Frank Batten (with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank): The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise Of A Media Phenomenon

Frank Batten isn't a weatherman, he's a businessman. The retired CEO of Landmark Communications tells the story of his company's most famous holding in The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise Of A Media Phenomenon, but even though Batten has clearly had a hand in TWC's day-to-day decision-making throughout its 20-year history, he and co-author Jeffrey L. Cruikshank present the details with the detached boosterism of executives prepping a stockholder's report. What Batten knows about meteorology and the technical complexities of weather forecasting mostly appears to have been picked up at board meetings, probably because The Weather Channel wasn't his brainchild. The idea for a 24-hour cable weather report first came from John Coleman, a former Good Morning America weatherman who spent much of the late '70s and early '80s pitching his plan to anyone who'd listen. When Batten's company came across Coleman, they were looking to extend their empire beyond newspaper and cable-system holdings. The Weather Channel launched in 1982, but within a year, Landmark was ready to fire Coleman and abandon a rapidly sinking ship. The fourth-best chapter of Batten's book details the mistakes made during the start-up process, as well as Coleman and Landmark's legal maneuvers in determining the fate of their collaborative project. Batten proceeds cautiously, giving Coleman his due while defending Landmark's actions in precise, legally defensible terms; it's pressure-packed, inside-the-boardroom stuff. The best chapters of The Weather Channel are the preceding three, which break down the hows and what-fors of cablecasting two decades ago–including corrupt local politicians, satellite-availability wars, pre-computer-graphics design, and Ted Turner. The second half of the book contains too much crowing, as Batten boasts of The Weather Channel's success in brand-building and earning the public trust. But even amid the Horatio Alger hoo-hah, the Landmark CEO slips in a surprisingly fascinating history of the Weather Channel web site, at a time when the marketing staff resisted putting the web address on company literature, figuring that nobody would know what it meant. Even though The Weather Channel's story becomes dominated by the vindicated tone of a mogul whose product was once a punchline, Batten's story contains a valuable, NASA-like lesson about venturing into the realm of the improbable to make substantive gains.