In the various debates over the state of journalism, the area about which the least is known is probably local news radio.
Critics argue that the field has been decimated, decrying that since the deregulation of the 1980s and the consolidation of the 1990s, station after station has abandoned producing local news, and arguing that cities around the country have suffered as a result.
Defenders say there are more choices and more news, talk and information than ever.
The discussion on both sides, however, is usually anecdotal. The medium tends not to receive the level of academic attention or critical study focused on network TV, print or the Internet.
As part of the Day in the Life of the News, we wanted to find out what local radio was actually offering citizens.1 [1] To do so, we studied what was on local news radio on May 11, 2005, in three cities in three different regions: — Houston, a major metropolitan area, Milwaukee, a middle-sized city, and Bend, Ore., a smaller city.
What we found, by and large, is that radio news today is more local than the critics might think, but also quite thin. It rarely involves sending reporters out to explore the community and tell stories about local voices and personalities — the hallmarks of traditional local news coverage. Over all, the stories we found on local radio this day had the shallowest sourcing and explored the fewest angles of any media studied.
Instead, what listeners got was headlines read from wires or provided by national networks. The stories were brief — almost always less than a minute and often less than 30 seconds.
|
Percent of all Time |
|
|
Anchor Reads |
24% |
|
Packages |
12 |
|
Interview |
31 |
|
Other News Outlet |
7 |
|
Traffic/Weather |
9 |
|
Sports |
5 |
|
Promos/banter/Fill |
12 |
| Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding. | |
What is probably the most prevalent local component on radio today is traffic and weather, broadcast on every station studied.
Whatever depth of coverage we found came largely from talk-show hosts offering their opinions on issues or taking calls from listeners.
In Bend, the one local radio station listed as offering local news and talk was KBND, where the only story segment longer than a minute in the hours studied was Paul Harvey’s syndicated “Rest of the Story” about the 1931 Indy 500.2 [2]
During morning drive time on News/Talk WTMJ in Milwaukee , the news block was made up of 14 headlines at the top of the hour, but the headlines were brief, without a single source for any information cited.
Of all the hours monitored on local radio this day, only 14% involved correspondents reporting the story and many of those came from the local NPR affiliate or feeds from network owners.
How much radio news did we find?3 [3] In the biggest city, Houston , with a population of roughly 2 million4 [4], there were two stations identifying themselves as news/talk, two all-talk stations and one public radio station. The fourth largest city in the country had no station listing itself as “all news” dedicated to coverage of the community.
Listeners actually had more radio news options in the Milwaukee market, population 600,000, with eight stations listed: Three news/talk, two talk, and three public radio.5 [5]
In Bend , a city of 52,000, radio listeners had little choice if they wanted news. One local news station, KBND, a “combined communication station” and CBS affiliate, offered CBS headlines and then mostly local news headlines. Listeners could also tune into an all-talk station broadcast from Redmond , Wash.
What We Studied
To get a closer sense of what was offered in each city we monitored one all-news station, one news/talk station, and a public radio station if it had local news programming hours. If no all-news station existed, we monitored a second news-talk station.
For each, we captured local programming at three different times of the day — an early-morning hour, a mid-day hour and an evening hour — if local news was offered.6 [6]