The Rain Man

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.”