What do you do when your TV news team is short-staffed around the holidays and you have a major winter storm blowing in? Well, send your sports reporter into the field, of course.
But you’d better be prepared for some blowback.
Because they were low on reporters and most of the sporting events had been canceled, KWWL News 7 sent out their sports reporter Mark Woodley to cover — live on air — the major storm that was hitting Waterloo, Iowa, on Thursday morning.
Early.
Really early.
Needless to say, Woodley wasn’t too thrilled with the idea.
“I didn’t even realize that there was a 3:30 also in the morning until today,” Woodley told viewers and the newscast’s anchor Ryan Witry, who was back inside a warm studio.
He put together some highlights and posted them to social media, where they went viral.
This is what you get when you ask the sports guy to come in to cover a blizzard in the morning show. pic.twitter.com/h0RL9tVQqg
— Mark Woodley (@MarkWoodleyTV) December 22, 2022
As of 10 a.m. Friday, Woodley’s post was viewed more than 14.5 million times and liked by more than 103,000 accounts.
Woodley’s on-air broadcasts for the NBC affiliate began at 4:30 a.m. and lasted for five hours, with the reporter tossing in some serious snark about the conditions.
“How do I get that Storm Chaser 7 duty,” he asked his anchor. “I feel like (co-worker) Clint got the better end of that deal. You know, that thing’s heated. The outdoors, um, currently is not heated.”
Woodley told Today.com that, as an Iowa native, he’s accustomed to the winter cold. He told Today that he’s surprised about the reaction to his tweet.
“Of all the things that I thought I’d be known for in my life, crotchety old weather reporter was not on the list,” he told Today.
