Local TV News Project 1999

If anything, quality in this year's study proved an even more reliable path to success than in year one. We saw it in good stories at successful stations. Chicago's dominant WLS does a multi-part series about the changing role of fathers in today's society. Minneapolis's KSTP does a "Focus 5" segment detailing the financial ordeal of one woman to show the dangers of tempting credit card offers.

We also saw quality's value in the overall numbers. The top-ten scoring stations in the study were more than twice as likely to be rising in ratings (50%) than falling (20%). The pattern holds up by a smaller margin when examining a broader category of quality, all A and B stations, with 44% rising and 36% falling.

The low road did not fare as well this year. The 10 worst-scoring stations were twice as likely to be falling in ratings (60%) as rising (30%). Among all D&F stations, again more were dropping (46%) than rising (39%).

We saw some big changes in quality among the stations studied both years, much of it for the better. At the 19 stations where we studied the same time slot, 12 rose in quality while seven fell. This finding could be simply random. Or, to be optimistic, stations may be responding to the scores earned in the first year.

In some cities, improving quality coincided with changes in either news directors or general managers. This was true at WCCO in Minneapolis (up from an F to a B with new GM Jan McDaniel), at rival KSTP (from D to B with news director Scott Libin) and at Evansville's WFIE (from C to A with new GM Lucy Himstedt). While money and the market affect what goes on the air, people are ultimately making these decisions based at least in part on their gut and their values.
We saw evidence that quality can be contagious, as in Boston and New York, where every station got better. We saw signs, too, that getting worse can become a trend. In Louisville, in a deadlocked race for No. 1, all three stations changed for the worse.