SPOTLIGHT
More Is Less
Centralized News Operations Are About Money,
Not Journalism
Television news executives have their orders: find more viewers, raise profits, and, oh, by the way, do it with fewer people in the newsroom. One result is that although news is everywhere today, much of it is blandly similar. Now, three second-tier players in the broadcast world are heading down a path blazed recently in radio: repackage news cheaply through centralized editorial operations, then beam it out to stripped-down stations.
All three are launching broadcast news services that use technology and mostly recycled news to create new advertising markets — without creating much new journalism.
• Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc., based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, is test-marketing News Central, a one-hour mix of local and national news, at its Flint, Michigan affiliate, WSMH-TV. The idea is to eventually expand News Central to all sixty-two affiliates.News Central leads with a segment of local news produced and anchored from Flint. Then viewers get a dose of national and international news, sports, and weather produced and anchored in Hunt Valley. The catch is that most of the Hunt Valley "content" is not original, but rather comes from other Sinclair affiliates or a CNN feed. Sinclair does plan to open bureaus in Washington, D.C., and possibly in New York, and will add a bare-bones news staff at those stations that currently don't have newscasts. Mark Hyman, Sinclair's vice president of corporate communications, says that eventually more of the News Central report will be original.
Since about half of Sinclair's stations have no newscast at all, the company is increasing the reach of its journalism. But on the other hand, news staffs will be trimmed at affiliates by about a third — with more of the newscast produced centrally, the affiliates won't need as many reporters and producers.
The addition of news at affiliates currently without it will allow Sinclair to sell more advertising. "About 30 to 35 percent of the advertisers out there buy ad time only on the news," says Hyman. "So it is not good business just to be a non-news station."
• American News Network, the brainchild of Vincent Castelli, the ceo of Prism Broadcasting Network, which owns and operates two TV stations in Atlanta, offers national news to independent stations that can't afford to produce it themselves. ANN buys news from ABC, produces two daily one-hour newscasts, and beams them to news-less stations free in exchange for a percentage of the advertising sold during the newscasts. Castelli says national ad rates start at around $1,000 for a thirty-second spot, but can climb much higher depending on the size of the market and other factors.
ANN also offers stations their own five-minute local newscast — produced and anchored in Atlanta from local feeds and then fed back to local stations. The stations provide the raw video and copy — through deals with local news radio, newspapers, or free-lancers — and ANN polishes it up and has an anchor deliver it in front of a virtual skyline, a graphic of whatever town the station serves. Castelli says so far about forty stations have signed on.
• Gannett's plan, in the early stages of development, will also provide another avenue for ad sales. The idea is to repackage local news from its twenty-two affiliate stations across the country and air it on a cable network. America Today is aimed at people who move away from their home town, but still want to keep in touch with what is going on there. "In every American city of consequence there is a fairly large number of people who are from somewhere else, or who have friends or family somewhere else," says Roger Ogden, senior vice president of Gannett's television division.
America Today will work on a grid, and viewers can find their hometown news at the same time every day. "We still have to do a lot of negotiating with the cable companies to support it," Ogden says.
There is an argument that such services will expand local news options in smaller markets. After all, towns that had no local news can now get it, and there will even be a bit of original reporting in some places. But if this were really about a dearth of local TV journalism, why not hire more reporters and let them do their job?
"It's a business concept first," says Rick Rockwell, who teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C. "You're trying to find new business models to generate advertising in a very poor advertising climate. I can understand why it makes sense to these guys."
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