If you’ve watched Baton Rouge TV regularly during the past couple of years, you might have noticed an explosion in the number of local news shows. Since the end of 2006, the market has gone from having two stations with 10 daily newscasts between them to having five stations that produce nearly twice that many shows each day.
Then again, you might not have noticed at all. This proliferation of local news programs has come, ironically, at a time when fewer people are getting their daily fix of crime reports, sports scores, weather forecasts and cheesy celebrity gossip from the old-fashioned evening news. Instead, they’re turning in ever greater numbers to new media platforms like podcasts and the Internet, as well as cable and satellite sources, which offer up information 24/7.
It’s taken a lot of the fun from the local news business. Money is tight, and competition is stiff. Entry-level reporters in the market make as little as $20,000 a year, and turnover is high. Advertising revenues are down, and stations are being forced to cut corners at a time when they are challenged to find new ways of reaching a dwindling audience.
“Gone are the days when reporters would do one story that would air that night on the six o’clock news,” says WAFB General Manager Sandy Breland. “Now reporters are updating stories throughout the day on Web sites or for cell phone alerts and blogs. It’s a whole different ballgame.”
The players
Not only is it a whole new game, but there are new players vying for a piece of the action. Now, in addition to WAFB (CBS) and WBRZ (ABC), WVLA (NBC), WGMB (FOX) and WBXH (independent) all produce local news. But the build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy hasn’t worked so well for the upstart newscasts. WAFB remains firmly entrenched as the most-watched local station, and WBRZ is a solid number two.
There are several reasons for WAFB’s dominance. Part of it can be attributed to the branding that has come from the round-the-clock cable rebroadcasts. Part may have to do with a heavy commitment to crime coverage that some say appeals to an urban audience.
The biggest reason, however, seems to be the consistency of the station’s on-air talent and their folksy, down-home style. Donna Britt and Paul Gates have both been at the station more than 25 years, while George Sells has been there for more than 20. Chief meteorologist Jay Grymes has more than a decade under his belt, and even new 10 p.m. anchor André Moreau is a familiar face: he was a sports anchor at the station in the 1990s. In tradition-bound southeast Louisiana, that consistency is not something to be discounted.
“Culturally, in southeast Louisiana, we are comfortable with the status quo,” says Andrea Miller, an associate professor of broadcast journalism at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication. “And Channel 9 is comfortable. It’s habit.”
Indeed, so ingrained is the habit of watching WAFB news in Baton Rouge that people often assume they’ve been watching WAFB even if they haven’t been.
“When I was on the news here, people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re the reporter from Channel 9,’” says one former well-known face from WBRZ. “They just assumed if they were watching the news, they were watching WAFB.”
The stakes
Who’s watching what is important because ratings translate into revenues for television stations—and commercial airtime during the news is more valuable than even during prime time or sporting events. The higher the news rating, the more the station can charge. A 30-second spot of airtime during WAFB’s 6 p.m. newscast went for around $850 last winter, compared to $360 for a 30-second spot on WBRZ. By comparison, WVLA was practically giving away its airtime at $50 for a 30-second commercial.
Media buyers who spend their clients’ money purchasing commercial airtime say they don’t just look at ratings when making buys. Often they will spread the dollars around just to blanket the market. They also say that local news is still a good buy because on balance it reaches a bigger audience than most anything else.
But it’s not as a good a buy as it used to be. Consider that nearly 30 million American households now get satellite TV, while an additional 34 million subscribe to digital cable. Together that represents more than half the total homes in the country with television sets. As a result, the number of channels from which viewers can choose has increased by nearly 25% since 2003.
In that time, local news audiences have declined. In May 2002, both WAFB and WBRZ had 25% more viewers ages 18-49 watching their 10 p.m. newscasts than they did in May 2008. Worse still, network and affiliate audiences are getting older. Adding fuel to the fire is the national recession, which has added another layer of pressure to local stations.
The strategies
Stations are coping in a variety of ways. Though there haven’t been many layoffs in this market yet, there have been some. In perhaps the most dramatic example of cost-cutting, Communications Corporation of America, the parent company of WVLA and FOX, laid off several employees late last year when it killed FOX 44’s local morning show, which for 15 months had tried in vain to take on the TODAY Show and Good Morning America.
Stations are discreetly cutting corners in other ways as well. In response to budget cuts from parent company Raycom Media, WAFB combined its promotions and production departments, putting them under one director of creative services. The station also went in-house with its traffic reporting, terminating its long-term relationship with Shadow Broadcast Services.
WBRZ hasn’t had to make cuts per se, but it doesn’t pay much—at least not its entry-level reporters, some of whom make as little as $20,000. According to a Web site that tracks salaries nationwide, Baton Rouge television reporters make around $35,000 a year. But stations are hiring more and more inexperienced reporters right out of college and getting them for cheap.
“My students who are being hired out of this market are being started at between $21,000 and $23,000,” says Miller. “I have to be very honest with them and tell them how hard it is to make a living on that little money.”
It’s also hard to stay motivated when you’re being run ragged, which is the lot of the local TV reporter. Not only are stations trying to make do with less—they’re trying to do more. Reporters now are expected not only to produce stories for the evening news but to update them throughout the day on station Web sites or blogs, and provide content for breaking-news e-mail alerts.
They’re also filing more stories from the field, something that just a few years ago couldn’t be done without a cumbersome live truck and an engineer. Now, a reporter and videographer can shoot, write and edit on-site, using digital technology on a laptop computer, then send the story back to the station or stream it live.
“In some ways it’s very exciting,” says Breland. “We have a lot of people with a can-do attitude and they’re not afraid to try anything.”
Some of those new endeavors are working well. During the snow day last December, stations urged viewers to send in pictures from their cell phones. WAFB got some 15,000 responses, some of which they posted on their Web site; others actually made the air. WBRZ was inundated with pictures as well.
Stations are also experimenting with other ways of interacting with viewers, creating new paradigms of participatory newscasts. On Thanksgiving Day, WAFB asked viewers to text in a message that said what they were thankful for. The station received a surprising 3,000 responses, which they ended up running as crawls across the bottom of the screen in newscasts all day. WBRZ solicits viewer feedback on its Web site after every newscast
“We get a good number of comments—which we sometimes air, and which helps us stay accountable to our viewers,” says WBRZ News Director Chuck Bark.
Experts say utilizing the tools made available on the Internet is the only way for stations to remain competitive. Those platforms that ultimately emerge as the delivery systems of choice will determine which stations survive. Stations are aware of what’s at stake.
“The broadcast industry as a whole has undergone significant change, and it’s a 24/7 news cycle now,” says Breland. “We’re competing for people’s time, and technology has created a demand for on-demand content, so we have to constantly stay on our toes.”
