COMMENT
Canned News
What Does It Mean When Local TV News Isn't Local?
For further evidence that local
TV news continues its steady retreat from serious journalism in
favor of making money, check out Michael Stoll's story about NewsProNet,
an Atlanta-based company that produces generic news-you-can-use
reports and investigations and peddles them to resource-starved
broadcast outlets around the country. As of March, according to
the NewsProNet Web site,
ninety-three stations had signed up for the canned goods, including
major stations in New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, and
Los Angeles.
Stoll, the associate director at Grade the News (www.gradethenews.org),
a Bay Area media watchdog attached to Stanford's graduate journalism
program, writes that NewsProNet deliberately crops out references
to place and other identifying features in its reports so that
they can be dropped in anywhere in the country and passed off
as a station's own locally produced segments. And that is exactly
what some stations do. A service called "SweepsFeed,"
according to the company's Web site, "has proven to be the
secret behind some of the most successful local special project
teams throughout the country."
It's hard to blame the folks at NewsProNet. They are simply cashing in on the local TV news business's abdication of its duty to good journalism. A 2002 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that nearly half the 103 local news directors surveyed said that "not enough staff" was the most serious obstacle to producing quality news. Another 11 percent said it was "too little time," which gets at the same problem. According to the PEJ report, which was published in the November/December 2002 CJR, the typical local TV reporter is expected to produce about two stories a day. "With staff limitations and budget constraints," said one news director in the survey, "we look for easy stories — just add water and stir."
NewsProNet isn't alone in the move to commodify news. In our
March/April 2003 issue, we wrote
about the efforts of Sinclair Broadcasting, Gannett, and Prism
Broadcasting to repackage news cheaply through centralized editorial
operations and use it to create new advertising markets at stripped-down
local stations. This strategy is defended as a way to expand coverage
in smaller markets, but it is more about making money. And TV
news makes money. In their 2002 book, The News About The News:
American Journalism in Peril, The Washington Post's executive
editor, Leonard Downie Jr., and associate editor, Robert G. Kaiser,
wrote of profit margins at local TV news operations that commonly
hit "40 to 50 percent or more."
Newsgathering is labor-intensive. To expand and improve coverage,
you need to hire more reporters. In the struggle to convince media
owners that quality is good business in the long run, local TV
news is a front where we seem to be losing the fight.
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