Funviralpark Mark Woodley has been doing the same job for 20 years. He is a TV sports reporter from Waterloo, Iowa, covering local games and high school teams. His tweets rarely got more than 5 likes. His children were unimpressed by his report.
Mr. Woodley became internet famous after posting 91 second clip from Twitter Imagine yourself delivering the weather forecast in the early morning with a grumpy look. “Can I go back to my old job?” he asked on-air.
“I thought one day I would be known for something in my life,” said the 46-year-old.
Woodley, who works for KWWL, an NBC affiliate in Waterloo, learned on Tuesday that he would have to handle Thursday’s forecast due to a shortage of staff. He didn’t know it was the morning show until the day before.
He woke up at 2:45 am on Thursday and had about 3 hours of sleep. “I was incredibly tired,” said Woodley, who attributed part of his on-air sullenness to the fact that he hadn’t closed his eyes.
“I didn’t even know there was 3:30 a.m. until today,” he said on the broadcast.
Mr. Woodley shot the segments 30 feet outside the station’s studio, warming up in the foyer when not filming. “I was out for six minutes, I was in for ten minutes, I was out for six minutes,” he said. “It was three and a half hours of my life.”
He was also his own photographer. The wires were frozen by the end of his shift. It took 30 minutes to thaw inside. He then edited his video and posted it on his personal Facebook account. His friends and family convinced him to post it on Twitter.
This post quickly gained attention.
“Olaf from ‘Frozen’ is retweeting me,” he said Retweet from actor Josh GadIn charge of the voice of the snowman in the Disney animation.
Apatow, who produced “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” didn’t just retweet the video. He included the word “legend”. What was Mr. Woodley’s reaction? “It was so weird, so wonderful, and so surreal.”
He had to apologize to his sister for ignoring her phone calls on Friday morning.
Woodley thinks the storm that disrupted the trip and brought severe cold, wind and snow across America was no joke. rice field. Woodley said he was serious during most of the segment.
“Basically, what you saw was a bad comedy movie trailer. The trailer had all the funny stuff in it,” he said.
KWWL general manager John Huff said he considered asking Woodley to tone it down, but found his humor added something unique to the morning’s coverage. I received a complaint.
“One of the viewers scolded me for taking him outside and I wished I had at least given him a cup of coffee,” Huff said. “Well, not only did we do that, we also put in cinnamon rolls!”
The news station’s website has an article about the rant, noting that “Woodley was not harmed during the making of the morning news broadcast.”
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Woodley admits that Iowa isn’t known for its breezy climate. But he said the temperatures that morning—about 5 degrees Fahrenheit plus winds as cold as -40 degrees—were bad for even Iowa’s lifetime.
The storm coverage is boring, he said. “If you can add a little bit of personality, people might pay a little more attention,” he said.
Mr. Woodley has not yet been asked to be a weather forecaster. But he’s looking forward to his next assignment, a trip to Nashville, Tennessee, to cover Transperfect Music his City Iowa his Hawkeyes playing in the Bowl on New Year’s Eve.
“Someone told me it was going to be close to 65 degrees,” he said of the weather. “I’m really excited about it.”
Contact Joseph Pisani at [email protected]
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