Local TV Content, A Day in the Life

And what about the stereotype that local news is the same in every city — that in a consultant-driven medium there is no longer any sense of place?

The Day in the Life study suggests there is something to that complaint, but we found some small differences. Across the three cities, the look and feel of all the newscasts were strikingly similar. From the images themselves — the news desks and anchors as well as the video clips — it would be hard to discern which of the three cities you were watching. All the newscasts had a two-person anchor team, almost always a man and a woman, one black, the other white, and almost always seated side by side. Only one station, WITI in Milwaukee , veered from having the anchors perched at the news table throughout. On that station they moved around, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting.

The video clips of sirens, frenzied gunshot scenes and even many of the softer feature pieces had little to identify them with a particular city. Nor did the graphic tags like “The Big Story,” “Deadly Accident,” “Breaking News,” and “Local First.”

What about traffic and weather? The names of the cities finally give the location away, but the other images, from the live traffic cams to the five-day forecast graphic, were universal in their look.

The biggest stylistic difference in the three cities was in the availability and use of live reporters. Houston , the biggest market in the mix, clearly had more correspondents available to report live. The newscasts there tended to have two or three stories with reporters live on the scene, with a cut to a package each had prepared earlier.

In Milwaukee, two of the newscasts had a reporter live in Zion, Ill., reporting on the double murders, but the other “live” comments were all in-studio. In Bend , the lone evening news program had one reporter live on scene for a story, while the other evening packages were from the anchors themselves, suggesting the effects of an even slimmer staff on a smaller market. And at 11 p.m. , three of the four packages came from the station’s NBC parent.

Among the stories themselves, however, the choice was not so strictly homogenized from station to station. In Houston, for instance, viewers at 6 p.m. were met with the same lead story on each station — breaking news on the Houston Crime Lab’s re-accreditation, which had been announced “moments” before — but after that the three stations diverged.

Houston, TX Evening Newscasts: Packaged Reports May 11, by station

In Milwaukee, the channels were more similar in their top news picks at 6 p.m. All four stations aired packages on Zion, the renaming of the Marquette sports team and the Oswald trial. The one station that led with something different was WITI, which ran a package on an announcement by the state commerce department that it would step up inspections of gas stations for possible fraud in the octane levels they claimed. The correspondent treated the development as a rather critical consumer matter, but in the end, viewers were left wondering why it was all that important. After interviewing the state commerce secretary and explaining policies in other states, the reporter closed by noting that the Wisconsin official “says so far they haven’t found any incidents of gasoline fraud.”

Milwaukee 6 P.M. Packages, May 11, by Station

In Bend , there is just one local news station, KTVZ, an NBC affiliate. The morning news show did not air that day because of local power outages, but the evening and late night shows give us a sense of the small cities’ resources and news offerings on the 11th. There were four packages in the 6 p.m. newscast — two on local legislative issues (education and gun control), a package on internet pornography and one about a singing track star.

In a sign of the small size of the station’s staff, two of the four packages at 6 were reported by the anchors. And as noted, three of the four 11 p.m. packages were feeds from NBC. The other package was a rerun of the one at 6 p.m. on a local gun bill.

KTVZ, Bend, OR 6 P.M. Packages, May 11, 2005