounge before your flight.”
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Clarification: The email version of last week’s Letter from the Editor omitted a caption for the photograph that accompanied the column. The subjects in the photo were, from left, MLive/Ann Arbor News reporter Sam Dodge; his father-in-law Frank Rampton; and brother-in-law Dalton Geraldo.
