Woodley’s grumbling from waking up early to avoid being caught in the act: A video to Twitter about weather in Waterloo, Iowa
Mark Woodley, a sports reporter at CNN affiliate KWWL, posted a video to Twitter on Thursday that spliced together some of his grumbling from his day as a weather reporter.
“I usually do sports, everything is canceled here for the next couple of days,” said a sarcastic Woodley in the video, standing outside in snow-covered Waterloo, Iowa. “So what better time to ask the sports guy to come in about five hours earlier than he would normally wake up, go stand out in the wind and the snow and the cold, and tell other people not to do the same?”
“Tune into the show for the next couple hours to watch me get progressively crankier and crankier,” he said, before bemoaning missing an assignment that would have kept him inside a car.
Can I return to my regular job? he griped at another moment. “I am pretty sure you added an extra hour to this hour just because somebody likes torturing me.”
He was unaware of the 3:30 a.m. slot on the channel, and didn’t find out he’d be covering it until the night before.
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He thought that if he brought some attitude to it, viewers would pay attention. He emphasized the importance of making sure people know what they need to do to be safe, and said it was a very serious storm.
He said that it was his sister-in-law who told him he needed to send a message. “I put it on twitter, thinking 20-30 people are gonna see this, my managers aren’t gonna care, it’s not gonna go anywhere. Within hours I’m getting these text messages like ‘dude, you’re going viral, Judd aApatow retweeted you.’”
As for fans’ calls that he should pivot from sports to weather? “That is my absolute nightmare,” he said. “We’re a bit shorthanded, like every newsroom is in the country, that’s why I was in this situation.
He said that he was a team player. “If asked, sure, I’ll do it, but that would be my absolute nightmare. I hope to God they do not ask me to ever do that again.”
I want to go back to my regular job. I am pretty sure that the show was added an hour because somebody likes torturing me,” he said. “Compared to two and a half hours ago it is just getting colder and colder.”
In an interview, Mr. Woodley, who has worked at KWWL on and off for 20 years, said that the previous 24 hours had “been insane” and that the response had been overwhelmingly positive, including from his employer.
“The whole thing was incredible, I don’t understand how celebrities do anything,” he said. “It’s exhausting. I was surprised by the way it came, but I love it because it is new for me.
He filmed most of the live shots before he got to work. He was alone on the street, delivering his jokes to just the camera.
Huff explained that he and the station’s news director, Andrew Altenbern, considered asking Woodley to report more conventionally, but decided that the humor gave the coverage a “unique element.”
Mr. Woodley managed to talk his way out of doing a second round of coverage on Friday morning and instead planned to return to his regular 6 p.m. time slot to preview the Music City Bowl in which the University of Iowa will play the University of Kentucky in Nashville next weekend.
“I was excited to not be that guy again, and if the good Lord is willing I will never do it again,” he said. However, if his team is short-handed, as was the case this week, he said he would grudgingly step in.
Mark Woodley’s Funny Face as a Bad News Anchor: The Iowa Blizzard Storm Twitter Tweet with Randy Apatow
“I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news,” television sports anchor Mark Woodley said while reporting on eastern Iowa’s winter storm on Thursday. “I feel my face, that’s good news,” he said. “The bad news is I kind of wish I couldn’t.”
A parody of the weathercaster cracking jokes while reporting on theweather from outside the KWWL building has been posted on the popular stream by the man. It has more than 180,000 likes and has been viewed over 25 million times since Woodley posted it Thursday morning.
He brought the humor he usually uses in his own show — the one he referred to when he quipped, “Can I go back to my regular job?” — to cover the storm.
He says he woke up at 2:30 am to report for his first hit on air that day, which was at 4:34 a.m. He said that he doesn’t know how you get up at this time every day. I did not know there was a 3:30 also in the morning.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/24/1145407512/sports-anchor-iowa-blizzard–storm-twitter-viral-judd-apatow
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I know there are people working hard. Making sure people are able to get to work. I know it’s a serious storm,” he said. The rest of the reports reflected these things. … I just want people to know that I didn’t think this was entirely a joke.”
He said that a lot of industries across the country have had trouble getting people back to work. “So people are pitching in in areas where they wouldn’t normally.”
“All that was on my mind at first was getting Mark inside the building right after each of his live reports,” Huff told NPR in an emailed statement. “We didn’t have him outside for the entire 3 and a half hours that we had!”, he said.
Despite Woodley’s viral success, KWWL hasn’t asked him to cover the weather again — which, because of the shift’s early call time, Woodley said is a relief.