2005 Annual Report - Local TV Audience

The news about local news audiences may be looking up.

After declines for most of the last decade, there were tentative signs in 2004 and heading into 2005 that the audience slide for newscasts in the two major time slots, evening and late news, may be slowing. At the same time, audiences for early morning news are growing.

Why the changes are occurring, and whether they are a temporary shift driven by news events like the presidential election or the war in Iraq, is harder to determine.

Understanding audience levels for local news is a little complicated. Data are collected and analyzed within each market, rather than nationally. There is no overall figure on local news ratings that is commonly published, as there is, say, for the ratings of the CBS Evening News With Dan Rather. This makes it difficult for station managers or analysts to get an overall sense of audience and pinpoint national trends.

To get some sense of overall local news audience, the Project took yearly audience data for 529 different stations collected by the investment services company BIA Financial Network (BIAfn).¹ We then calculated national audience averages for both early-evening and late-night local news programs, going back to 1997.

After significant declines through 2003, the data for those key newscasts in 2004 show signs of stabilization.

For those unfamiliar with the TV industry, there are two basic measures of audience - share and ratings. Ratings show the percentage of all television sets in the market tuned to a given program (including those in use and those that are turned off). Share tells us the percentage of television sets in use at a given time that are tuned to each program - or something akin to market share. Stations use ratings to set prices for advertisers; share allows stations to see how they're performing relative to the available competition.

Looking first at share, between May 1997 and May 2003, early-evening news programs lost 16% of their available audience share - or more than 3% a year. Late news programs lost even more, 18%, again more than 3% each year.

In 2004 the declines in share slowed considerably. The average early-evening newscast share declined just 1.2%, from an average 16.1 share in May 2003 to a 15.9 share in May 2004. The average late-newscast share fell even less, from an 18.7 share to 18.6, a difference of 0.5%.

Average Early Evening News Share

May 1997 to May 2004

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Source: BIAfn Media Access Pro

Average Late News Share

May 1997 to May 2004

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Source: BIAfn Media Access Pro

Looking next at ratings, the declines in the last year also support the overall sense of stabilization.² Ratings for early-evening news declined 1.2% (8.3 in 2004, compared with 8.4 in 2003).³ Ratings for late news saw twice the decline, 3.9%, to 7.4 in 2004 from 7.7 in 2003. Still, these declines were relatively modest compared with previous years.

The audience picture becomes even more nuanced, and potentially more positive, if one also takes into consideration another part of the day that is sometimes overlooked: early mornings. This has been the one growth area in local news viewership generally in recent years. How much has morning news audience grown? Are those audiences large enough to compensate for the loss of audience in evening and late news?

A research project led by Robert Papper of Ball State University in Indiana, the Middletown Media Studies, found that when media use was observed in person the results showed people were watching more TV news than was captured by methods like phone surveys or diaries (diaries are the method used by Nielsen to measure TV viewership in smaller markets).

Papper intends to release a new study in 2005 that will argue that the amount of news viewership has actually increased rather than declined over the past twenty years.

Papper's data also suggest that TV news viewership is as high during the morning as it is in the evening and during prime time, with each time slot garnering between 37% and 44% of the people being observed. His data further indicate that people who watch TV news in the morning tend to watch a greater amount of news - 86 minutes - during that time period than news viewers in other time slots. People who watch TV news during the evening tend to watch about an hour of news (61 minutes); those who watch during primetime and afterwards watch roughly 46 minutes.⁴

These potential findings about levels of news consumption are tantalizing. The availability of news in more formats and in more time periods means that the news is more convenient and that some of it, such as traffic and weather, may be more up to date.

Without knowing more, however, some questions need to be considered in evaluating the growth in morning viewers.

First, it is unclear whether the gain in morning audience really has made up for what has been lost in the evening and late at night. The BIAfn data from May 2004 (based on Nielsen diaries) indicate that the average morning news program nationwide gets an audience of 4.6 ratings points, about 55% of the evening news average (8.3 ratings points) and 62% of the late news audience (7.4 ratings points). So the BIAfn data suggest that the morning audience does not yet match the audiences available during the traditional news time slots.

Second, news directors and station managers the Project consulted on this subject would be thrilled to say their audience is actually larger than before, but based on the ratings data that they use for advertisers, and their own sense of their markets, they see what we find in the BIAfn ratings. One general manager at a station in the Midwest explained that morning news has become such an important time slot because it appeals to advertisers trying to reach a defined audience: "Mornings are a place where there is a group of people who have means and needs. They have jobs and kids and there are things they must buy."⁵

But the manager went on to note that in the "key demo" of women between the ages of 25 to 54, his station's late news audience is two to three times the size of the morning news audience. Put bluntly, the manager declared, "I could win the 6 and 11 o'clock news, lose the mornings, and keep my job. Win mornings but lose the 6 and 11 and I'll get fired."

The Ball State study, in addition, was conducted in one market, Indianapolis.⁶ According to BIAfn, morning news viewership in Indianapolis is higher than in most other cities, achieving a total of 5.2 ratings points in May 2004 compared to the national average of 4.6.

The Ball State data also look at time people spend watching both local and network morning shows - indeed, any news between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m.

Even if the morning audience equals or exceeds what has been lost at night, there is another point to be made about it. Early-morning news is a different product from evening news, one designed to repeat itself every 15 minutes and heavily focused on delivering traffic, weather and headlines. It is not the same kind of newscast as one might see in an hour at 6 p.m.

Despite all these caveats, there is evidence in survey data to support the idea that the local TV news audience may be stabilizing. In its 2004 biannual news consumption survey, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, fully 59% of Americans surveyed said they watched local TV news "regularly," compared with 57% in 2002. That is also higher than the percentage of Americans who say they "regularly" go to any other news outlet. This leveling off, moreover, comes after a period of steep decline. In 1993, 76% of Americans said they were "regular" local news viewers. That fell to 65% in 1996 and 56% in 2000.

At the same time, the percentage of Americans tuning out local TV news has apparently stopped rising. While the Middletown Media Studies indicate people tend to underestimate the amount of media they use when answering surveys, pollsters argue that looking at data over several years can still show valid trends. Pew Research Center trend data shows that after increasing sharply in the 1990s (from 8% in 1993 to 12% in 1997 to 20% in 2000), the percentage of people who say they "hardly ever" or "never" watch local TV news has remained steady since 2000 (at 19% in 2002, and 18% in 2004).

How Often People Watch Local TV News

1993 to 2004

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Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press surveys

What accounts for the slowing-down in the decline in local news audiences? First, research suggests that much of the past decline was due to an expanding number of households' getting cable or satellite TV and, with more cable networks to watch, choosing entertainment or other programming over news. By 2004, that expansion was coming to an end, according to a report in 2004 by the Wall Street analyst Tom Wolzien of Sanford Bernstein, which predicted that the rapid growth in cable viewership would slow to a crawl by the end of the decade.⁷

Cable expansion is not the only reason for declining local news viewership. Research shows that other factors included complaints about local news content (too much crime, fluff and repetition), and changes in commuting and sleep patterns.⁸

All of these are factors, some TV industry experts believe, that may have reached their limit. Jon Currie, president of Currie Communications, which specializes in interpreting Nielsen data for local TV stations, says there is reason to believe the steadying in audience decline could last. "At some point there is going to be a slackening off in the decline . . . Local [TV] news is going from a mass product to a niche product, but there will be some people who keep watching no matter what."⁹

Some temporary short-term factors also could be boosting the audience for local TV news, among them current events. In May 2003, viewers were following the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship (as our data on cable viewership indicate); in May 2004 there was interest in a presidential campaign that had already seen both candidates criss-crossing the country and visiting swing states. In August, most of NBC's owned-and-operated stations saw a jump in news ratings during the Olympics, another example of events driving viewership.¹⁰

Pew Research survey data add weight to this explanation, at least when it comes to the election. According to an August 2004 poll, 32% of Americans were following the election "very closely," compared with 22% of Americans at the same point in 2000.¹¹

What's more, local TV seems to be one of the most popular sources for political news. An October 2004 Pew Research poll found Americans more likely to say they were getting campaign news from local TV than from any other single network or cable news outlet, with 16% naming it as their main source for election news.¹² When people were asked how they "learn something" about the presidential campaign, a Pew Research poll in January 2004 found that 42% named local TV news. This was a higher percentage than for any other news source. It was lower, though, than the figure in 2000, 48%.¹³

Another potentially positive sign is that unlike many other news media, particularly newspapers, local TV news enjoys viewership that is consistent across income and educational levels. According to Pew Research Center's 2004 survey, 57% to 62% of Americans in every income category say they watch local news "regularly." The percentage is similar across all levels of education (54 to 62% say they watch regularly).¹⁴

The greatest disparities in the local TV news audience are by age group. Older people in general tend to be heavier news users (with the exception of online news), and local TV news use fits the pattern. Seven out of ten people 65 and older (70%) say they are "regular" local news viewers. By comparison just under half (46%) of 18-to-29-year-olds are "regular" local news viewers.

Still, at a time when many news outlets are worried about appealing to younger generations, local TV news seems to be in an enviable position. Only one in four young adults (23%) reported reading a newspaper on the previous day when polled by the Pew Research Center, half the amount of "regular" local news viewers. An even smaller percentage, 18%, said they were regular viewers of the networks' evening news programs.

The question for the industry is whether younger generations will become more likely to watch local TV news as they "age into" older demographics. But local TV news is fortunate to be starting from a much higher baseline.