The Rain Man

Paul Douglas is not the area’s most experienced broadcast meteorologist, nor its  longest-tenured. He’s not a local boy, and at one point, he left loyal fans high and dry for the bright lights of a bigger market. His chastened return to the airwaves a few years later was anticlimactic, and we wondered if the weather guy who embodied our fascination with the climate had worn out his welcome.

Not long after that, however, Star Tribune columnist C. J. was once more painstakingly chronicling the evolution of his hair (A “series” of transplants since 1987—“it’s finally getting where I want it to be,” he says), and Paul Douglas was again working his way into the center of our weather universe.

It was inevitable. Douglas is simply the most intriguing public chronicler of the unending drama that is our local climate. Perhaps it’s the entrepreneurial streak, perhaps it’s the florid vocabulary, perhaps the odd amalgam of nerd and showman—perhaps it is the hair.

Whatever. It’s clear that Douglas is back on top. Many have forgotten he ever left. Think local broadcast weather and his face inevitably pops into your head. He’s smart, passionate about his craft, sincere, and none too slick. Run into him at Eden Prairie Center, and he’s not too high-falutin’ to stop and talk a little shop and look at a picture of the grandkids. He might just barely remember you from that sweaty day at the state fair.

Douglas Paul Kruhoeffer, forty-five, has arguably found a home in Minnesota so conducive because he lives, sleeps, and breathes weather. And though we’re all decades off the farm, in our climate-controlled homes and vehicles, the snowplowing service ready to clear our driveway—so do we.

“It’s a dirty science,” Douglas says of his unmasterable passion. “The atmosphere is still largely misunderstood because every day is a new and distinct creation. It’s the ultimate manifestation of chaos theory.”

As if mastering the weather doesn’t keep him busy enough, Douglas always seems to need to find something more to do—more than being a husband to his wife, Laurie Kruhoeffer, an architect; father to two teenage sons; and chief meteorologist at WCCO–TV. He’s also founder, chair, and chief cheerleader at his Minnetonka startup Digital Cyclone, which sells customized, localized forecasts across North America.

“Making a success of a company is the ultimate challenge,” he insists—this from a guy who has attempted to forecast the weather for nearly thirty years. You gotta give him credit for ambition.

“A lot of people in the forecasting business, I’ve found were traumatized by weather, and they could either let themselves be terrified or learn enough to overcome it,” reveals Douglas, whose own boyhood home in Columbia, Pennsylvania, was flooded by hurricane Agnes in 1972 when he was fourteen years old.

So it followed that in 1975, during his senior year in high school, Douglas, working at McDonald’s but fascinated with the weather, began providing forecasts to the local 500-watt radio station, WHEX. The station’s general manager, deeming “Kruhoeffer” unpronounceable, told him it “had to go.”

At Penn State, between classes, young Kruhoeffer, known as Paul Douglas on the air, began feeding forecasts to a network of stations, often working from a closet so as not to disturb his roommates. One of his clients, WNEP–TV in Wilkes-Barre–Scranton, called him in desperation one weekend. A scheduling mix-up left both its weathermen out of town. Douglas came to the rescue. I “was awful,” Douglas says, “but not so awful that they didn’t hire me to do weekend weather.”

After he graduated with a bachelor of science in meteorology, it was on to Stamford, Connecticut, and cable pioneer Satellite News Channel, where he worked with legendary Twin Cities weather showman Barry ZeVan. “Barry had a signature style, like many of the successful guys at the time,” Douglas recalls. “He urged me to go to Minnesota. He said, ‘You’ll love it, and they’ll love you.’ ”

In the Twin Cities, WTCN, which would morph briefly into WUSA and then KARE–11, had just been sold to Gannett. Douglas arrived in 1983 to head up weather at the station. He would stay eleven years and become an essential component of the juggernaut led by Paul Magers and Diana Pierce, which took the station from a distant third place to the undisputed market leader.

The Twin Cities was, in 1983, already home to several broadcast meteorologists. KSTP was leading the way and had begun to invest heavily in forecasting technology. By contrast, Douglas relied on an impish sense of humor, KARE’s outdoor weather studio, and a penchant for descriptive language well outside the bounds of traditional forecasting. His helicoptered narration of the 1986 Fridley tornado only added to the gonzo mystique.

“I think you can have sound science and be entertaining,” he insists. “I grew up watching a guy, Jim O’Brien, in Philadelphia. He had a flair for words. He was colorful, descriptive. He turned it into an event without cheapening it. It’s storytelling.”

Some would go so far as to say Douglas is a student of the medium. “Doug understands TV quite well,” adds his friend and former colleague, KARE’s Paul Magers. “He’s not making it up as he goes along.”

By the early 1990s, Douglas was flying high atop the local market but was frustrated at the lack of tools to translate what was going on in the atmosphere to viewers. Visual presentation of weather forecasts had remained static for decades. “I dreamt about finding a way to display the weather in a 3-D format, but I had no idea how to translate that to technology,” Douglas recalls. “Luckily, I’ve been blessed by friends who can take my dreams and visions to a business model.”

Beginning in 1989, each night after the 6 p.m. broadcast, Douglas would leave KARE and head to Burger King to pick up dinner, then drive to the home of then-business partner, Craig Burfeind, a software developer. Burfeind, using a Silicon Graphics computer, created EarthWatch in his bedroom.

Douglas first used the presentation technology, which “flew” viewers through the weather across large distances, on KARE in 1991. Soon after, the company, also called EarthWatch, began selling the software package to broadcasters all over the globe and making real money.

By 1994, Douglas had been in Minneapolis more than a decade and was an undeniable phenomenon, but his bosses at KARE were not so impressed. “I was getting the runaround from Gannett in contract negotiations,” he recalls. “They didn’t like that EarthWatch took some of my time and energy. They wanted to rebrand my weather page in the Star Tribune to promote KARE.”

Then Chicago came calling.

Former WCCO–TV general manager Bob McGann had left to run the troubled CBS-owned station there, WBBM, which, like WCCO, once led—through sound journalism and newsy investigations—the ratings but had fallen on hard times at the hands of lighter fare from competitors. McGann knew Douglas had stolen viewers from WCCO and suspected he would have similar appeal in another Midwestern market. Douglas jumped.

“CBS liked me, they liked that I had EarthWatch,” Douglas remembers. “I knew they had problems, but when I started at KARE, we were far worse off than ’BBM. I thought it’d be a big Minneapolis, both in what we could achieve at the station and in the way the community viewed weather.”

It was the beginning of a long down cycle for Douglas, which even today, nearly a decade later, he has not entirely turned around. His tenure at WBBM proved to be an unmitigated disaster. “How you enter a station is everything,” Douglas says. He was to supplant, eventually, Steve Baskerville, a popular African-American weatherman who was not a meteorologist. An ugly, unintended racial undertow undercut Douglas’s goals.

Douglas had much of the Chicago competition beat on skill and technology, but his act—dubbed by one critic as “the goof on the roof”—did not wear well. WBBM remained beset by anchor shuffles, management turmoil, and bottomed-out ratings. Douglas was finally given the 10 p.m. weathercast in 1996. Not long after, in a cruelly ironic twist, Hank Price, the general manager Douglas left at KARE, was hired to replace McGann at WBBM. He fired Douglas and bought out his contract a few months later.

It was 1997, and Paul Douglas was off TV for the first time in twenty years. From his home in the affluent Chicago suburb of Winnetka, he decided it might be the right time to get out of TV. EarthWatch had made him some money, he had other entrepreneurial ideas, and the business world, unlike TV, seemed like a venue where the best product always won out. “I’ve discovered that I’m a serial entrepreneur,” Douglas explains. “I love technology and gadgets.”

Douglas asked his family where they wanted to live. Boyhood memories and relatives were calling him from the East Coast, but his kids desperately wanted to return to the Twin Cities, and so the Kruhoeffer family did. “The wanderlust was bludgeoned out of me,” Douglas says. “We came back because this is where we wanted to be.”

Not long after, Douglas sold EarthWatch for in the “lower seven figures.” The business was mature, had spawned competitors, and he had a lot of time on his hands to dream. The dream, funded by the proceeds of the EarthWatch sale, was Digital Cyclone, a company that would create forecasts tailored for individual needs, delivered in a venue and format of the user’s choosing, such as web pages or e-mails.

“On TV, viewers were miffed that I was standing in front of Willmar,” Douglas explains. “I wanted to create a visual forecast that put them and their lives at the center of the universe. The key was to build an automated weather machine that would do that. All the pieces were out there.”

Or at least the computing power was. Douglas raised $5 million in seed money from BELO Corporation, a Texas-based broadcaster and publisher that does business in weather-sensitive regions of the country, and $3 million more from family and friends. “It took about $8 million to develop the technology,” he says.

DCI launched in 2000, initially pushing customized forecasts by e-mail and Internet, licensing the content to individual broadcasters and newspapers (“your Star Tribune My-Cast”). “It was not enough to make us profitable,” Douglas notes. “In some markets, we couldn’t sell it because it threatened the TV weatherpeople. The market for [Internet] banner ads collapsed as well. The last two years have been brutal. TV stations aren’t spending.”

DCI’s mission is to “push” weather information directly to subscriber cell phones and data devices, but the rollout of the technology was stalled in North America by the economic slump and overcapacity in the telecom industry. “It was a timing thing,” Douglas says.

That put Douglas in an uncomfortable position—the boss handing out pink slips. “We had to let some very good people go. It was like a very slow death. It’s painful to tell people you can’t employ them anymore because you don’t have the cash flow to pay them.

“Chicago taught me that no matter how good you are and how hard you try, eventually things beyond your control can undo you.” Now Douglas was seeing that bleak scenario take hold in a second arena.

During Douglas’s first year back in the Twin Cities, WCCO’s lead weathercaster, Rebecca Kolls, was seeking greener pastures and better hours in a syndicated gardening program. She told station management she would not renew her contract. WCCO called Douglas, whose noncompete agreement with KARE was long-expired. “It took six long months of discussions to put me in a comfort zone to do it,” Douglas recalls. “I had a horrible experience with CBS,” which now owned WCCO as well.

Douglas maintains he was reluctant to return to TV. “It’s a very difficult business. There’s so much management turnover, and it’s tough to have to constantly re-prove yourself to each of them. The last one only wanted me to wear white shirts. So I wore white shirts. The day you convince yourself you’re not replaceable is the day you get canned.”

Aware that DCI would be a capital-intensive long haul, Douglas accepted ’CCO’s entreaties, becoming its chief meteorologist in 1997. He surely had uses for the income.

Douglas’s love affair with the Twin Cities has once more grown to full strength. He says he rejected entreaties from the CBS Morning News in 2001, convinced this was where he needed to be. His “incredible” chemistry with Paul Magers is no more, and in the overhyped, highly marketed realm of local TV weather, a certain cynicism now reigns. But it’s tough to imagine local TV without Paul Douglas, just as it would be without Don Shelby—or will be without Magers. All have come to define the medium locally.

The Chicago experience has left Douglas keenly aware of how fertile a field the Twin Cities is for broadcast weather. “There is an appetite for weather here that there isn’t in other places,” says Douglas. He also contends the technology available to the broadcast weather community here is equaled only in two or three other markets. That level of investment has fostered a “competitiveness” among the local weather broadcasters that he didn’t sense in Chicago. “That said, I respect Ken [Barlow] and Dave [Dahl],” says Douglas.

The competition that has brought cutting-edge technology also demands cutting-edge interpretive skills for the wild arena of severe weather forecasting—those tense nights the Douglases of the world live for. “It’s the equivalent of election night for the anchors. And research shows viewers draw their conclusions about us on the quality of severe-weather forecasting.”

DCI remains a work in progress. “We’re very close to break-even,” he notes. “I’ve been loaning the company money again, but I see a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re growing by 10 to 20 percent a month.”

DCI’s data, radar images, and customized forecasts are now available from virtually all of the major U.S. wireless carriers. But competitors such as The Weather Channel and Accuweather have recognizable brands, and Douglas anticipates them forging exclusive deals with the wireless carriers. “So we have to have superior content and hedge our bets by going directly to the anglers and pilots,” Douglas explains, a bit incredulous that his high-tech company is now advertising in fishing magazines.

Twenty years after he came to Minnesota, Paul Douglas remains an unlikely celebrity, a bit too Everyman, a bit too awkward. Sitting in McCormick & Schmick’s one late August day, wearing a WCCO-logo shirt, Douglas meets a server’s request for a drink order with a “Have you got anything deep-fried or on a stick?”

The server stares, and then tries to answer seriously. It’s not clear that she gets the joke or even knows who’s telling it, but Douglas doesn’t stop trying, despite previous protestations that he’d prefer not to be noticed.

“He’s a resilient character, that’s for sure,” Paul Magers notes. “Doug’s one of those guys you can’t help but like. He’s even funnier in real life.”

And the jokes aren’t just about the state fair and Doppler radar?

“Naw,” Magers scoffs. “Doug’s not as innocent a fellow as he seems.”