The first TV station in my local market (Rochester) will switch to high-def for its newscast almost three years after the first network newscast did so. According to the station manager, the switchover will cost “millions”.
Because death of journalism stories are generally being written by print reporters and pundits, who don’t talk much about local TV stations, it’s easy to miss that local TV is hurting, too:
Economics:
- In 2009, total industry revenues were expected to decrease 22% to $16.1 billion, from $20.6 billion the previous year.
- Revenues for 2010 were expected to increase between 3% and 5%.
- Political advertising neared $1 billion in 2009, doubling the total of 2007, the previous non-election year.
- Reports suggest that 450 jobs were lost at local TV stations in 2009, and that was on top of 1,200 jobs lost in 2008.
- Despite staff reductions, the average amount of news increased to 4.6 hours each day, from 4.1 hours the previous year.
The usual print attitude towards local TV is negative, but some of our local TV reporters are the best journalists in town. Most of them are comfortable creating a story without much editorial control, so they made the transition to blogging with a lot less effort than the average print reporter. Local TV news has a lot of problems, including too many soppy features and an addiction to meaningless live shots, but they’re better than the almost-nothing being produced by our local newspaper.
Of course, like most people younger than the Efferdent generation, I don’t actually watch local TV news, I just subscribe to some RSS feeds from their website. These websites are mediocre at best and in dire need of an overhaul, but I don’t see that happening when the stations are making a multi-million dollar investment in high-def. Unlike newspapers, who can run their old presses and concentrate on pimping up the website, local TV news is having to invest in a core technology that is mainly valued by the older members of its audience. Having to make a big capital investment in the face of huge revenue declines is just going to accelerate some already ugly trends.
cliff enz
Look- while I prefer ‘efferdent’ to ‘cialis’, ‘depends’, or ‘erection lasting more than four hours’ generation- it’s still not complimentary. And yes- the set design is expensive- the equipment more so- a studio setup costing more than 2-3 million for HD is pretty standard. But let’s face it- the affiliate has ALL that free bandwidth to broadcast on. Think about that next time you skip the local Fox affiliate.
Weedhopper
Local TV is pretty much a thing of the past. I just visited a station I worked at as an engineer in the 70s. They just shut down master control since all programming (except local news) originates in another state. TV group owners are moving to consolidate program origination to automated centers that stream programs to some or all of their stations bypassing local facilities.
Local TV will no longer provide much in the way of employment or community involvement. Makes one wonder why we allocate so much of the radio spectrum for their use.
Rommie
Yeah, it costs a lot, but they have to do it, especially in an area like mine with 4 quality TV news channels in a tight area (a 1/3 of their signal area gives Lake Michigan crystal-clear Hi-Def)
Otherwise they end up looking like a SCOLA channel compared to their Hi-Def competition. The digital signal changeover ended up happening at a very bad time, just before the economy went south. Either Congress shouldn’t have kept delaying the rollout date, or shouldn’t have set a mandate at all, keeping the Free Hand of the market tied down. Stoopid Congress!
Joey Maloney
I don’t know if that’s fainting with praise damns, or what. Some of our local TV reporters may well be decent journalists but if so they’re required to conceal it to do their jobs, which is to look windblown and serious posed in front of the scene of today’s gruesome crime or bloody highway smashup or totally unpredictable except it happens every year severe weather.
I have never seen a local politics story unless it involved salacious allegations, fisticuffs, or other out-of-control behavior by someone drawing a public salary.
The coverage of issues about which people need to be informed in order to be good citizens of the local polity is nil.
Management fires anyone who’s been around long enough to be making reasonable money, which is how long it takes to develop sources and figure out where the bodies are buried in the local power structure. Ane anyone with any tv skills (as opposed to journalism skills) is constantly polishing their resume to move up to a bigger market.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I don’t know who you think the Efferdent Generation is, but I am about to turn 64, and I don’t watch local tv news more than a couple times a month, because it is just crap. Trash fires and a broken water main get more time than any relevant local issues, and national stories get less than even drive-by treatment. “Journalism” happens only once in a while, and when it does, the thing is ballyhooed as if actual reporting had just been invented by the local station.
The local station is outperformed on sports by cable, outperformed in weather by syndicated feeds and the Weather Channel, outperformed in business news by … everybody in cable, outperformed in every aspect of the game by cable and by mainstream internet sites and feeds.
Local tv news deserves to die, and only exists today as a vehicle for local commercials aimed at a very low end audience.
Maxwel
When local affiliates go who will ruin expensive national broadcasts with weather crawls about thunderstorms in North Ga (actually South Carolina)?
cmorenc
Oh goodie, more local car crashes and broccoli festivals in hi-def on local news.
Powdermonkey
The truth is that the upgrade to HD will cost millions to each of the local stations, but a similar upgrade of equipment would have cost 10 times more just a few years ago.
The cost of TV equipment, even Professional versions, has gone down so much in the last 10 years it’s amazing. The equivalent of the $60,000 camera I used in my first job in the industry can be bought for less than $20,000 and if the station is really cheap, they can buy a “pro-sumer” camera for under $5,000, that still does more than my old $60,000 dinosaur.
You just cannot find SD equipment any more either. If you buy new equipment to replace something that has broken, it will be digital and HD. The most expensive single piece of equipment in a HD upgrade is the digital transmitter, but what the station doesn’t tell you is over a few years (in most cases) they will save money on that purchase.
An analog transmitter requires a huge amount of power to punch through the signal. A digital signal requires much less power and therefore much lower power bills with a great return on investment.
Most stations (even in the top markets) are not really going all HD live shots and most newsgathering is still done in SD and up-rezed. so their “All HD newscasts” are only the studio portions.
The TV/Video market is going through the same shake out as the printing/publishing industry did in the 80’s-90’s. In the 20 years I have been in the industry, we have gone from a room full of millions of dollars worth of equipment and at least 3 people to edit a network quality program, to being able to edit a higher quality product on a laptop (or equilivent) bought with all software for under $5000.
Just last week I sat in a bar in LAX and edited a program while drinking a beer! And the graphics and special effects were better than anything I could have done 20 years ago.
The change is coming, get ready.
Strannix
What Weedhopper said, x 10. I’ve worked in local TV for nearly 20 years, and the quality of our local journalism has decreased in direct proportion to the increased number of hours now dedicated to news. I swear, I feel less informed after one of our newscasts than I did before it started.
Local television is dying. Though my local situation is not quite as dire as Weedhopper described, consolidation has reared its ugly head here as well. The NBC affiliate directly controls the ABC affiliate (and outright owns the CW affiliate), though their news operations are still somewhat separate. The CBS & Fox stations are now literally under one roof, operated in fact by one company (though on paper by two). Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe it.
Brachiator
@Weedhopper:
This sounds a lot like what happened with FM radio some years ago, when local DJs were fired and replaced with homogenized network programming.
@Joey Maloney:
I have to agree with you here. Los Angeles is a “major news market,” but in all the time I’ve lived here I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of important stories that were first or intensively reported by local TV news.
vtr
About 10 years ago, I moved to Fairfield County, CT from northern Vermont. On Burlington’s Channel 3, anchor Marselis Parson quietly produced a real newscast containing real news five nights a week. When I moved here, one of the first NY local tv 10 o’clock casts I saw led – led – with a report about a building super who had fallen down an elevator shaft. In New York City, The Most Important City In The World, the biggest media market in North America, they actually had some guy doing a standup in front of the building to help me comprehend the magnitude of the happening. Two more reports about bar brawls, two teases, five car spots later, they got to their momentous unveiling of “the lethal chemical to be found in your OWN HOME!” It’s Clorox. Don’t let your kids drink Clorox. A half-hour of “news” without a single story that hadn’t been shot, knifed, run over, or raped. Or, I guess, poisoned. It’s probably gotten worse since.
Suggestion: Report the goddam news. Then I’ll watch.
by the way, so long, John Henning.
Steaming Pile
It’s worth noting that although color TV gained wide acceptance in about 1967, the news was still black and white into the early 1970s.
Albatrossity
I can’t speak for the rest of the country (you all are doing a fine job of that yourselves), but I agree that local TV news is feeble here in the middle of the country.
For various reasons I’ve been interviewed by local TV “reporters”, and invariably they really really really only want footage that is sensationalist. One time avian flu was the topic, and the reporter tried multiple times to get me to agree with her “We’re all gonna die!!!” outlook on that. I didn’t do it, and my 30 minute interview ended up as 2 seconds of TV time, followed by a good 20 seconds of someone who agreed that yes, avian flu was probably the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.
Part of the problem is the format; it’s tough to say anything nuanced in a 30 second clip. But a lot of it is the belief that sensationalism is the only approach that will get you viewers. It may be true, alas.
gbear
Nothing to add except that Nick Hornby’s book ‘High Fidelity’ is a great read, especially if you were a record store rat in the 80s.
Local TV and radio has been dying since ownership restrictions were done away with decades ago. Ain’t nothin’ new.
fucen tarmal
weather and traffic on the 8s, what killed local news for me was when the morning show went to the gimmick of baby’s first birthday pictures…there is a time and place for that, but not on the already pared down and repetitive morning local news.
that and the 6-8 minutes at the top of crimes without context, who is bleeding where, with no more insight than the police are looking for suspects….then you have the messy home report, that always comes after a good bit of hype, i mean you have to prepare your audience to reach that sort of rubbernecking and judgemental scorn. occasionally they may even discuss something of relevance to a broader audience, or in lieu of that, local sports, features, what local sports fans think of this or that…get in a story about some outrage at a local high school, a whole lot of faux weather puffery and jargon, trying hard not to focus on what actually happened weather wise vs what was predicted….and when a storm of some sort, or a cold snap, or heat wave hits, it becomes the super big story, because it affects their ability to tell you who is bleeding, the local sports opinion, and the highschool gossip….
eff local tv news…
debbie
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
I’d be happy to get even that. In my town, one of my local stations may be HD, but they don’t even bother with news anymore. Their motto may be “because accuracy matters,” but it seems their idea of accuracy is fewer words, period. In fact, they’ll spend more time telling you when a certain story will be aired (and provide graphics of the scheduling) than they do on the actual story. And when they do get to the story, most of the time alloted is spent on telling you there’s a link to any real information about the story on their Web site.
And if that’s not bad enough, they’ve canned just about all of their reporters and replaced them with what they call “photojournalists.” I think this means they’ve consigned the cameramen to also be reporters. Unfortunately, what they’ve gained in “downhome-ness” they’re losing in journalism.
Another station is careful to use wind machines in their ads for all their female anchors. With the HD, you can see every waft of every hair! Unbelievable!
Xecky Gilchrist
Last I saw local news here in Salt Lake City they were breathlessly reporting about American Idol. Before that, it was a story about the then-current housing meltdown stuff, blaming it all on black people who got mortgages they couldn’t afford.
I’d rather read mocking of all that stuff than shows that claim it’s news.
vtr
I blame the whole thing on Watergate. People’s fascination with the sins of Nixon compelled them to watch all the coverage – mostly excellent, by the way – taught tv news directors and station management that news could be so much more that fulfilling an FCC-mandated public service. It could be a profit center, too. Than the 1996 Communications act abolished the necessity of fulfilling any public service obligation. Most radio stations did away with any news coverage at all. TV is just lousy>.
KEN
@Powdermonkey:
To amplify, the alleged millions spent was largely on transmitters a few years ago even though 85% of the audience get their video from cable or satellite. Score another victory for a hapless FCC. New computer-centric technology and small format HD cameras for $3500 make possible enormous increases in coverage and better story-telling. However, the companies owning broadcast media today could care less about the content or the marketplace in which they exist. American TV news has — by management directive– made itself useless to the communities it serves. Abroad it’s better. In Africa and Asia television is growing and making a difference, for the better, when it comes to civil society issues. One of the major problems in American TV today is that all the bright lights are working on new media and couldn’t give a toss for broadcast television.
Taylor
My wife worked at Seton Hall University when they had the fire at the dorm. She witnessed first hand “reporters” chortling into their cell phones that they had caught witnesses crying on camera.
Let’s get something straight: Local news has existed for one thing and one thing only: car dealership commercials. They get what they pay for.