Local news has a Laurel/Yanny/royal wedding addiction. It has to stop before local journalism is gone
If you tuned into your local TV news in the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen a lot of coverage of the royal wedding and “happy chat” about the viral Laurel/Yanny audio clip.
These important local issues deserve the scrutiny only the reporters in your community can provide.
That sentence is laughable, right? And yet, local newscasts are awash in this type of content.
I’m not going to get into a debate about ratings and what people want. The truth is this content drives the Nielsen and Chartbeat needles. But maybe those are the wrong metrics.
Local news organizations are badly out of alignment with the information needs of their communities. When I watch local news, I’m frustrated. I’m disturbed by the lack of substance. I’m bothered by the cycle of “stay tuned” teasing. I’m perturbed by how similar it is to when I produced it more than 10 years ago.
TV news is a laughable mess. It is self-parodying. This clip from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight (a nearly weekly feature) pokes fun at how bad it is.
But just about nothing changes. TV companies still stack newscasts with a consultant-driven diet of weather, crime and conflict.
And guess what? The ratings are being gutted.
Pew Research shows the popularity of using local TV for news dropping like a rock from 2016 to 2017 — falling nine points in just one year.
Ouch.
It gets worse when you slice up demographics.
Of those 65+, 57 percent say they watch local TV “often.” For adults 18–29 the number is just 18 percent.
Revenue at TV companies is still pretty strong — propped up by the growth in what is called “retransmission consent” — fees paid by cable companies for the permission to carry the TV station. When you pay your big cable bill, a portion of that cash gets signed over to the corporate owner of your local TV station.
That money is just a panacea covering for rapidly declining ad revenue. With accelerating “cord cutting,” that revenue will start to slump.
The common number I hear is that local TV has between three and five years before revenue dives off the same cliff as local newspapers.
Even digital revenue is declining at many of the corporate local news providers — driven by pressure from Facebook and Google.
That leaves a short window to innovate — and covering Laurel/Yanny and speaking in British accents in local news isn’t it. Shout out to my former employer at TEGNA for at least trying some things.
Don’t take this to mean every newscast or every anchor is bad. Lots of good journalism is being done in local news. But resources are stretched thin. I often laugh when TV companies tout the addition of more hours of news programming. The extra minutes don’t mean additional reporting; it is often filled with recycled stories that already exist and lots of national filler content.
If local TV is cooked and local newspapers are over the cliff, how will communities be informed? Or… will they be informed at all?
I’m putting the finishing touches on a “big crazy idea” for local news that culminates my research at Stanford that I will publish in coming weeks.
In the words of your local TV news anchor… “stay tuned!”
Don Day is a 2018 Stanford John S. Knight Fellow. He has 20 years experience in media — leading teams, producing award-winning journalism and innovating in the digital journalism space. He currently is the publisher of BoiseDev.com.
