A Brand New Ball Game for Local News   

The realignment of pro football's TV schedule will have an impact on newscasts.

The realignment of network relationships with the National Football League is causing some elation and a lot of consternation for local television news from coast to coast, particularly at ABC- affiliated stations that broadcast "Monday Night Football."

With Monday football beginning an hour earlier under the new contract, ABC affiliates in the Eastern time zone figure their late newscasts will get on the air between 11:15 and 11:45 rather than way past midnight when far fewer people are watching. But in the Pacific time zone, stations are worried that the earlier start time will hurt their evening newscasts as well as their late.

"We can't help but increase our audience, particularly young males, and attract advertisers," says Paul Stueber, news director at WNEP in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But the enthusiasm of Stueber and other East Coast news executives is diminished because the game won't actually start until 8:20 p.m., after a 20-minute pregame show.

"That means we still won't get our news on in time to count in the ratings," Stueber says. "So we'll still be at a disadvantage with our competitors... I don't think we'll see the audience defection at 11 o'clock as we have in the past because people will know the news is coming up."

On the West Coast, "it sucks," says Darrell Brown, vice president and general manager of KGTV in San Diego. "We not only lose our 5 o'clock news but now, after the game, we're going to have a problem holding an audience until our 11 o'clock news. The network is not going to feed us a program after the game to fill until 11 as it did in the past. We have to come up with something, a movie or a syndicated product maybe, to fill the period and that's not easy for most of us."

In addition, all ABC affiliates are being asked by the network to help pay for the Monday night games, which will cost $550 million annually over eight years. Several plans are being discussed, including a reduction in the compensation the network pays affiliates for airing all ABC programs. In other proposals, the affiliates would give the network additional air time to sell advertising or just ante up cash.

The situation is a little different at CBS, which outbid incumbent NBC to televise the weekend games of the NFL's AFC. CBS had lost its longtime rights to the NFC games four years ago to Fox in a move that shocked the industry and helped make Fox a viable network.

Most CBS affiliates believe pro football will enhance their overall station image and give them another strong vehicle for promoting their local news. So more are willing to help defray the costs of CBS' $500 million a year portion of the contract.

ýThere are some affiliates that really disagree, but most of us wanted it back desperately, and we knew we had to do something helpful to the network," says Howard Kennedy, general manager at KMTV in Omaha and chairman of the CBS Affiliates Advisory Board, who represented affiliate viewpoints to CBS for the NFL negotiations. "Our stations have had a real decline in male demographics in the past four years since we lost the NFL, and this will bring a lot of males back to our newscasts."

Fox, which retained the NFC games for $550 million, is also asking its affiliates to increase the $30 million they paid for the previous contract. Five years ago, the NFL coup spurred many Fox affiliates to air local news for the first time (see The Business of Broadcasting, March 1994) but it's too early to determine whether the new agreement will cause additional news growth at Fox stations.

NBC stations are moaning the loss of the NFC, but some news directors believe it will have little effect on their local news. "Sure, we'll miss the Steelers, but this won't hurt our news a lot," says Bob Morford, news director of WPXI in Pittsburgh. "We'll now air our 6 o'clock Sunday news more consistently and we'll have a newscast for people who are not Steeler fans, just as our competitor had before. It won't make much of a difference during the week."

As for the NBC stations' potential loss of prestige, many observers believe the network is more capable of neutralizing that than CBS was in 1994 because of its strong entertainment and sports programming, which includes the National Basketball Association and the summer Olympics.

So, it's a civil war inside ABC that will have the most impact on local news.

"The viewers that are not interested in football at five are going to go to our competitors," says KGTV's Brown. "One advantage I have here that maybe other affiliates on the West Coast don't have is a 24-hour news channel on cable." That means the station can still do a 5 o'clock local newscast on cable and encourage viewers not interested in football to switch over. Still, that does not resolve his bigger problems and the financial squeeze that he and other West Coast ABC affiliates see ahead. l