Weather is the reason local TV news is still alive. In Pew's survey of 35,000 Americans, 70% called weather important to their daily life. Crime came second at 44%. Nothing else was close. Which makes the weather segment the strangest survivor on television. Your phone has the same forecast, free, updated every minute, built on the same National Weather Service data. The app was supposed to kill this job twenty years ago. Instead the meteorologist became the most protected person in the…