Longtime meteorologist Anthony Slaughter was unceremoniously fired yesterday by KSDK (Channel 5), the station where he’s worked off and on since 2009.
“I’m pretty much as dumbfounded as you are,” Slaughter tells SLM. “I just got called into an office one day, and they just said we’re parting ways…It was a three-minute conversation.”
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Slaughter was a meteorologist in San Francisco between his stints as a weatherman in St. Louis. More recently, he had been at KSDK since 2017.
Multiple sources say that Slaughter clashed with KSDK director of content Morgan Schaab over the station’s morning program, Today in St. Louis. Schaab came to KSDK last February.
Slaughter didn’t mention Schaab by name, but indicated that station leaders were pushing the pace.
“There’s only a certain amount of hours in the day, and there’s only a certain amount of things you can do in a shift, and we were doing so many things on our morning shift, you know, doubling up, recording things, just so we could do something else—I mean, it was getting to be a little absurd,” he says.
He says he loves weather and meteorology, but his job was getting bogged down in semantics. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they’ve got a new brand called ‘Weather Impact,’ and they want you to say it a thousand times every weather hit,” he says.
At a recent annual review, Slaughter says he was told he needed to adopt a different attitude about the changes. “I had an attitude, because they’re taking us down the wrong direction,” he says.
Neither Schaab nor news director Art Holliday responded to emails seeking comment this afternoon.
Multiple people familiar with the industry, including Slaughter, say that KSDK has long struggled in morning ratings, generally losing out to Fox 2 (KTVI), which dominates in the morning, and KMOV.
“So the idea of being a number three meteorologist was always thrown around in my face, you know? And it was like, ‘No, no. This is a station problem. Yeah, this is not a me problem,’” says Slaughter.
One new requirement he found particularly counter-productive was being asked to make longer weather videos. “It’s like, bro, nobody’s watching the weather for 5–10 minutes,” he says. “The company wants content. It’s all content driven. Everything’s content. How much content can you produce and put out for us?”
Slaughter says that the content he was expected to produce “at least doubled” in recent years, for both linear broadcast and streaming on the app. He says that for a while, station leaders wanted the app to be distinct from the TV broadcast, meaning that content created for one couldn’t be repurposed for the other.
“Can we just get back to the normality of just telling the weather?” he said. “Instead of having to say all this Weather Impact? You know, jump through these hoops and try to push people over to the streaming and be sure to check us out on [5 on Your Side+, the station’s streaming app]. We’ll be doing this extra weather, and we’re not doing anything different. We’re just talking longer.”
In a 20-minute conversation with SLM, Slaughter wasn’t shy about sharing his gripes about KSDK, though he never came off as particularly bitter.
“No pain here,” he said early in the convo when the reporter said he felt his pain.
The job had become such a bear, he says, he’s happy to let it go. He wants to get into entrepreneurship. He’s long harbored an ambition to get into the restaurant game.
He also looks forward to being a little more free.
“I can go and do what I want. I can be free, you know, I don’t have to answer to anybody anymore. I’m done,” he says. “I put 100 percent forward. When I left out of that building every single day, I knew that I did my best.“
Slaughter is now 40, but as a single 29-year-old, he famously adopted two of a cousin’s children, fourteen-month-old twins who’d been placed in foster care. He later wrote that seeing the toddlers for the first time was “like looking at myself as a baby.” He described moving back to St. Louis from California in order to have the support to raise them—and later told SLM he found plenty, with not only his dad and stepmom but four brothers and a sister, lots of cousins, and 17 nieces and nephews. He’s been active with adoption-related organizations in St. Louis.
Slaughter’s family also includes a famous uncle: Fellow St. Louis native Sterling K. Brown.
