2004 Annual Report - Local TV Content Analysis

Some critics have suggested that local news has been so homogenized that it is the same everywhere - that the news in one town looks just like the news in every other with no real connection to the local community. One reason, observers have argued, is that a handful of three or four television news consulting firms dominated the industry from the 1970s through the 1990s and impressed the same small set of conventional ideas on virtually every station in the country. As a consequence, local television news has no sense of place.

Is that critique fair?

The data in the PEJ content study suggest that the complaint about homogenization appears to be partly true but exaggerated. For instance, crime was the most popular topic almost everywhere (at 191 out of 242 stations studied). Still, that leaves more than 50 stations at which crime was not No. 1. (At some stations, as noted above, crime was as low as 5 percent of stories.) The next-most popular topic varied - from human interest at some stations to politics at others.

There were some other differences that stood out as well. The most obvious was the variation in the number of stories aired in a typical newscast. The average number is 14 stories, but there were stations which ran as few as 7 per night to, in one case, a station that typically aired 27 stories.

The size of a station's market had an effect on some aspects of local television news: stations in the smallest markets were less likely to air sensational footage and more likely to cover social issues.

What may be more true is that the style - the look and feel of local news - rather than the substance, seems homogenized. Local anchors tend to look alike and dress similarly. Almost all stations have adopted the "family model" - two anchors, usually a man and a woman, plus an amusing weathercaster and a jock newscaster. Older women are hard to find on newscasts, though older men are not. The graphics and sets are similar. So is the emphasis on live, local and late breaking. At least one reporter package starts with a live lead in, even if the event is hours old, and the story unfolds according to format. And many gimmicks - "The News at Six starts now" intones the anchor breathlessly - are so common that they are clichés. But the charge that the news is the same on every station everywhere is, beyond the style, unfair.