The Noose Around Local News

We heard the funeral bells chiming for the print publishing business, tolling mournfully in the distant cloudy skyline for the loss of newspapers. But if you look at your local television newscasts, you might have noticed a litany of trends, all pointing to the downsizing of what was once the pot of gold in local broadcasting. It’s all about saving bucks, because the local advertisers – particularly retail stores and auto dealers – are pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to funding their marketing efforts. The money ain’t what it used to be.

For decades, local news was the profit driver for most local television stations. The importance of the “other” programming was often that it was a lead-in for big-dollar-generating local news. When network programming failed, the audiences that followed their “end-of-prime-time” dramatic program into the local news dwindled and the local stations complained to the networks. Low ratings = low lead-ins to local news. We can still see the vestiges of that attitude as NBC affiliates are beginning to rebel at the low ratings for the new “primetime” Leno talk show. While NBC (the network) might be making more money by saving on production costs – even with lower ad revenues – local stations, already feeling the contraction of local advertising revenues, are screaming that they are losing viewers for their local news programming.

First to go have been those “friendly faces” we have seen locally for decades – the identity of many local newscasts to the local audience – the highly-paid anchors. These individuals have typically been the largest draw-down against local news ad revenues and have been the easiest part of the budget to cut. Where union rules permit, the news-gathering field reporters have also increasingly been given cameras to carry, and even when they have a crew, gone is the 4-person traveling assemblage of workers: producer, sound person, camera person and talent; it’s down to two people on average, and the “one-person-band” is increasingly common.

Today, sportscasters and weather people often have their tasks relegated to those new “anchors,” who increasingly do it all at many local stations. Some station groups, like Sinclair Broadcasting, have taken to centralizing their weather reports and use one weatherperson, telecasting from a Baltimore studio, to do the local weathercasts for all of their stations scattered about the United States . Thus, this weather specialist will record the weather insert separately for each station in the Sinclair web; to a local, they have no way of knowing that their “local” weathercaster is really sitting in a studio thousands of miles away.

Part-time workers and “outside stringers” (folks who freelance and sell footage or services on an out-sourced basis) are finding their way into the mainstream, people without permanency or any fringe benefits. Anchors may be asked to run their own teleprompters (using floor pedals), and in-studio technical personnel may find themselves operating several cameras at the same time, using automation equipment with simply “point and shoot” joysticks. Bye-bye in-person camera operators. Pooling several local stations into a single crew to cover the same event (as opposed to sending separate crews) and even sharing of basic functions – news-gathering facilities, even helicopters and aircraft – among previously competitive stations has become an accepted practice.

In the end, changing technologies, an impaired economy and an over-saturation of communications choices and bandwidth – both on the air and online – have narrowed the economic possibilities of what we once knew and may have taken for granted. We see this everywhere; I’m even writing a book about it. Looking for the “little evidence trails of change” around us can explain these changing times so much better than reading the statistics.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I thought you might be curious.