Growing up in Texas, storms terrified Ali Van Fleet. She overcame the fear by learning more and more about them, and eventually became obsessed.
“I have always really loved weather,” Van Fleet said.
After she graduated from college, she moved to Oregon to become a morning meteorologist on local TV news, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“It was just very isolating and a lot of downtime, and I started creating content for TikTok, and really found an audience on there, and it really started leaning into the climate space,” she said.
TikTok is more personal than TV, Van Fleet said, and it allows for a multidirectional flow of information. And it allows her to make her audience feel safe in asking questions that others may think are ignorant.
“I never want to make someone feel like they’re being talked down to or make them feel stupid for not understanding it,” she said. “I’m still in academia. Especially in the science realm, you do get talked down to a lot, especially as a woman. I never want to make people feel like they can’t ask questions.”
Several of her videos did well, and suddenly Van Fleet got a call from the Weather Channel in Atlanta to create the same kind of social media content for them.
“I’m really stubborn. I like taking a really difficult, complex topic and breaking it down in a way that is fun and engaging” she said. “When I worked at the Weather Channel, my boss and I would go back and forth on whether a topic was going to be interesting for an audience, and I’m like, ‘No, just give me a chance. Just trust me. People like to learn things.’”
Van Fleet said her professional experience has led many people to look to her for credible information.
“Unfortunately, weather – and climate especially – is really politicized,” she said. “I think that people do realize that, even if they don’t want to call it climate change, people do realize that there are shifts in our weather patterns. So I hope to be a space where even those people can feel like they can contribute to the conversation or ask questions or learn something from my content.”
Now in graduate school, researching innovative ways to communicate climate and weather information, Van Fleet said the News Creator Corps fellowship has already added credibility to and increased eyes on her work. Her Instagram engagement has increased, in part because she never posted her TikTok videos as Reels before. It also has kept her posting consistently, while she has so many other things going on.
“I have so many different things going on right now, so who knows why I chose to do [the fellowship] now,” Van Fleet said. “But it just seemed like a really good opportunity to connect with other people who want to do the same things I do and get a little more guidance on how to create better content, how to work with the algorithm, how to actually market yourself. And my biggest thing is: How do I actually make money ethically doing this?”
Van Fleet said it’s important for creators like her to put out accurate information on their platforms where they know people consume it and it’s so easily shared.
“I’m starting to see an uptick in more conspiracy theories around weather and especially climate,” she said. “I think it’s easy to tell someone like, ‘Oh, you can go read this book.’ But are they going to? No. This is how people are getting their information. We need to meet people where they’re at and provide them with the most accurate information at the time.”