Local News Reflection

Let me start by stating that I usually watch the 5:00 or 6:00 news; I’m rarely awake by 10:00. One major difference that I’ve noticed between the 5:00 and 6:00 broadcasts is the amount of sports coverage. Sports gets about 5 minutes of coverage at 6:00, but barely any at 5:00. Now, I’m not a big sports guy, so it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but this got me to thinking about the reasoning behind the programming decisions being made. I think that the editors/programmers at KARE 11 view their 5:00 and their 6:00 audiences differently, perhaps based on Nielsen data. Maybe 5:00 viewers are more affluent, and therefore appear to have a preference for “real news” over sports-related content?

The diversity of the anchors and reporters was, in my opinion, fairly balanced. One anchor was male and the other was female. The head of the sports department was male, the meteorologist was female, and the reporting staff included a mix of male and female. The two anchors shared work reporting the stories; switching from one to the other for almost every story. This decision was made, I think, to appeal to a larger audience. The more representative your newscast, the more people you appeal to, the larger greater your ratings become, which leads to more advertising money coming in.

Something that surprised me, as I wrote the viewing log (above), was the lack of any real crime story. Usually, I’ve found that news programs will start with some reports of fires, gang violence, gun shots, or the like. Tonight, for whatever reason, out of the 30 or so items listed, only 2 could reasonably be argued as being “crime-related,” the two fire reports. Either bad things did not happen today (unlikely), or the program director felt that the other stories had more value than reporting on items that didn’t affect a lot of people. I say this because the majority of the stories seem to affect communities as a whole, like the U. of M. story and the Hecker Automotive story. I think that the news directors wanted to appeal to a larger audience, so they went with these broader stories. Again, this ultimately can bring in more advertising money to the station.

Also, it was interesting to note that the only “live” coverage of anything was the Hecker Automotive piece. It was also the starting story. I think that the producers put this story at the beginning because it was their only live story and the “action,” as it were, can entice viewers to stay tuned. After this lead-in, the stories were progressively less live for the first third of the newscast. It went down to reports that were live at one point, but then edited into a clip, then the anchors reporting on clips, then just the anchors reporting.

Finally, a very obvious appeal to the viewers was all the “teasers” to maintain viewership, right down to the very last story. A statement in Richard Beach’s book, teachingmedialiteracy.com, from a class participant, gives us the reason stations use them: “[R]esearch proves that most people change stations or turn the television off after the first 10 minutes.” I don’t blame the station executives for using them, but I would appreciate it if they used less of them; I’m not one for gimmicks.