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Essay
Content Analysis
Two questions stand out in considering the content of local
news heading into 2005:
If, as some hope, local newsrooms are poised to get at least
some additional resources, what does the content of local
news tell us about how those resources might be put to use?
And how did local TV news do in covering the elections?
The Project did not conduct new content analysis of its own
for local television this year, but there are three sources
we can draw on for insight.
One is our sister group, the Committee of Concerned Journalists,
which has had a training program inside local newsrooms since
2002. It includes surveys and small-group sessions with hundreds
of local news professionals that offer clues into the thinking
and concerns inside newsrooms. Second, Ken Goldstein at the
University of Wisconsin, in consort with the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of Southern California,
conducted a major study of local TV coverage of political
campaigns in 2004. And we can compare the findings of both
those efforts with the five-year database on local TV news
content compiled by the Project between 1998 and 2002.
The Culture of Local TV News Content
Over the last decade, local TV newsrooms have had to contend
with growing ownership consolidation and an expanding workload,
often without expanding resources.
The role of the local TV news reporter declined.
The percentage of stories without reporters increased, as
did the use of so-called feed material. There was even greater
reliance on "daybook" stories (that is, stories
about pre-scheduled events such as hearings, trials, and press
conferences, usually kept in a file known as the daybook).
Against this background, many newsrooms gradually converged
on a style that might be called the "hook and hold"
approach.
The approach, which is reinforced by the tendency of local
TV news personnel to shuffle from market to market for career
reasons, has led to a style of news that is predictable from
one market to the next and even from one station to the next,
and may defy even the desire of station managers and news
executives to change. It has also caused some viewers to give
up on local TV news altogether.
One interesting sign is that newsroom consultants, who have
frequently been blamed for homogenizing local TV news, are
among those advancing the idea that the industry now needs
to be willing to change its approach. "There has to be
a total rethinking of what news departments are doing,"
Dick Haynes, vice president of research at the consulting
firm Frank N. Magid Associates, suggested in a 2004 interview.
The "Hook and Hold" Approach
The "hook and hold" approach is a mindset about
what viewers want that imparts a surprisingly static, formulaic
structure to most local newscasts.
The approach begins with a natural desire to hook viewers
at the start. That is done by putting stories that are supposedly
"live," eye-catching and alarming at the top of
the newscast. The thinking relies on traditional TV journalism
priorities like immediacy, localism, danger, and the conventional
belief that only highly visual images will retain viewers'
attention. The result is that the stories that lead newscasts
turn out to be in a notably narrow range of topics, mostly
incident-based, public-safety news - what used to be called
"spot news," made up of crime, accidents, fires
and disasters.
The middle of such newscasts is filled largely with stories
that journalists don't want to leave out, but that are considered
not good television. That's a surprisingly large band of topics,
everything from business to education to science and technology
to news about government, social welfare, budgets and politics.
The third part of the "hook and hold" approach is
based on "holding" viewers until the end of the
newscast. That involves "teasing" some of the funniest
or most unusual video, and promising further detail later
in the show. "Soft news" is nearly always the material
here - topics such as pop culture, human-interest features,
and sometimes medical news. These "softer" stories
are often promoted throughout the newscast to remind people
not to leave.
This approach shows up quite clearly in an examination of
the data collected by the Project for Excellence in Journalism
during its local TV news study from 1998 to 2002. While "public
safety" news accounted for 36% of stories over all, it
constituted nearly two-thirds of the stories that led newscasts
(61%), the stories given the most time and resources. And
public safety news continued to make up the majority of stories
until the fifth story in the newscast. (Indeed, 13% of all
newscasts began with three crime stories in a row, back to
back to back.)
"Public Safety" and "Soft" News
During Local TV Newscasts
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By placement within newscast
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Trainers working for the Committee of Concerned Journalists
have also seen ample evidence of "hook and hold"-style
news in conducting more than 200 exercises at local news stations
around the country, in markets large and small, with more
than 1,000 local news professionals. These exercises ask newsroom
staff members to "stack" a newscast using a selection
of nine typical stories, including reports on events involving
public safety, civic issues, and soft news. With exceptions
so rare they can be counted on one hand, every group trained
so far has followed the same approach and created nearly identical
newscasts. Stories that have the potential for alarm - even
when the journalists suspect the alarm will turn out to be
unfounded - lead the newscast. Stories they know are important
but not visual are given short shrift and buried in the middle.
Amusing stories they think will get talked about the next
day around the water cooler are held to the end.
These findings in the newscast data and the newsroom exercises
explain some of the apparent homogeneity of broadcasts. They
also offer clues to why critics believe some kinds of stories
are ignored in local news, even though journalists feel they
cover them adequately.
Interestingly, when this commonality of approach is discussed
with news people during the trainings, they are not entirely
aware of their actions. The tendency to lead with what is
highly visual has become reflexive, but the effect of these
priorities on newscast content tends to go unrecognized.
One effect of this emphasis on newscast leads is that stories
at the top of the newscast get more time, effort and newsroom
resources. They often merit "team coverage" and
deployment of the station's helicopter and microwave trucks
to grab live footage.
They are also more complete. The average lead story runs
2 minutes, 18 seconds. And with more time, the lead stories
are statistically more likely to provide a fuller range of
sources and viewpoints and more authoritative sourcing. A
story about a highway pileup, for example, might include comments
from a policeman, a hospital spokesman, and a bystander.
Together, the first three stories in a typical 14-story newscast
consume a total of five minutes, or 32% of the average newshole
of 14 minutes and 20 seconds (that is, the amount of time
devoted to news excluding commercials, anchor banter, lead-ins,
and promotions, sports and weather).
The second effect is that the broader range of public affairs
news, which lacks dramatic visual elements such as flashing
ambulance lights and yellow crime-scene tape, has little chance
of breaking into the lineup before the fourth story, which
is often the beginning of the second block of the newscast.
In the five years of the Project's local TV news data, only
after the sixth story in an average broadcast does "public
affairs" news (politics, government affairs, social issues,
business, etc.) surpass "public safety" news in
quantity.
Public affairs topics are not absent from local TV news.
In fact, they account for 30% of all stories. But the "hook
and hold" approach means they are given short shrift
in the coverage they receive, not only when they appear but
for how long and in what kind of treatment.
Going back to the construction of the average newscasts,
if the first three stories take up five minutes, the next
11 stories must compete for the remaining nine minutes.
In practice, that means that stories about more complex issues,
like politics and business, are dealt with in a more perfunctory
matter. The obvious consequence of having less time for a
story is that it must be told in shorthand. The local TV news
data reveal that sourcing (the number of sources, their expertise,
and the number of viewpoints) deteriorates dramatically as
the newscast progresses and stories become shorter. After
the first story, the frequency of stories with multiple sources
drops steadily while the number of items based on a single
source or passing references increases. Non-controversial
sourcing (that is, sourcing that provides undisputed facts
or information), a characteristic of soft news, skyrockets
as the broadcast goes on.
Both CCJ training and PEJ data reveal that soft news is almost
always pushed to the end of the newscast. And local news people
are candid in training in acknowledging that that is largely
because of the "teasibility." The PEJ local TV news
database shows that soft news was a lead story in only one
out of ten newscasts. By the tenth story, however, "soft
news" accounted for about a third (32%) of all stories,
and the amount increased from there.
Such stories include classic "water cooler" fodder
about the latest miracle diet, celebrity divorce, or heartwarming
reunion. The very end of the newscast, the "kicker,"
is often a story about a weird or amusing incident designed
to leave viewers smiling or laughing.
Why has the "hook and hold" approach become so
predominant? There are a variety of reasons, from the nomadic
life of local news people to an overwhelming desire to keep
what TV people call their "lead-in" audience, those
viewers inherited from earlier programs, often higher-rated
entertainment programs, particularly in prime time.
Another factor, local-news professionals say, is the development
of more refined ratings technology that allows TV newsrooms
to track their viewership minute by minute. In earlier decades,
the main hump to get over was convincing people to tune in
to a newscast in the first place. The expectation was that
once viewers decided to sample a broadcast they'd watch it
the whole way through.
The task now is no longer that simple. Instead, with the
ability to track audience minute by minute, many newsrooms
see their biggest competition as the remote control; their
priority is to keep material flowing at a pace rapid enough
that viewers won't feel any temptation to change the channel.
One reason why credits at the end of primetime shows have
shrunk in recent years is to create a "seamless"
experience that will discourage viewers from changing the
channel, whether between two sitcoms or between the end of
"ER" and the local news.
Graphed on a chart, the "hook and hold" reveals
itself as an X. One leg represents the hook--"hard"
public-safety or other "live, local and late-breaking"
stories of the kind that usually lead broadcasts but disappear
as a news program progresses. The other leg represents the
hold-- soft, "teasible" water-cooler stories that
viewers will sit through the broadcast to see.
It's a vicious circle: if a story isn't live, local and late-breaking,
it won't make the first block. And since first-block stories
are awarded the most time and resources, less breathless topics
like government or transportation or business news get short
shrift.
The desire to hook and hold an audience, however, isn't the
only reason the X-factor has become so popular.
Less Expensive News
The kind of stories the "hook and hold" approach
emphasizes are easy to find and easy to promote. For newsrooms,
that has created an economic incentive that trumps more traditional
journalistic values like significance and relevance. The result
is a predisposition to cover events that can be reported with
less effort.
For example, two-thirds of all local stories in our five-year
study of local TV are initially broadcast to newsrooms on
police and fire scanners, triggered by information from press
releases, meeting agendas or daybook events that are literally
dropped in the laps of assignment editors, or picked up from
other local news outlets.
And as local stations cover more stories that are easy to
find and report, they are also airing significantly more content
that requires no local newsgathering whatsoever. This so-called
feed material, from outside sources such as a network, affiliate
cooperative, or independent syndicator, accounts for almost
a quarter of all stories on local news programs.
Not only is feed material relatively cheap and plentiful,
it complements the "hook and hold" approach. Newscast
producers monitor the daily satellite feeds, cherry-picking
eye-catching video that is highly "teasible" or
can be used to fill in the blanks in the "hook and hold"
template. If a producer wants to end the newscast on a light
note and has no local "happy news," he or she simply
pulls some feed footage of a newborn Panda cub at a faraway
zoo.
Except for a relatively small core of stories that exhibit
the highest levels of reportorial effort, stations have opted
for efficiency over quality. Coverage of stories that were
more labor-intensive for newsrooms declined between 1998 and
2002. The use of material requiring less manpower increased.
The Disappearing Reporter
Newsroom dependence on the "hook and hold" template
to structure newscasts coincides with another trend - the
disappearing local TV reporter.
Over the five years of the Project's study, the percentage
of stories typically presented by reporters dropped by about
a third, from 62% of the total in 1998 to 43% in 2002. At
the same time, all other content, including feed stories,
daybook news covered without a reporter, and anchor "tell"
stories with no tape footage, increased from 38% to 57%.
For many topics, the PEJ five-year study found that a reporter's
appearance in a story is a predictor of quality. For example,
a story about a pre-arranged event in which a reporter appears,
whether it is to ask a question in a short interview clip
or narrate a longer reporter package, is significantly more
likely than a story about a pre-arranged event that doesn't
feature a reporter to contain a mix of opinions about a subject
rather than just one point of view, PEJ data show.
That is true whether the story is about crime, politics or
social issues. The content analysis this year of network and
cable TV reporting finds a similar connection between packages
and the depth of reporting. (See Cable/Content
Analysis and Network/Content
Analysis.)
The decline in reporter appearances could indicate newsrooms
are depending more on photographers assigned to an event to
ask questions and take notes in addition to making pictures.
It could also mean reporters are doing more assignments every
day, writing anchor voiceovers for some stories and appearing
on camera in others. In fact, both things may be happening
simultaneously. One clue may be found in the annual news director
surveys conducted as part of the study. Over five years, the
number of stories covered by the average local TV reporter
increased from 1.4 in 1998 to 1.8 in 2002, an increase of
28%.
The Outlook for Content
Ownership consolidation, declining audiences, and a troubled
economic model all created incentives for newsrooms to thin
out their newscasts and structure them with a ratings-focused
approach. But regulatory pressure may exert an influence that
will push newsrooms in an entirely different direction.
Television stations are given an exclusive license to broadcast
over a defined portion of the publicly owned spectrum, and
in turn are expected to operate in "the public interest."
But the term has never been codified precisely. Stations have
argued that they meet their public-interest obligations by
forgoing a significant amount of advertising revenue in order
to broadcast things like public service announcements, disaster
alerts, telethons, and more. A survey of TV and radio stations
by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) valued local
TV stations' community service contribution at roughly $2.9
billion.
In early 2004, however, Chairman Michael Powell of the Federal
Communications Commission hinted that he took a skeptical
view of those activities: "I don't think there's anything
special about a broadcaster sponsoring a walk for breast cancer....
I don't think you should go out and have complete garbage
on TV and then buy your way out by sponsoring events in the
community."
In the fall, the FCC issued a decision requiring stations
broadcasting multiple digital signals to devote at least three
hours a week to children's programming for each channel they
transmit, one of the first content-based mandates in several
years. Its actions led many to suspect the FCC might move
toward more regulation of content, though the outlook on this
front is unclear in light of Powell's resignation in early
2005.
The debate over the extent to which the FCC can regulate
television content was highlighted in 2004 by both the Janet
Jackson Super Bowl incident and the agency's ultimately failed
attempt to rewrite media ownership rules. (See Ownership.)
In hopes of avoiding on-air profanity, the networks instituted
tape-delay policies during live events such as NASCAR races
and awards shows. On the local level, the FCC has proposed
that TV stations keep 90-day archives of their programming
to facilitate indecency investigations.
Such requirements, some critics worry, could have a chilling
effect on television content.
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