Do you know who produces your local TV news?
In a lot of places, it’s not the television stations that it airs on. It’s another case of one company outsourcing production to another. One station produces the news for another station — often with different news anchors and branding. So, it may look like the FOX Local News at 10pm, but it really might be pretty much the same as the ABC Local News at 11pm. Typically, stations that do this share behind-the-scenes people, as well as reporters and photographers.
How big is this?
A recent survey from Hofstra University for the Radio & Television Digital News Association reveals that of the 1,053 stations airing local news, 339 of them get their news content from another station. Folks, that’s about 1/3rd of all local newscasts aren’t being produced by the station it airs on.
In my previous job, two of our TV stations produced newscasts for 4 other stations. While each had its own distinct channel number and brand, they often shared anchors and reporters. The editorial voice behind each one was the same as the news gathered was shared across multiple stations in slightly different forms.
We used to smile (to ourselves) when people would call our newsroom to tell they were switching to watching the local news on the CBS station because they couldn’t stand the biased news on the local FOX station. Folks, it was the same news with different anchors.
A TV station in Little Rock, Arkansas produces newscast for different stations all over the country. Anchors sitting in its Arkansas studio are reporting the local news for places like Meridian, MS. Another company is Iowa has been doing newscast for East and West Coast stations.
How and why?
The simple reason is that news is expensive. Not only do you have the costs of equipment (cameras, studios, control rooms), but the payroll expense for anchors, reporters, directors, producers, etc. is significant. It’s typically a television station’s largest department with the largest expense budget. But once you have that expense in place, producing one more newscast is fairly easy. For example, in a Midwest market that has a 5pm, 6pm, and 10pm news on a NBC station, it’s not a big deal to produce a 9pm news for the FOX station, for example. You’ve already got all the personnel in place, so the expense is minimal. In this case, the FOX station would typically pay the NBC station to produce the news or create some kind of revenue sharing arrangement.
The FOX station does it because it’s cheaper to “buy” the news from another station than it is to build out a news department. In the end, they get the same amount of news and the same number of commercials to sell without the cost of funding an entire operation. For the NBC station, they get to amortize some of their costs, and most of the money they get from producing the news for FOX is pure profit — which many stations pour right into the newsroom budget.
Why do all this news?
Despite what you may read about TV viewers cutting the cord or streaming video, there’s still a much bigger audience watching local broadcast television stations. Even though the audience has shrunk in some cities (not all!), local news is one of the most desired products for advertisers. It reaches the people invested in the community: homeowners, tax payers, voters, business people, government officials, and residents. That’s why the bulk of advertising done by politicians is on TV, and appears in local newscasts.
For stations that don’t have news, they are often cut out of a significant number of advertising buys that target news consumers. By “buying” a newscast from another station, they have a way to capture those advertising dollars that they would otherwise have missed.
Back to the dollars
In high-performing news stations, as much as 40–50% of the total advertising revenue appears inside its newscasts.
Local news hits record highs
That may be why the amount of local news on TV hit a new record high this year. Back to the Hofstra survey, spearheaded by Bob Papper, the average amount of weekday news is 5.5 hours per station. The median weekday news amount of 5.5 hours broke the previous record by thirty minutes a day.
And those numbers are likely to keep growing. In the survey, more than a quarter of the stations surveyed said they plan to add more local news in the future.
