Abstract
Innovation in local television news is hard to quantify but urgently required according to Andrew Heyward, one of the country’s leading experts on the topic. The former president of CBS News now directs a major research initiative at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The research project, funded by the Knight Foundation, is focused on identifying best practices in local TV news and on collaborating with stations to develop new strategies to ensure sustainability.
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Heyward: I agree with your sense that the pace of innovation and the recognition of the need for innovation have both intensified. Television news has not been spared from the economic forces that wreaked havoc in the newspaper industry, but things have been much easier for TV. It’s pretty striking that most major cities only have one newspaper now, if that. And those same cities have three or even four television newsrooms, in some cases even five. Television has been given a longer runway because of the huge influx of political advertising every couple of years and because of retransmission payments—payments from cable and satellite companies allowing them to carry the local station’s signals.
To your point, though, what I think has happened in the last few years is that the more enlightened managers see that a new generation simply isn’t going to gravitate to the linear broadcasts that have paid the bills, and if there isn’t a successful transition to digital content, digital platforms, digital programming that generates revenue, there’s going to be an inexorable decline. So, I would say that the recognition of generational change, changing consumer habits is really what’s creating this renewed sense of urgency.
Heyward: First of all, station margins are already lower than they used to be. When I started in the business, they used to be what I would call obscene. Now, they’re merely strong. Stations have been diligent about cutting costs, they’ve expanded programming, often without adding a lot of resources, which is a way to stave off economic reality by generating more revenue at pretty much the same cost. And yet, as I say, if the core audience is getting older and not being replaced by new consumers, then there’s a fundamental, existential problem that no amount of cost cutting is going to address.
Heyward: The three myths are omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. Omniscience is the idea that we know everything, omnipresence is the myth that we are everywhere, and omnipotence is this idea that we can do it all.
If you look at the way television news is written and produced, it’s really designed to reinforce those ideas, and yet, they’re not really accurate. No news organization can make those claims. Are local TV journalists omniscient? Of course not. And yet, if you look at the way anchor copy is written, it suggests that anchors even know the stories before the reporters report them. The anchor lead-in often gives away the story, and that seems phony, but we’ve accepted that as the as part of the formula.
Then there’s this notion of omnipresence. We’re not everywhere—we’re where the police scanner or the assignment desk told us to go today.
And finally, omnipotence—this notion that everything is branded as the station’s work. Various stations have been loath historically to give credit to others, to say where the ideas really came from. I’m certainly not a harsh critic of TV news—I’m devoting my life to local TV news now—but I think these myths are really looking very tattered around the edges, and the next generation sees right through them. One of the buzzwords of today is authenticity. It’s not authentic to pretend that you are all knowing, and that you are everywhere, and you can do everything by yourself.
Heyward: I think the most significant technological changes are not really current. It’s just the invention of lighter, highly portable equipment and the ability to go live from everywhere. Arguably live technology gets the blame for distorting television news, by promoting recency over relevance, and immediacy over impact.
The most dramatic technological development right now is a result of the pandemic. There was an extraordinary burst of impressive innovation at every television station in America, which suddenly had to continue to serve its audience, in fact, arguably doubled down on service to the community, while not able to fluidly move around the community and go and see people and do business as usual. So, the very rapid transition to remote broadcasting and reporting, I think, is going to have some positive lasting impact even as we’re able to get back into our newsrooms. One simple example: the audience is now completely accustomed to seeing interviews done on Zoom. That innovation makes it much easier, much more efficient to reach experts or citizens that you might not have been able to reach before, including people outside your region if they’ve got something valuable to add. I think you’re going to see other examples of increased emphasis on content rather than the glitz of production because it became obvious that the content was much more important than the package. We’ll see what survives, but I believe that we’re not going to go back to exactly what we had before the pandemic, and if we do, shame on us.
Heyward: I’m afraid Hank is right; I’m actually old enough to have started in television news in the 70s. Certainly, the production now is much more sophisticated, and our tools are dramatically better for news gathering and news production. That said, I agree that local television news is overly homogenized over space and time, meaning it’s too much like what it was decades ago, and it’s too similar around the country. If you were traveling and got plunked down in a random market, you might actually have to wait for the weather report to know where you were. It’s really an extraordinary phenomenon, and I’m not quite sure why it happened. I think we can speculate that waves of consultant-driven advice decades ago had a profound effect, and consolidation of station ownership would be a second thing I would cite, and the third is this army of what I call news nomads—journalists moving from market to market and bringing the same ideas to different places. But it’s still extraordinary.
Adam Smith, the founder of economics, must be spinning in his grave, because the whole notion of successfully competing is to differentiate yourself. And yet the differentiation among television stations too often is too superficial. It’s either relying on signature talent, which only sometimes works, or slogans and marketing rather than fundamental differences in how the station serves the community. I think that’s going to change, but I agree with Hank that it’s a problem.
To answer the second part of your question, you’re starting to see some stations tinkering with the familiar formula. It’s difficult to assess financial viability because stations don’t like to share that information, but take the stations KUSA in Denver and KGW in Portland, both of which have innovative, single anchor 6 o’clock newscasts. Denver came first and then KGW about a year ago. And it’s not just that they have a solo anchor, but that solo anchor has a very distinctive personality and voice, and audience input is very skillfully incorporated into the content of the program. It’s a much more down to earth, accessible presentation. To go back to our earlier point about the three myths, I think these are myth-busting productions, and I assume they’re financially viable because they’re still around.
One more, which I do know a little bit more about in terms of its financial success is Univision 41 in New York. The station revamped its late news to focus on in-depth coverage and not police scanner-type coverage. In the last July sweeps, it won the most coveted advertising demo of 18 to 49 among all the stations in New York City, regardless of language, meaning not just against the Telemundo station, against all stations.
I recently wrote about KVIA in El Paso, which went to a very unusual three anchor format. The goal was not only to emphasize one of the strongest reporters in the market, but also to have all three anchors contribute in-depth reporting on a nightly basis. They showed me their ratings, and they’ve seen double digit increases since they started the new format. So again, these are just a very few among hundreds and hundreds of stations doing news, and there is still way more similarity than there is difference. What we’re seeing though is some glimmers of experimentation that I hope become more than that.
Heyward: I think we may be asking way too much of Tampa, in your example, to come up with its own innovations. Take KGW in Portland. Those producers went to Denver, where “Next with Kyle Clark” was a model for the kind of innovative program I’m talking about. By their own admission the KGW producers were heavily influenced by what they saw in Denver. They thought they had in their own Dan Haggerty the kind of anchor who could carry this type of program, but KGW’s show has its own personality quite different from Clark’s program in Denver. I don’t think there’s been slavish copying or imitation and, in fact, I’d love to see more imitation. The comedian Fred Allen once said imitation is the sincerest form of television. Let’s hope that applies to imitation of innovation.
True innovation doesn’t have to originate with you, but it has to be authentic to you, and it has to be something that realistically reflects your vision for how you serve your community and your station’s abilities. Stations should ask themselves: What’s the opportunity? Do we have the wherewithal to do that? And are we actually serving the public? If the answer is yes, I wouldn’t criticize stations for borrowing ideas; I wish they would try to borrow more. Let’s worry about that when we see a wave of innovation sweeping across the country. Then we can meet again and say, “Wow, we need some new ideas because everybody’s doing the same innovative things.” We’re not there yet.
One of the things that I’d be thinking about if I were running a station right now is collaboration. InvestigateTV, which is an over-the-top streaming channel created by Raycom, now Gray, is based around the work of a reporter/anchor in New Orleans, Lee Zurik, but it goes well beyond him and his unit. InvestigateTV is highly collaborative; it involves a lot of partners, including the non-profit news outlet ProPublica. I think that’s a really promising model.
The easiest kind of collaboration is within your own group. ABC’s “Localish,” which started out as a series of features that the ABC-owned stations were doing for a Facebook Watch program, grew into a linear channel. I’ve also reported on the very sophisticated sharing of content that the Sinclair stations do; they’ve got a strong infrastructure for that, and they have central news gathering capacity in Washington and elsewhere. Tegna has a terrific project called “Verify,” which started purely as fact-checking, but it has expanded and that, again, is a centralized unit, with original journalism being done by the unit, but it’s also a franchise that all the Tegna stations can pick up and draw on. Nexstar has worked with the Solutions Journalism Network, which is a non-profit that has a whole methodology for reporting rigorously on replicable solutions to problems.
My other two areas of focus would be community and commitment. What I mean by community is really doubling down on service to the community—committing to it. There’s always been some of that: You’ve certainly seen the slogan “On Your Side” that a lot of stations use, but the pandemic brought this to the fore as a priority for stations. Scripps has a terrific project across the entire company called “The Rebound,” which looks at recovery from the pandemic across multiple dimensions, not just health, but also economics. Gray just launched a project looking at public health across the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia for which it also won a Google News Initiative Challenge grant. Tom Cibrowski, the general manager of the ABC station in San Francisco, prompted his station to embark on a project called “Building a Better Bay Area,” which has become a franchise for the station—something it reports on again and again. This notion of sustained commitment to a community, I think, is going to be very valuable.
Graham Media, which is a very forward-looking company, is actually experimenting with a membership model, kind of like what public media has, though they’re not charging anybody yet. They’re trying to build such an intense relationship with the viewers that the station becomes an essential part of their lives. At Scripps, citizen advisory boards are pretty much mandated for its stations, and general managers and news directors meet regularly with them to bring back ideas to the newsroom. I think you’re going to see more and more emphasis on really tuning into your community.
The way I would frame it is that there’s a growing recognition that enterprise reporting and distinctive journalism that directly serves the needs of the community is the way forward. That may sound like a bromide, but don’t think it is. Historically, because it was so easy to make money in television, you could just follow the police scanner, just do something that looked like news but wasn’t really relevant and wasn’t really important.
That isn’t going to work anymore. One way to put it that I’m hearing more from news leaders now is that we need to be essential to our communities. Scripps some years ago started an extraordinary in-depth research project that continues today, which included interviews in people’s homes. They would actually go to people’s houses and talk to them at length about what they needed from the local news station. And Sean McLaughlin, the head of news there, said to me the other day, “I never want to feel as out of touch as I did when we went to those houses and realized that people wanted one thing, but what we were giving them was something completely different.” I do think we’re moving toward more responsive journalism that more directly addresses community needs. I think there will be, especially with the appropriate new attention on diversity and equity and inclusion, more of an effort to reach underserved communities representing different parts of the market.
Related to that is a move into hyperlocal journalism. You’re starting to see some effort to embed journalists in underserved communities. ABC actually has a community journalism program where young journalists who normally wouldn’t be ready to work in an ABC owned and operated station are hired, and they have to live in the community they cover. Spectrum News, which is a very innovative cable operation, is transitioning to a model where reporters are embedded in their communities, and they contribute to the whole, but they’re also very much meant to be beat reporters, covering those communities.
To end on an optimistic note—I really believe that local television news, because of its continuing economic viability, because of its familiarity with video and with storytelling, and because it has personalities known in the market, has the potential to lead a renaissance in local news, but that is going to depend on the industry’s willingness to embrace collaboration, commitment and community.