IN A TOWN FREQUENTED BY tornadoes, the most important part of the evening news is often the weather forecast.

After changing television station NBC 24/51 to KNWA on Aug. 13 and focusing the NBC affiliate's coverage on northwest Arkansas, Blake Russell added a weather forecast on Aug. 27 specifically for viewers in the Arkansas River Valley.

Fort Smith has a history of violent tornadoes, with the worst on record hitting in 1898, 1927 and 1996.

So Russell, the general manager of KNWA, started providing Fort Smith with a one-minute weather forecast during each of the three evening newscasts and four 30-second weather reports during the morning news. Russell said the Fort Smith weathercast is just another change he had been planning with the shift to KNWA.

"I said all along we are not abandoning Fort Smith," said Russell, who came to the station in January as part of the new regime of Nexstar Broadcasting Inc., which is in the process of buying the station from JDG Television Inc. of Muskogee, Okla.

The Fort Smith weathercast is just another gambit in the area's television competition. As western Arkansas grows, the television market has vaulted from No. 119 in the nation in 1992 to 107th largest this year with 267,030 television-watching households. The area's television news advertising market has more than doubled since 1992 from $16 million to $34 million per year.

And there's been a demographic shift as well. Russell said 51 percent of television viewers in the 11-county dominant market area (DMA) are now in the northwest corner of Arkansas, which is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. For the past five decades, Fort Smith has held sway over the DMA, which includes nine counties in Arkansas and two in Oklahoma. But the River Valley city just isn't growing like the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metropolitan statistical area.

With a...