Local TV Newsroom Investment

News continued to be an important element of programming at the local television level, and while news directors erred on the side of caution in planning for 2005, the year began with healthy newsrooms, in both size and money.

Among the notable developments:

• The amount of news on local TV showed no signs of declining, after reaching record levels in 2004.
• Stations continued to increase news budgets, though the growth was essentially led by the network affiliates and was only slightly above the rate of inflation.
• Network-affiliated stations continued to have the biggest staffs, and all growth in staffing occurred among them as well.
• Over the past decade, the news director emerged as the CEO of the newsroom, not only commanding a high salary but also seeing the most substantial increase in median salary over time.

Amount of News on Local TV

One of the major issues in local TV news in recent years has been the trend toward stations’ producing more news without increasing their staff to do it. That amounted to a kind of stretching of resources that translated into a thinning of the product. Stations did fewer reporter packages and less original reporting and enterprise, relying more on second-hand material (see Content Analysis 2004 and Content Analysis 2005). What is happening now, according to the latest data (from 2004)?

The most important source of data on newsroom investment is the annual survey conducted for the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) by Bob Papper of Ball State University, in which news directors report and comment on the state of the local newsrooms.

The amount of news on local TV stayed the same as the year before, and the evidence suggests that that will continue. Perhaps stations have come to fill all the time they can.

When asked how much news they planned to air in 2005, about two thirds of news directors said they would keep the same level. A quarter of stations said they planned to increase their programming. About 1 in 10 of the news directors planned to reduce the amount of news on air.1

The average amount of local TV news each day in 2004 remained about the same as the year before — 3.6 hours. The stations affiliated with the four top networks averaged 3.8 hours, with the most at CBS stations (4.2 hours) and the least at Fox affiliates (3.1 hours).2 Independent stations weren’t far behind, with an average 3.5 hours.

TV News Budgets

With the amount of news on local TV relatively stable, what about the news budgets used to produce it?

Looking at all stations — affiliate and independent combined — most, 44%, had increased their budgets, as opposed to 51% in 2003. Another 26% percent said budgets remained the same.

Here, though, network affiliation made a difference. Among network affiliates, 49% of news directors increased their news budgets, with more than a fourth saying the budget had not changed (27.5%).

At independent stations, however, over a third (37%) reported cutting their news budgets from the year before, and nearly as many (34%) said they couldn’t comment on or did not know whether budgets had gone up or down.3

The data suggest that if there are winners and losers coming in local news, independents, which had been a growth area in an earlier era, are facing trouble ahead.