What does the typical local television newscast look like? For some chapters of this report, the Project did a special content analysis of media sectors in 2003. No such content study was done for local television news. From 1998 through 2002, however, the Project undertook an exhaustive examination of the content of local news in 15 to 20 markets a year - randomly selected with controls for station size and geographic diversity. In all, 154 stations were studied, some multiple times. Based on that research, the largest single study of local news we know of, the Project has a fairly detailed sense of what Americans generally get from local television news.1 [1]
This detailed analysis suggests that local television news is, indeed, very local. It does a good job of covering many everyday events in most communities, especially incidents from the police scanner and events on the news daybook. Local television news is, also, not the same everywhere.
Yet the data also reveal that the medium is dominated by the ethos of "live, local and late-breaking" coverage, particularly of crime. Many of the stories are formulaic, reactive and, above all, short.
Here are some findings:
Three-quarters of all stories are local.
Roughly 70 percent of the stories are under one minute long.
The most common topic is crime - by more than 2 to 1 over anything else.
Four in ten stories are about fairly typical, everyday incidents.
Six out of ten stories that involved controversy gave only or mostly one point of view.