The user can ask questions, the expert then can provide helpful answers.” But he also used the blog to crowdsource information from his audience. “Weather is dynamic and ever changing, it’s really a type of topic where a two-way conversation is really helpful. “I thought a blog was the perfect medium for communicating weather information,” Samenow said. The site, which at the time could be found at, wasn’t even a blog at first. Family and friends read it, and when there was a big event, I’d do a little write up about it.” “It was originally just a portal to DC weather information. “I decided to start a DC weather website on the side,” he told me in an interview at the Washington Post’s offices. After graduating in 2000, he parlayed this interest into a position as a climate change science analyst at the EPA.īut his obsession with local weather never went away. A self-described “weather junkie” since the age of 10, he majored in environmental science as an undergrad and later became interested in climate change while getting his master’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jason Samenow founded it as a standalone website back in 2003. Perhaps the reason the Capital Weather Gang doesn’t read like a traditional media outlet is because it didn’t start out as one. Through its approach of radical transparency, crowdsourcing, and community engagement - along with its early embrace of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook - the blog has built out an impressive reporting apparatus that should be studied not just by other weather journalists, but by any media organization that wants to establish a more intimate relationship with its readers. In fact, I would argue that it represents why the journalists who run it are among the most beloved weather reporters in the nation. This kind of self-appraisal isn’t an anomaly on the Capital Weather Gang blog. Sorry to gush but to us you are really top notch. My family relies on you all and you have never let us down. “The fact that you grade yourselves so honestly after the fact is, alone, worth extra credit. The post has over 170 comments, and most mirror the sentiments of a commenter who went by the handle Hoagland. But, grading on the curve, our forecast was satisfactory.” “In some areas it was right on, in others it was a bust on the low side. “We’re not going to win any awards for our forecast for yesterday’s snowstorm,” Samenow wrote. But he also dives into the blog’s shortcomings, most notably its failure to predict the time the precipitation would transition from rain to sleet to snow. In it, he lists several bullet points on things his team did well, which included getting the timing of the high impact storm events correct and accurately predicting that the amount of snowfall would be much lower than what other meteorologists were forecasting. It’s actually a postmortem in which Samenow assesses the successes and failures of his predictions leading up to the snowstorm. In fact, it was published on March 4, the day after the snowstorm took place. In March of 2014, Jason Samenow, the editor of Capital Weather Gang, the Washington Post’s weather blog, published a post titled “ March 3 snowstorm: An acceptable forecast.” The post isn’t a forecast. Jason Samenow, founder of the Capital Weather Gang

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