Brighter afternoon skies, another super soaker tomorrow

Talk about timely rains this season.

It seems like clockwork. Somebody hits the master weather switch every three or four days with another soaker. All summer long.

The weather fire hose clicks on again tomorrow as tropical moisture surges north once again. Radars start to light up again overnight. The vanguard waves of yet another super soaker with multi inch rainfall totals across Minnesota tomorrow.

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People sometimes ask me what's the one weather tool I would keep if I had to choose. That's easy. The advent of modern weather satellite has probably been the biggest advance in the last 50 years. To see actual storms from space thousands of miles away? Priceless.

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Check out the moisture surging north today from the desert southwest into Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska.

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College of Dupage

The maps show the trend. Low pressure sides northeast. Moisture collects and wrings out over Minnesota. Showers and thunderstorms could affect both rush hours Wednesday.

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NOAA

Rainfall totals look impressive with this one. Another inch or two for many Minnesota towns. The remnants of Grace soak the Carolina coast.

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NOAA

Here's the pinpoint model forecast for Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Wednesday. No need to turn the sprinklers on this summer -- or as we hit astronomical fall.

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NOAA via Iowa State University

The weather maps are smiling on Minnesota's September weekends. Another shot of weekday rain. Another mostly sunny and mild weekend. How about those Vikings?

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Weatherspark

The future of news: Who provides the content?

It used to the big three news giants were CBS, ABC and NBC. Now it's Google, Facebook and Apple. 'Intelligent' aggregation news feed algorithms choose your news based on your habits and interests. That a wonderful and scary thought.

Are you really getting the whole picture, or just your potentially limited view of the world? As fractured market share forces cuts in traditional print media outlets, who will provide the content that feeds these growing aggregation news feeds. Talk about eating your young. I'm more thankful for a robust, vibrant, and human staffed public radio newsroom everyday.

Here's a sobering view of the future of news from an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.

The big three are not alone in focusing on news delivery. Snapchat this year launched a feature called Discover, which contains news and infotainment blurbs provided by a dozen partners including ESPN and Vice News. Twitter and Instagram reportedly are crafting better ways to aggregate and organize news too.

The news-delivery frenzy in Silicon Valley poses profound questions for the incumbent players in the media.

Legacy publishers and broadcasters are being forced to decide whether to contribute their expensively produced content to the master apps — or risk being marginalized as consumers forsake their carefully tended digital brands for the convenient and compelling aggregation platforms fielded by the tech giants.

The argument in favor of sharing legacy content is that media companies can expand their audiences at the same time they share in the fresh revenue generated by the superior reach and marketing power of their technology partners. As discussed above, several major media shops have already signed on to such arrangements.

But industry sentiment has not been unanimous. William Lewis, chief executive of Dow Jones, recently asked if publishers should "run, headless chicken-like, toward offers from companies like Apple and Facebook to put our content in their walled gardens."

Tech behemoths could well squeeze the life out of many of the independent news-aggregation sites that have emerged over the years. Those indie efforts range from Flipboard, the most prominent and innovative of the ilk, to the Circa news app, which succumbed over the summer for want of audience, ideas and cash. The increasing competition from Silicon Valley probably contributed to Circa's demise.

Even legacy publishers may not be safe. The ongoing tech-tonic shifts emanating from Silicon Valley are likely to throw a wrench into the professed plans of traditional publishers and broadcasters to pivot to pixel-based delivery platforms such as smartphones, smart watches, smart cars and even smart refrigerators.

If techies take control of the front page with increasingly intuitive interfaces, how much audience and business will be left for the traditional providers of the news?

Not everyone is nostalgic for the bygone publishing era, but here's why this shift matters: One of three newsroom jobs has been eliminated at America's newspapers as the collective revenues of the publishing industry dived more than 40% in the last 10 years. Even at today's diminished staffing levels, newspapers put the most journalistic feet on the street in the typical community. If their readership and revenues continue contracting, newsrooms are bound to shrink too.

Algorithms may be great at finding and organizing stories, but what will Silicon Valley do if the news supply runs dry?