Changes and Challenges for Local TV Stations

A study released on July 20, 2007 by the Media Management Center [1] at Northwestern University (Ill.) asks: How can television stations produce quality local news that attracts and engages audiences in an ever-shifting landscape of audience fragmentation and exploding Internet usage?

The study purports to offer TV stations "insights that will help them better engage their audiences, stimulate strategic thinking about their position and role in the market, and better connect with viewers in ways that could lead to improved civic involvement."

Hank Price, a Sr. Fellow at the Media Management Center and the President and General Manager at WXII-TV in Greensboro/Winston-Salem (NC), wrote an insightful piece on the implications of the study for the way local TV news stations think about content and production.

Price writes:

About 15 years ago an interesting thing began to happen to television news in the United States. Ratings of individual newscasts started to drop.

At first we thought the problem was an anomaly – just as 1991 – the first down year ever in station billing – also appeared to be an anomaly. But then, as the years passed things didn’t get better. Ever so slowly, but ever so steadily, news ratings continued to decline.

Like many of you, I at first subscribed to the theory that the fault lay with all the new station players. It seems odd now to think that during the 1980’s there were only 734 television stations in the United States. 734 including the PBS stations. During the 1990’s that number more than doubled to today’s 1,747.

Who were these new players? Fox, WB/CW, UPN/MY TV. Even a few pure independents. Many of these stations began to produce local news.

At the same time, the traditional players all expanded their newscasts. I was in more than one meeting during my consulting days discussing whether or not a station should add a 5:00 pm newscast. Would a 5:00 pm newscast take viewers from the 6:00? Yes.

And of course the 6:30 Am Half-Hour newscast stations we had done since the beginning of time began to morph into today’s never ending Morning News.

Given all this additional product, individual ratings had to drop. And we accepted that. But we also retained our unshakable belief that total television news audience was continuing to grow – or at the very least – stay the same size.

That belief was shattered in 2001 when the Tribune Company filed a document with the FCC showing conclusively that total news viewing was actually in decline – a fairly steep decline.

What Tribune did was look at a 25 year track of total late news audience – combining 9:00, 10:00 and 11:00 pm total ratings in each of their markets. Even with the addition of new players – including Spanish language newscasts which were presumably bringing in new viewers – total viewing of evening newscasts was eroding.

New York, to cite just one example, had a 19% decline in total late news viewership between 1975 and 2000.

Removing Spanish from the mix, English language newscasts declined 28%.
And that was seven years ago.

But wait, you may say, methodology has changed. Diaries to Meters to People Meters. Each new methodology has shown a smaller, more fractionalized audience. So we must ask, how much is methodology and how much is real?

To find out, last year I looked at 25 year demographic ratings trends in selected markets that continue to use diaries for demos. Meters change the equation, but most markets still use paper diaries to measure demographics, giving us an apples-to-apples comparison.

The results were even more dramatic than the Tribune study back in 2001.

In some markets 6:00 pm news viewing alone had dropped by more than 50%.

The question of course is WHY?...

Click here [2] to read Price's analysis in its entirety on the Media Management Center website.

Click here [3] for the landing page for "The Local TV News Experience" report, which includes links to the full report and commentaries from other professionals associated with the report and information about the report's funding.

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