RIP Frank Batten: An Early New Media Adopter

Frank Batten, creator of The Weather Channel, died at age 82 yesterday.

What an incredibly vibrant and experiment-to-win company he created!

It’s perhaps a bit hard to imagine cable TV as new media now–but every media was new once! The idea of putting the weather (that thing that everybody talks about ) on TV and making it work was a bold move.

When  I worked at Wink Communications in the mid-1990s, The Weather Channel was one of the very first to experiment with our then-new interactive television technology. They were really early on the web too.  I’m not close to the company anymore, but I can bet they are already looking long past what is currently considered the newest media phase/trends — social, mobile, etc.

Batten’s book, The Weather Channel, The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon is a really good read about enterpreneurship, being human and media innovation. Check it out if you can.

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