10 Things Your Local News Won't Tell You

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By Nancy Nall Derringer
April 11, 2006
1. "We're live, local — and more lurid than ever."
The audience for local news has steadily declined in recent years. According to the 2005 "State of the News Media" report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, both early- and late-evening news lost more than 3% of their audience a year between 1997 and 2003, though the attrition slowed in 2004. As a result, local stations have gotten more aggressive in trying to hook viewers.

Terry Heaton, a former TV news director now working as a Nashville-based consultant to the industry, recalls being promo-teased one night with "40 DEAD ON I-65," only to discover the casualties were pigs, killed when a livestock truck overturned. "Nothing makes viewers more resentful," he says.

Scott Jones, a former TV reporter, producer and news director who now runs FTVLive.com, an industry Web site, says these promos are written by ad copywriters — so what might be a straightforward story about a vice bust gets sold with a lead like "Could your child's teacher be a prostitute at night?" But if the promo entices you to stay tuned after "Law & Order," as Heaton was, then it has successfully "managed audience flow."

2. "Crime wave? No, just sweeps month."
In most markets, broadcasters measure their audience four times a year — in February, May, July and November, during four-week ratings periods. Although nine of the top 10 markets get constant monitoring via Nielsen Media Research's "People Meters" — devices installed in sample homes — the rest depend on "sweeps" to track viewership. This data is used to set ad rates and to stake claims in marketing: "Most watched!" "No. 1!"

That means stations have a lot riding on sweeps periods, which is why they roll out the big guns: flashy projects, like investigative reports — and often stories that tread closest to the line of taste and propriety. "Going into hotel rooms to test for stuff on the sheets was a big one for a while," Heaton says. Cleveland anchor Sharon Reed even got naked for an art piece by photographer Spencer Tunick. The story was shot in June 2004 — but didn't run until November sweeps.

Ratings-garnering excesses are an uncomfortable fact of the industry, but one it has learned to live with, says Deborah Potter, executive director of NewsLab, an online resource for TV journalists. "This is our bread and butter," she says.

3. "And now a check of the forecast — with our weatherman, Chicken Little."
Everyone agrees that local news dominates weather coverage. "It's the franchise," says Boston Phoenix media critic Mark Jurkowitz, "the one thing they do better than anyone else." But it can also confuse viewers, bombarding them with various seals of approval and technological one-upmanship.

According to Dennis Feltgen of the National Weather Service, your local weatherman may or may not be trained in meteorology, and the station probably doesn't rely exclusively on its own forecasts. Many tap the NWS or a private provider such as AccuWeather or Weather Central for a baseline forecast, then augment it with their own, much-hyped Doppler radar system (which tracks precipitation and wind velocity).

Then when skies darken, they go for the kill. "The [weatherman] tries to scare the hell out of you if more than an inch of snow falls," Jurkowitz says. "I've seen schools canceled over what turned out to be less than two inches." The problem, Potter explains, is that station owners are heavily invested in their Doppler equipment and want their money's worth: "The investment justifies the coverage, and vice versa."

4. "Our consultants in Iowa are calling the shots."
Ever wonder why TV news is so similar from city to city? The reason, many in TV say, is a handful of powerful industry consultants who sell station owners on their tried-and-true techniques, right down to stories that get repeated across markets. Perhaps you've seen their work: In 2004, the heyday of the consultant trend, stations in Kansas City, Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee all did virtually identical stories on chat-room predators, in which men were lured to a rendezvous with a supposedly underage girl they met online who turned out to be a reporter.

Consultants argue they're not the homogenizing behemoth their critics claim them to be. Bill Hague, vice president for corporate development at Frank N. Magid Associates in Marion, Iowa, the largest news-consulting firm, says his company is an advocate for viewers: "Everything we do is based on local research. What works in Dallas may not work in Duluth." Hague admits the same ideas do tend to spread. "Right now it's MySpace [the online community popular with teens]," he says, but claims that isn't Magid's doing. "I don't know how they're all getting the same idea."

5. "Sources? We don't need no stinkin' sources."
Journalism is all about gathering, interpreting and presenting information, and journalists have evolved a set of principles to help consumers understand it. Sources in this magazine story are identified by name and affiliation; newspapers offer a credit line under photos. But TV news doesn't always play by the same rules.

Take VNRs. Video news releases are the TV version of PR, sent in from corporations or other sources but packaged to look like journalism. In a well-publicized 2004 case, many stations ran versions of a story on Medicare picked up from the CNN Newsource satellite feed. But it wasn't an independent report; it was a VNR paid for by the Bush administration and "reported" by a PR agent. The Office of National Drug Control Policy drew attention in 2005 for the same thing, which the General Accounting Office called "covert propaganda."

VNRs can be useful, says David Folkenflik, media reporter for NPR. They provide "B-roll," or secondary, footage, which "should always be labeled," he says. But even when VNR footage does get credited, Scott Jones says, it's often under the vague and overused catchall "file footage."
6. "This story goes out to all the ladies in the house."
You may have noticed lately a change in the sports segment of your local newscast. Perhaps it's shorter or seems to focus more and more on the human-interest angle rather than providing scores and highlights. Why? ESPN, for one thing. But it's also part of an attempt to cater to advertisers' most coveted viewers — women ages 25 to 54. Brad Schultz, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi, is studying the change. "Support for sports reporting is a mile wide and an inch deep," he says. "It's the least-watched segment, an invitation to tune out."

Less sports isn't the only way women are tweaking TV news. Scott Jones says the quest for female viewers is changing coverage across the board and is a big reason for the increase in health stories. Women not only tend to control a family's spending, they're the family doctor, too, and research shows they're interested in information about health and well-being. Those making the decisions "are convinced that's what the audience wants," Schultz says. And to please their advertisers, TV newscasts are going out of their way to give it to them.

7. "And now a word from our all-powerful sponsor."
Every news outlet that relies on ad dollars to survive must draw the line at how much influence it will allow advertisers to have on its content. TV news works the same way; its line is just a bit more flexible. "The unwritten rule: If you're doing a 'nice' story on an industry, pick an advertiser [to focus on]," Heaton says. It works the opposite way, too. Jones recalls a case where he was told not to do an item on a local doughnut shop — so popular that it was causing traffic jams — because the shop had refused to advertise with the station. Another story you won't hear, according to Heaton: "people getting ripped off by a local car dealer," since dealerships are big advertisers on local news.

"It's a daily headache in a lot of newsrooms," Potter says. "There's still a fair amount of padding between the sales department and the newsroom in most [local TV] markets, but when radio stations are selling naming rights to their newsrooms" — one in Wisconsin has rechristened itself the "Amcore Bank News Center" — "I think that's crossing a line."

8. "It's your fault we stink."
You might say you want your local TV news to be sober, responsible and comprehensive, but research shows that the highest ratings go to news that isn't. The Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual report bears this out: In 2004, 24% of local TV news content was crime-related. "The stories that lead newscasts turn out to be in a notably narrow range of topics," the report says, "mostly incident-based, public-safety news — what used to be called ?spot news,' made up of crime, accidents, fires and disasters." And it remains true today: If it bleeds, it leads.

"Good journalism is often [at odds] with TV news," Heaton says. He explains that TV journalism's finest moments are blockbusters — big, breaking stories such as Hurricane Katrina, when many people turn to their television for updates. "Now everyone wants to have blockbusters all the time, and the systems are in place to create artificial ones."

9. "Hard news is yesterday's news."
If the local news media have one job to do, it's to cover policymakers and those who spend the public's money — state legislators, city councils, school boards. And yet the accelerated pace of local news broadcasts makes these types of stories tough to cover with any sort of depth. "That's a newspaper story," is how hard news often gets characterized, according to Potter, meaning that it's "complicated, and it doesn't have good pictures."

The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that political and governmental news make up just 10 percent of stories. But crime coverage is a perennial newscast leader, followed by stories of "accidents, bizarre events, fires and catastrophes," making these more than one-third of all stories on local TV. Potter thinks the lack of in-depth government news coverage is partly a result of consultants' influence. "[Researchers] tell us people don't want stories about politics, but how are they asking the question? It's one thing to say, "Do you want more coverage of politics?' and another to ask, "Do you want to know what your public officials are up to?'"

Jurkowitz agrees. "Consultants have hammered home that no one wants to see politics on TV. That day-in and day-out coverage of state government or city hall has almost vanished from local TV here," he says. "Covering it as process is one thing; covering its relevance to people is another."

10. "That's infotainment, baby!"
TV news anchors have been comedy fodder for decades, from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show's" pompous Ted Baxter to Will Ferrell's smarmy Ron Burgundy in "Anchorman." "The truth is," Heaton says, "Hollywood has a pretty good handle on some of the characters you run into in this business." Indeed, your local newscast can often be unintentionally comical. Ever snicker at a reporter standing on an abandoned street corner excitedly describing events that took place hours before? What about the weatherman dressed for the Arctic who is braving the elements of the station's parking lot to poke a pocket ruler in a snowbank?

It's all part of the mandate of a visual medium: Show, don't tell. "We're good at sharing experience," Potter says, and visual aids help. Heaton explains that the live-on-location gimmick evolved as part of a consultant-driven "command anchor" strategy, designed to position the main anchor as the show's pilot. The live shot works as a "debriefing" on breaking news, with the anchor serving as the audience's surrogate, like a military commander getting news of troop movements.

"Ask yourself what you're getting," Folkenflik says. "Weather, a crime segment, a tie-in to the network's entertainment programming, a little news, some sports. Are you getting fair value for your time?"

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