Blacked Out   

Local government news-- considered unsexy and often lacking in good visuals--has been downplayed if not abandoned by many TV news operations. Democracy is the loser.

IMAGINE THAT THE HISTORY of local TV news was on a videotape, and you could rewind that tape, say, 20 years. You'd see local newscasts that resembled mini-C-SPANs. Stories told start to finish in meetings. Abundant video of white guys in ties, seated around tables. Reporters delivering stand-ups from outside the government buildings where those meetings took place.
Now fast-forward to today. The meeting footage has for the most part gone away.
But so has some important newsgathering.
Don't look for an academic study to chart local broadcast journalism's drift away from the halls of government. Such a widespread, far-reaching survey doesn't exist. But talk to veterans of local TV news who have lived through it. Most peg the shift as beginning in the early- to mid-'80s: driven by research, consultants, technology--even a desire to do more creative storytelling.
Lucy Himstedt remembers how it was. She was a reporter and producer at KTHV-TV in Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1979 to 1990. In her early years there, several reporters would make daily checks at the Capitol. "It didn't matter whether anything was going on or not. If the Legislature was in session, that was the lead story in the newscast," she recalls. But then things changed, around the early '80s, says Himstedt, now vice president and general manager of WFIE-TV in Evansville, Indiana. "We were told by consultants and research that government and politics is boring," she says. Indeed, at times those TV segments could be drearily dull.
Himstedt isn't a consultant basher. Yet she knows that at stations across the country, that message that "government is boring" transformed the way stations shaped their newscasts. Today, there is less coverage of the people who are elected, appointed or hired to serve the public. Less attention to the process of decision- and deal-making. Fewer chances for the public to see city hall­even if it is just through the lens of the evening news.
Brian Trauring, news director at WATE-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, is concerned about where that leaves broadcast news today. "Issues such as taxes, road repair and garbage collection are often ignored because they lack an emotional element," he says. "Reporters and producers are not fully aware of local legislative procedures and naturally shy away from generating story ideas involving local government."
Technology may have played a part in TV's move away from city hall coverage. Electronic newsgathering--"live cameras"--emerged in the mid-1970s and proliferated in the '80s. "Why have a boring package at city hall when you can have a live reporter on a street corner with a fire behind him?" asks Doug Fox, who's covered politics at WFAA-TV in Dallas for 26 years.
Fox, whose station still invests in political and government coverage, sees fewer stations making the commitment his does, and fewer young reporters interested in his job. It's not easy to cover city hall in a way that will engage readers and satisfy the bosses. "I'm beginning to feel like an endangered species," Fox says.

W E MAY HAVE TO RELY on the recollections of experienced journalists to confirm that government meetings used to be a staple of local TV news. But there are hard data confirming how little attention is paid to the subject today.
In 1997, a group of journalism professors from several universities released what it called "the first known attempt to sample the news content of television newscasts on a national scale." Professors participating in the Consortium for Local Television Surveys taped newscasts in eight cities--in November of 1996 and January, February and April of 1997--and analyzed the content. Their findings? Crime and criminal justice stories took up nearly 30 percent of the local news time (more than any other topic), while government and politics accounted for only half as much--about 15 percent. Natural disasters and calamities took up 10 percent, education coverage 2 percent. In releasing the data, project director Joseph Angotti, then a professor at the University of Miami and a former vice president of NBC News, called the sparse coverage of government affairs perhaps "the most disturbing news to come out of the survey."
COLTS professors still analyze local news, although the group's membership has changed and cities have been added to and subtracted from the survey. Their preliminary findings from newscast samples taken in nine cities from January through May of 1999 show a story similar to 1996-'97's: Crime and criminal justice took up nearly twice as much airtime as government and political coverage--23 percent to just under 12 percent. Calamities took up a bit more than 11 percent, education about 5 percent.
Survey coordinator David Kurpius, a professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and a former local TV news director, is reluctant to make year-to-year comparisons because the cities in the sample have changed. (Los Angeles and Miami are not included in figures compiled in 1998 and '99, as they were in 1996-'97.) But he sees the overall story as one of misguided choices: "Are stations just covering what's cheap and easy, like crime and criminal justice, or are they covering stories that help citizens and communities make decisions and play a part in the democracy? We're finding they're doing crime...which should be obvious to anyone who watches TV news."
An even larger-scale study found much the same. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, last year vetted nearly 600 newscasts and 8,000 stories from 19 markets. Its findings: Crime coverage was tops, taking up 22 percent of news time, followed by human interest (11 percent), education/welfare/society (10 percent), science/health/ technology (9 percent) and politics (9 percent). "Coverage of the political process in general in local news is nothing to be proud of," says the project's deputy director, Carl Gottlieb, who spent 22 years in TV news. But it's not just the scant amount of time television devotes to the topic that concerns him. It's also the kind of government stories on which the stations focus: "Not process, but scandal; not real issues, but personalities"--story treatments that "reduce substantive issues to nothing more than a game."

G OVERNMENT COVERAGE WAS HARDLY a game to Valerie Hyman when she was urging stations to change their approach to storytelling. In the late 1980s, Hyman was the director of news development for 10 TV stations of the then-Gillett group. She was an award-winning investigative reporter, fresh from a Nieman fellowship at Harvard, passionate about quality journalism. Part of her job was to help reporters become better storytellers. I know. I was a Gillett news director whose staff she coached at WITI-TV in Milwaukee.
Hyman issued a challenge to us: ban video of meetings from all our newscasts for a month. Get it off the air. Break our reporters' dependence on those predictable pictures that fail to tell the deeper stories of government decision-making. She urged our reporters to go to the meetings and gather the facts, but then to get out of the marble halls and into neighborhoods, to tell government stories through the lives of citizens. Her mantra: "The meeting is not the news; the meeting is about the news."
Doing it Hyman's way meant more work for news crews accustomed to finding and telling their stories in a kind of one-stop-shopping at city hall. Going to meetings was merely Step One. Finding the places and showing the faces affected by the meetings added significantly more steps. But the effort paid off in stories with greater dimension. Our coach was pleased.
Today, more than 10 years later, Hyman sees an ugly mutation of her message when she watches local newscasts. It seems that the part of her advice that's really stuck is the part about getting out of the marble halls. Step One--going to the meeting--is often skipped. "In too many cases," she says, "stations have abandoned meeting coverage altogether, and by missing the meetings, they are missing important news."
What's behind the abandonment? Hyman says stations have added newscasts without adding sufficient staff; news consultants have pushed for higher story counts; and news directors are being told to develop stories that appeal to "target demographics." She is in a position to know. Not long after her Gillett work in Milwaukee, she signed on with the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, to direct its broadcast programs. For 10 years, until 1999, she taught Poynter seminars on TV reporting and producing, visited stations and reviewed newscasts. She sadly reports that, over time, she witnessed a decline in coverage of institutions--less news from state capitols, city halls and school boards. "It is not good for citizens," the trainer says flatly.

C ITIZENS . IN THE BUSINESS of television, not all are created equal. Some are more valuable than others: the so-called target audience. Advertisers want to reach them; certain TV content is said to attract them. "You really want adults 25 to 54," says Matthew Zelkind, news director of WKRN-TV in Nashville. Zelkind talks candidly about the business of news, not just the journalism. "We look at who are our viewers, and who we want them to be. You have to craft your product to who your viewers are."
He adds: "Government many times is complex and doesn't allow us to tell it in small doses. It may not be completely relevant to large numbers of people." So his station dedicates resources elsewhere, especially to breaking news and weather. He hasn't abandoned government coverage but is selective about the stories his station covers. "Many of the issues that are important to government aren't important to people on a day-to-day basis," he says.
But what about the journalists' challenge to be the daily eyes and ears of the public, the watchdog on government? How can that happen if reporters aren't regularly assigned to the beat? Marion Just, professor of political science at Wellesley College, is part of the scholar team on the Project for Excellence in Journalism's local TV research project. She says television's selective coverage of government contributes to public cynicism. "If you don't cover what government does, but you cover its mistakes, then you aren't going to create the kinds of citizens who want to take an active role in the political process," she says.
Zelkind won't go so far as to argue that his approach to covering government--small doses of selected stories--is everything viewers need. But, he says pragmatically: "The very unfortunate reality is that it is a big business. A TV station is absolutely there to inform, to give issues and community service. But without ratings, there would be lots of unemployed [TV] people."
Ratings come from people making conscious choices about news and where to get it. And research shows that for Americans, television is their top choice. In a March 1998 Gallup survey, local television news surpassed local newspapers in both trust and frequency of use (see "A Matter of Trust,"). Doesn't that mean viewers are satisfied with the news coverage that television provides? Maybe not.
TV news viewership--local and national--has been eroding. The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, concerned about declining interest in local news, commissioned a study in 1998 that compared the opinions of the general public with those of local TV news directors. The directors were asked to predict the public's interest in various story types. They had a pretty good handle on crime: They estimated 67 percent of the public would be very interested in "crimes that happen in your area." The general public's response was 65 percent.
But when it came to the public's interest in state and local government news, the news directors estimated only 23 percent would be very interested. The public's response: 41 percent. That suggests an interest TV news may not be serving.

L E WIS FRIEDLAND, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin, believes well-executed government coverage can attract viewers to TV news. He's done five years of field research that looks at some of the country's best and worst TV news coverage of government and civic life for his forthcoming book, "Civic Innovation in America." "TV stations, for the most part, are shooting themselves in the foot--giving people more and more information they don't need," Friedland says. "I have no doubt in my mind that people want more than they're getting."
From in-depth interviews he's done with viewers, he's concluded, "Many people positively dislike TV news." They tell him local news fails to show true pictures of things that matter to them. They see body bags and beauty tips, house fires and health hints, and say that's not enough. They tell him they want information about their parks, their garbage pickup, their property taxes, their schools--the kind of information reporters develop from nosing around at meetings, given the opportunity.
Is coverage uniformly bad? No, Friedland says. "Some stations take a serious, long-term approach, not whipsawed by consultant-driven gimmicks. They do day-in, day-out coverage of civic life." Those that do, he says, tend to be market leaders. He cites KRON-TV, the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. "KRON spent years, starting as early as 1994, covering government differently--from the perspective of citizens in the neighborhoods," he says.
KRON News Director Dan Rosenhelm says this means approaching issues "in ways that make them real to people." So KRON holds community forums, invites viewers to e-mail story ideas and includes citizen questions in political debates. For the November and February ratings sweeps, the station produced multiple-part series on subjects such as managed health care, genetic engineering and aging. Each of the subjects was told through the lives of citizens but included an examination of the public-policy issues involved. KRON was San Francisco's first choice for local news in the early morning and at 11 p.m., according to the February Nielsen ratings. It was a close second to rival KGO-TV at 6 p.m.--and gaining in ratings.
KRON also did well in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's critical review last year of newscasts from 59 stations in 19 markets. KRON was given an "A" for the strength of its newscast content and ranked third among all stations for quality. The PEJ study also concurred with Friedland's theory that quality coverage can win viewers. It found stations that demonstrated high quality (defined by, among other things, enterprise, reflecting the community, coverage of issues) were likely to be rising in the ratings.

B UT EVEN NEWS DIRECTORS who have enjoyed ratings success are concerned. Stuart Zanger, the former news director of WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, left TV news in 1999 to teach. Zanger's station helped build its ratings and reputation by acting as a government watchdog. It won a George Foster Peabody Award and the 1999 Society of Professional Journalists' award for public service in journalism, earning the honors by keeping local government under a microscope. The station's investigative team spent months looking into the construction of two new sports stadiums in his town, projects using nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money. WCPO uncovered crony contracts, wasted dollars and broken promises to minority and women contractors. The series led to changes in the way the stadium-building business is conducted in Cincinnati.
Zanger is proud of that series and his former station but hardly satisfied with broadcast journalism's approach to covering government. He says it is rarely done daily or in depth. "We're not set up anymore, in most newsrooms, to be able to report," he says.
He blames the industry's "money lust" for the staffing levels and content choices in local newsrooms. "We devote a person to health and one to consumer [issues], because the consultant tells us that's what people want. But how many people do we have that we can send out on the street--to go out and find stories?"
He thinks many of those stories can be found in and around the meetings television is missing. "People care about government stories. They're not boring. But they have to be well researched and well written and about issues that are important." He says that kind of reporting runs afoul of resource allocations in today's cost-conscious newsrooms.
Plenty of news directors agree with Zanger. As part of the Project for Excellence in Journalism's 1999 review of TV news content, researchers surveyed news directors at 59 stations and got responses from 46. Professor Just summarized the findings: The average profit margin of newsrooms responding to the survey exceeded 40 percent. Nearly three-quarters of the stations have added broadcast hours in the last three years, a demand that has generally matched or overwhelmed any budget increases. News directors widely agree on what constitutes quality local TV but say lack of staffing, and time and budget pressures get in the way.
In fact, nearly eight in 10 news directors said staff size was a problem. Seventy percent of stations required reporters to produce a story a day. Thirty percent required more.
Enterprise reporting, the kind that comes from digging for information and developing sources, is difficult for reporters to produce when they must turn in a story every day. Fox, WFAA's political reporter, feels the pressure to feed the news machine daily. "I'm doing my first NFT--not for today--story since February," he said to me. It was November 10 .
Even TV news consultants are concerned about staffing levels at stations they visit. They insist lack of human resources, not consultants' advice, is keeping stations from meaningful government coverage. Audience Research & Development's Phyllis Slocum, a news consultant with 15 years of experience, says, "We've never told people not to cover government, because government is the source of economic, cultural and even moral legislation." But, Slocum says, this coverage "takes a lot of work.... You cover government by thinking, by spending some time."
She echoed the concerns of the news directors in the PEJ survey. "There's been a proliferation of newscasts and no corresponding rise in bodies," she says, ticking off the time periods in which stations have added or lengthened newscasts in the past 10 years: mornings, weekend mornings and early evenings.
Joe Rovitto concurs. He's been advising stations for six years. Before that, he was a TV news director for 17. His firm, Clemensen and Rovitto, of Redding, Connecticut, handles research and consulting for 20 stations around the country. He, too, insists he's "never advised against covering government." But has he lobbied for it? Rovitto says he's more likely to encourage issue coverage than to press for general coverage of the political process. However, in two markets where his stations are located in state capitals, he says his research showed high viewer interest in the legislature, and he advocated beefed-up coverage of the lawmakers.
But Rovitto also added his voice to the chorus of those concerned about the ability of news staffs to produce fresh, meaningful material each day. "The pressure to fill newscasts is immense," he says. "Very few staffs have the time to go to meetings. They hit the door, the assignment editor gives them a piece of paper, and they go" to whatever story the assignment desk has selected. Then, he says, the crews are expected to turn the story in for the 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. news and re-cut it for the 6 p.m. and the late news. That leads to what Rovitto calls "short-cut journalism"--a triage in which newsrooms select stories that are easy to find, easy to tell. They can't afford those that take too much digging and might not make deadline for that day's shows. "You simply have to make a choice. If you know you can't cover a story properly, you don't cover it at all."
He thinks that is keeping stations from doing the very thing consultants are supposed to help them do: differentiate their newscasts from their competitors'.

I N LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY, THE 66th-largest TV market in the country, you'll find a station that's differentiated itself right into the top of the local news ratings: WKYT-TV. At 6 p.m., a key newscast time in Lexington, the CBS affiliate draws more viewers than its two news competitors combined. "Our secret? We really keep in touch with what people care about locally," says WKYT's senior vice president for news, Jim Ogle.
WKYT is the only station in the market with a staffer permanently stationed in Frankfort, the state capital. Reporter Barry Peel has an office and an editing bay there and is linked by microwave to the station. He delivers daily reports on state government. Ogle believes his man at the capitol contributes to WKYT's ratings strength. And there's more: "I've got a school board reporter who goes to meetings," Ogle says, a touch of pride in his voice. Schools reporter Angie Ricono is known to attend meetings even when there are no hot items on the agenda. "When she's one of four people in the audience, they know she's paying attention," Ogle says. That leads to trust and story tips.
"Good journalism takes time. A reporter's got to know people on his or her beat. People who are significant players have to develop a comfort level with a reporter," he says.
Lexington School Board members are comfortable enough with Ricono to invite her into the hallway during meetings to slip her information. Ogle says such tips helped Ricono break stories last year about the scrapping of a major high school reorganization in Lexington, a pending performance review of the school superintendent and concerns about management of the School Board's travel budget.
"We regularly celebrate in our morning meetings those enterprise stories that appear on our air before the paper. Reporters have to feel that this has great value," says Ogle. And that's why WKYT also assigns reporters to Lexington's courts, to its merged city and county government administration and to religion.
Ogle enjoys life at the top of the news ratings in his town. But he's keeping an eye on the progress of competitor WTVQ-TV, the ABC affiliate. In some TV markets, when the ratings leader is known for serious reporting, the underdog takes an alternative approach: flashy, featurey or tabloid. WTVQ isn't going that route. Its news director, Jay Mitchell, came to town in mid-1998 and says he was given carte blanche to develop a mission and vision for his news department. He's aiming high. The station held "Newschannel 36 Listens" forums in the community and set up a phone line and e-mail address for viewers to share story ideas. What did he hear? "They want to know about issues important to them: school safety, road repair, basement flooding and government spending."
Mitchell was determined to build a news operation that would give viewers what they asked for. In his first months there, he focused on filling 15 jobs in his newsroom, hiring a second-in-command and helping the staff move into a remodeled newsroom. He hired carefully, knowing he was building a culture.
In January 1999, he reassigned several reporters from general assignment posts to beats: urban county government, education, politics and agriculture. The beat reporters go to meetings, often directly from home, instead of starting their days at the station, as had been their custom. Mitchell changed his station's crime coverage from what he calls "mayhem du jour" to stories about trends and solutions.
He put his priorities and philosophies down in writing. He developed an "Editorial Style Guide"--a fat set of documents that define both the station's mission and the performance standards expected of employees. It is a combination pep talk and road map, dealing with coverage, competency, strategy and ethics in specific terms. It includes a passage about the importance of covering meetings. Every employee gets a copy in a binder so pages and ideas can be added.
Mitchell knows he is competing against a formidable opponent in WKYT, but he fears an even more dangerous competitor: the "off" button. He thinks viewers turn off news that's superficial or needlessly scary. He has particular disdain for hyped-up health and consumer stories that make the rounds during sweeps periods--the ones whose edgy promotions claim that your underwear, your mattress, your dishrag, your iced tea or your chicken dinner is a serious threat to your well-being. Mitchell says: "A lot of people have contempt for TV news because we've scared 'em to death. We have to bring it back to more matter-of-fact reporting."
So, what stories did WTVQ produce to attract viewers during ratings sweeps? Stories about cigarette sales to teens, discrepancies in truancy enforcement, curfew effectiveness, school start times and sleep-deprived kids, and an investigation into the Fayette County drug court.
Mitchell's approach to news coverage may be paying off. November's ratings showed viewership was up for every one of WTVQ's newscasts. And February's ratings saw the station's 6 p.m. newscast move from third to second place, edging past NBC affiliate WLEX-TV. "We've gone from being invisible to raising our profile and letting people know we are here," Mitchell says.
WKYT's Ogle, the market leader, agrees. "I think they've been doing it right, laying long-term groundwork."

M ITCHELL IS WALKING A high road many broadcast journalists wish they, too, could travel. Political scientist Just speaks sympathetically about today's TV news directors. "They're under tremendous pressure to deliver eyeballs," she says.
Despite the pressure, many of them have impressed her with their desire to produce better-quality newscasts. "The kinds of things they wanted to do clearly reflected the values you'd want," she says. News consultant Rovitto believes it. "I can honestly say to you there's not one single station I work with where the news director doesn't want to do it right. Their challenge is to find creative ways to give reporters time to find the relevant stories."
Journalism trainer Hyman says in the past few years, even TV station general managers and news directors have told her they watch less news in their own homes. They find it irrelevant, predictable and boring. Reporters and photographers have told her this isn't the business they signed up for. Producers said they are padding newscasts with nonlocal, unimportant stories from "feed services," because there's too much time to fill and not enough staff to produce meaningful homegrown material. Hyman's conclusion: "The truth is, media corporations need to put more dollars back into their newsrooms." The money, she says, should go to staffing.
Hyman knows news audiences are eroding but holds out hope nonetheless. "We can bring people back to their sets with compelling, engaging coverage of what's really going on in their communities. It's local coverage people want; distilled versions of the ongoing news of the day, told in a way that makes people want to watch."
And she knows where reporters can go--right now--to find those stories. Back to the meetings.