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The TV station business is becoming tougher by the day, but here’s something that could make things painful: The broadcasters’ biggest cash cow, their local newscasts, could lose lots of viewers as people discover that they can find the info they want more quickly and easily on mobile devices such as smartphones. That’s one of the many sobering findings from a study that examines how people discover what’s going on in their communities, out today from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Internet & American Life Project 
with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. ”For some things TV matters most, for others newspapers and their websites are primary sources, and the internet is used for still other topics,” says PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel. Newspapers satisfied the most needs with their coverage of issues including local government, taxation, and zoning matters — but still ended up as the fourth-most-popular sources of news behind TV, word-of-mouth, and radio.
But here’s the catch. Although 74% of adults watch TV newscasts at least once a week, viewers primarily tune in for just three things: weather, breaking news, and traffic. These “might easily be replaced by mobile platforms that are even more accessible than TV,” the report says. “For weather, this may already be happening — as roughly a third (32%) cite the internet as a primary source and 7% cite mobile devices.” The report adds that for “most of the local topics that require more deep reporting and analysis … consumers already turn to platforms other than television.” The phone survey of 2,251 adults was conducted in January and has a 2 percentage point margin of error.
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Have you seen the news monkeys/mannequins trying to make small talk about news they don’t seem to understand? It’s a misery to watch.
News people are traditionally hired on the sole basis of their physical appearance and speaking voice – not their education or intellect. These are the people who are empty-headed, lacking even the skills to be actors or models. Watch the 1989′s remake of Network, Broadcast News. It was a portense of the future of news – cotton-headed ninny muggins who look great on camera and don’t mind the hand of the puppet-master up their asses.
Thanks, but no thanks. When Tom Brokaw was fired for doing his job, the thinly veiled pretense that news wasn’t politicized fiction was thrown out the proverbial window.
Local newscasts are a joke. Bubble-headed (bobble-headeded) bleach-blondes. “Safe” is the new drinking game. Everyone is Barbie & Ken with sensational scare-tactics and no substance.
These troubles with TV news broadcasts largely fall into two categories – national and local. National news operations have deeper budgets and global news bureaus to afford them the luxuries of in-depth reporting and an international reach. The Big Three have only a single major daily broadcast, whereas their cable counterparts have 24-hours news operations.
Local stations have a more difficult future, however. In many markets, local news operations are not confined to the local Big Three (or Four) affiliates. There may be a half-dozen or more local news stations vying for viewers. They also are broadcasting a greater amount of time than the nationals – maybe 3 hours or more in the morning (including general “Today”-type local shows), 30 to 60 minutes at noon, 2 hours in the early evening (bracketing national telecasts), and 30 minutes at the end of prime-time. That’s over 6 hours daily, not including any late-night/early-morning updates. That’s a lot of time to fill with traffic, weather, sports scores, and local zoning issues. Local news operations do best when allowed to perform in-depth investigative reporting, but their budgets usually restrict these operations. Maybe a station will have the local investigative “team” which might consist of one journalist and one cameraman. They might also double on the “consumer watchdog” beat.
But most local stations are clashing their budgets and staff. Long-time experienced reports (i.e. those that are older, more experienced, and command higher salaries) are either laid off or are put on limited contracts. Local stations rely on pretty boy/girl anchors that do not know how to report the news. Hell, many cannot even pronounce the copy correctly. There is a female anchor in Dallas that is laughably bad when it comes to reading her copy (sort of a female Ted Baxter). She either butchers the copy or mispronounces simple things like the name of US space agency NASA, which she calls “Nassau”.
With crappy content like that, it is no wonder that many viewers are tuning away from local broadcasts. Combine this lack of quality with the fact that there just aren’t that many local news stories to go around for all the different local stations, and you have an impending nightmare for local reporting.
This is a problem largely brought on by frugal management that only looks at the bottom-line and does not value quality journalism. So every sweeps, get ready for local stories on the “Crackdown on Prostitution”. Sex and stupidity sell at the local level as well.
Doesn’t online news primarily come from the websites of local TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers? Most people can watch their local tv stations’ newscasts online.
Should we expect other sources to pop up for local breaking news?
It’s inexplicable to me why “the big 3″ and their affiliates continue to believe they all have to program local and national news at the same time. Hopefully, based on the data from this article, affiliates will realize that maybe there don’t need to be three local news shows on at the same time, and will actually program something else.
Not only the crappy content..but the constant interruptions of programming with crawls and tag team weather proclaiming that the sky is falling. I don’t get that noise on cable, satellite, internet and radio channels.
Local TV station managers should read this post, but they wouldn’t even know who this “Nikki Finke” person is, or where to find this website.
Seriously, though, as I see it, the big problem with local television news is the ownership. Many of the owners in smaller markets don’t understand *content* is what is selling their product. Why should any of us be surprised, given the hyperventilating blowhard airheads that pass for “reporters” and “anchors” on TV news these days, that the viewers are voting with their remotes or smartphones, and going elsewhere?
One story out of West Virginia might entertain you. A group owner got the bright idea to buy a bunch of “little red Wal-Mart cameras” (as it was described by the wags), and passed them out to high schools, expecting the high school kids to fill his newscasts with content for free. He then nuked most of his experienced people that cost money to have around. He didn’t buy any professional cameras for the remaining staffers either, but insisted that “little red Wal-Mart cameras” were a perfectly acceptable standard for newscasts. Never mind what the video and audio looked like at home on a 40″ plasma display after a bunch of compression by the local cable guy!
The result? Ratings tanked when the content went to crap, most schools didn’t buy into the plan, and the video quality of the stuff that was put out was pretty dreadful. After a year or so, The “little red Wal-Mart cameras” are being used today by the few staffers left in his station group. There’s a closet of them at the stations, I’m told. Some new gear is finally supposed to be on the way, but will this group ever get back an audience?
I only wish I had the capital this character has burned through. Sigh.
Why is this post written as if this is something that COULD happen… it’s something that IS happening, in a massive way, now. Local newscasts have been BLEEDING viewers the past few years. Just using LA as an example, nearly every news organization has had a shakeup here in the past year. Expensive longtime popular anchors are being replaced at the drop of the hat. Fox stations, in particular, seem to be BEYOND desperate to shake things up (they were trying to make their newscasts look like TMZ for a few months… a plan they have since jettisoned)… perhaps because their newscast’s audience is younger, and have discovered sooner that news is on the internet now.
Another reason why broadcasters must get behind the DTV mobile ATSC m/h standard, which could make every mobile device a “free, OTA TV device.” If the public understood that braodcasters are making local station broadcasts available for free via mobile DTV, they would demand that cellphone makers equip models with DTV m/h chips. But the greedsters in the business apparently have convinced broadcast orgs to sit on their hands on this vital issue. RCA is selling a hand-held mobile DTV for about $140, and I can’t find it in any store, only online, and there’s little price competition. Why? Because the broadband/cable cabal appears to be calling the tune.
people who watch local tv for their weather are idiots. hop online and u can find your weather forecast in about 3 seconds.
and for sports scores and highlights? gimme a break.
When my mother and sister moved in with my wife and I while their house was on the market they often expressed consternation at my refusal to join them in watching the daily news. I explained that on the way home from work I have already (and selectively) caught up on the news that I, repeat , I determined what was important to me. Local news in this day and age still seems to cling to the adage “If it bleeds, it leads”
While they were in the family room one afternoon and I was in the kitchen, within earshot of the TV, I started calling out the category of each report. It sounded something like “Crime, another crime, teaser on upcoming “investigative” team reporters confronting someone in their office, another crime, a fire, a mention about a zoning proposal, another crime, a fire, helicopter view of a wreck on the major interstates (I’m already home… how does that affect me?)… oh, almost forgot, another crime report.”
After two days my mother asked me to shut up, my point was proved.
As far as morning news go, I look for my top story to be about something that is going to affect me in some significant fashion. Overnight fires, wrecks, murders, and constant scenes of flashing police lights and yellow crime scene tapes… in short, it’s nothing more than a police blotter broadcast.