Fresno State alum forcasts weather

By Umaymah Rashid
The Collegian

Fresno State’s Internet weather service is a gift from alumnus Chuck Prewitt.

“At the time that I studied, there was no Internet,” Prewitt said, who is Vice President of sales and marketing at The Weather Underground, Inc. said. “No one knew what ‘this’ was.”

Now that the Internet is alive and well, Prewitt works with The Weather Underground, a service that provides weather forecast, astronomy information, blogs and other valuable weather related information to numerous media outlets including FresnoStateNews.com.

“Within the Weather Underground, we have an initiative to go out and give free data to college newspapers,” Prewitt said. “We feel it’s very important to engage the youth and do what we can to support college newspapers. All the employees are encouraged to reach out to their particular school and provide them with free data.”

Prewitt worked in the television industry for more than 20 years before he began working with The Weather Underground, Inc and cited the huge changes that have taken place within the television industry as his motivation to work with the Internet.

“The [television] market is no longer mass,” Prewitt said. “It was fun working in television when you had a 40 rating so you could reach 40 percent of the people, now your lucky if you get a one rating, it lacks appeal when your selling advertising.”

The appeal of the internet according to Prewitt lies with the fact that The Weather Underground, Inc. provides weather information and advertisements service to so many people and companies including many colleges and universities, Google, Knight Ridder, Hearst, American Express, and Tribune.

“We started a new industry, with a new business,” Prewitt said. “I’m providing not only data but advertising as well.”

Prewitt said he loves the fact that The Weather Underground, Inc. is able to provide so much information to so many different people.

“We basically cover the entire world in 75 languages,” he said. “We publish as many as 20 million pages per day on our own Web site and another 10 million on other Web sites.”

Prewitt is a fan of journalism and has a son who writes for the newspaper at Brown University.

He believes journalism is good, but he has a passion for advertising and appreciates the technology of the Internet.

The former Fresno State student says that his company does the job with 28 employees, while his closest competitor has 400.

“We utilize technology and let other people utilize manual labor.”

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