Advertisers pay to reach a local news audience. That's the model. Local TV news isn't a subscription model, yet. If the brand is diluted and becomes less credible because children are winging it on camera, eventually not even the remaining advertisers will want to sponsor newscasts.
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MMJ Reporters in E. WA Making Less Than Working Fast Food
- Thread starter Kelly A
- Start date
The model is dead. That's why they can't afford to pay these reporters. If it's less credible, tell me what's a better way to pay for news.
Netflix is rolling in money. Why aren't they investing in news production? Same with Apple.
No more dead than traditional radio. Sure, the audience is mainly 25-54MF, but last time I checked, there are still advertisers wanting to reach those demos.
Again, not the same as subscription.
Because Netflix and Apple aren't in the local news business. Just because they're both considered media, doesn't mean they serve the same purpose.
The MODEL is dead. It's not about the demos. The ad revenue isn't enough to cover the costs anymore. Thats why they can't pay a reporter more than 50K. Plus their anchors are all getting $200K a piece. So the bottom of the food chain loses because of the big name anchors who sit at a desk all day. You should know all this.
The ad supported media business is in big trouble. That means local radio and local TV and anything else.
I know what they do. Apple isn't in the music business either, but they use music to sell computers and phones. Content is content. News is content, just like music. They could get in that business if they wanted to. Tech companies aren't restricted to just making tech products. But they know news is expensive. So they sit back and watch the TV companies pay journalists $50K a year.
It depends on the market.
In my case, Palm Springs is an older demo market with lots of folks watching TV news. The "good" local TV operator, Press-Gazette, has a fully staffed news department with multiple vehicles and street crews. They even do regular investigative reporting.
They have CBS, ABC and Fox and Telemundo among their channels and they have news on one of the channels during about 75% of the day, as well as a channel that streams the latest newscast all the time. And the coverage is faster, better and more interesting than in the Desert Sun, the local daily paper which used to be very readable and today looks like an English test before the corrections!
They are full of local ads, and good ones.
One of our posters here mentioned how bad local news was in Eastern Washington... Yakima, Spokane, etc. The opposite of what I see in the Palm Springs metro.
News is ephemeral. The noon news today will have zero viewers. It is not "Orange is the New Black". Lousy shelf life, and high cost per subscriber to provide local coverage in a hundred or so different markets.
Great. Any guess how much they pay their street reporters? Over or under $50K?
Well over. It is California. $50 k in Texas is $80 k or more in CA.
That station hires people out of markets like Lubbock or Albuquerque or Las Vegas or Fresno and they tend to stay here a long time.
Sorry, but native Missourian here has to get pedantic: it's NPG - News-Press/Gazette, with its origins in the News-Press and Gazette of St. Joseph. (Actually, the Gazette is no longer published and the News-Press publishes print editions twice a week with most of the focus being digital plus broadcast.) The Bradley family still owns the group. They've been smart enough to do well in St. Joe even with Kansas City being so close.
By the way, this book (pictured below) was one of the more interesting things I inherited from my grandparents. The cover is hard to read but it's a book of front pages from the St. Joseph newspapers during World War II. The point in bringing this up is that NPG has a long background in journalism.
Now we return you to Point/Counterpoint, already in progress.....
There you go:
They run that very briefly at the end of every newscast. I shudda' known better, particularly since my stepbrother ran a newspaper!
Well, I don't think St. Joseph, Missouri is top of mind for most people. I'm fond of it myself...I guess I enjoy overlooked places and I have had some family connections there...but Kansas City passed it by a long time ago.
And just like radio employees, a lot depends on market. Houston or Dallas have a higher cost of living and higher ad rates than say Lubbock. Same could be said Seattle/Tacoma to Spokane.
Unlike what BigA (aka Carnac The Magnificent) predicts, I believe local TV news isn't dead, but more likely will be regional-ized. Over time large market stations will encorporate smaller market news from around the state, replacing local newscasts from those smaller communities.
I see it increasingly here with the DC stations, including PBS affilliates. DC stations are covering fewer traditional downtown shootings and carjackings, and adding more stories from Fredericksburg, Richmond and Southern Maryland. Public stations are sharing stories from around the state to WETA.
What this ultimately does is diminish the local coverage done by a local smaller market station, but increase the overall quality of the newscast. Higher quality product and more eyes spread over a larger geography equals 'reach' to advertisers, but unfortunately will be at the expense of smaller market stations.
This is (sort of ) what iHeart did in early 2019. What were once 43 working newsrooms in iHeart's stations around the country became nine.
Their plan, though, was not for the large newsroom to cover the smaller stories---but to homogenize. To only cover stories that could be considered of statewide interest. As soon as Robin Bertolucci at KFI heard that, and they heard from Robin, they had to start amending the plan.
There are currently three working newsrooms in California:
- KFI got to keep theirs, and apart from providing big stories that happen to the other stations, has no responsibility to generate coverage or newscasts for other stations.
- The Total Traffic center in Long Beach expanded into news to cover stations in the southern third of the state not named KFI. However, KFI could use anything they generated if it wanted to.
- The existing KFBK newsroom was brought under corporate and covers stations in the northern two-thirds of the state and only generates Sacramento news because the PD went to the mat to insure that would be the case, and he had 'BK's ratings and revenue to justify his demand.
Now that I'm retired, I can tell this story:
I was pitched the job of Pacific Region News Director in January of 2019 as the plan came together.
They didn't update the PowerPoint deck before the meeting and I saw version one of the plan, which would have shut down the 'BK newsroom. Apart from KFI, the only California newsroom would be in Long Beach. The Sacramento operation was saved when the Regional VP in San Francisco and the Sacramento Market President went ballistic.
At the time, I was both KFBK ND and co-anchor of the afternoon news. I was told I couldn't do both the Pacific ND gig and the news and I'd need to choose. I chose to continue co-anchoring, got a new contract, and that contract's generous severance saved me when the January 2020 layoffs rolled through.
Very similar to the situation here with public radio. CapRadio has a story-sharing agreement with most of the other NPR stations in California.
I didn't say local TV news is dead. I said the ad-supported model is dead. However, you believe low pay hurts credibility. A station pays people based on the profitability of its service. If you want TV news people to get paid more money, the work they do has to attract more money. Your issue, and the topic of this thread, is that news reporters make less than fast food workers. That's nothing new.
There are groups looking to change the way journalism is funded. Some want to see big tech companies pay a tax that would fund journalism. The problem is qualifying who is a journalist. You end up with the same problem NPR has now, with congress demanding NPR cover right wing conspiracy theories the same as actual news.
There are people reporting on local news every day, and doing it for free. You see them on Twitter, YouTube, and other social media. You can say the quality is not as good as the professionals, but that's subjective.
radio news is kinda regionalized up here. Sorta
AK Public Media owns one station.... they also produce several statewide interest programs.. a lvie nightly newscast, health show, an outdoors show.. that many of us air.
Stations (even mine!!) contribute news/stories to the "network" for inclusion in thje nightly news cast or for other stations to use (i regularly air stories from KYUK in Bethel, independent of what the network may air)
And Coast alaska based in juneau is a non profit that owns juneau stations, rado and tv... but collaborates with multiple other SE AK stations to do news.. theyll have a Coast Alaska Regional News Director who oversees news on all the stations.. and thsoe stations work together extensively to share resources and stories.
AK Public Media owns one station.... they also produce several statewide interest programs.. a lvie nightly newscast, health show, an outdoors show.. that many of us air.
Stations (even mine!!) contribute news/stories to the "network" for inclusion in thje nightly news cast or for other stations to use (i regularly air stories from KYUK in Bethel, independent of what the network may air)
And Coast alaska based in juneau is a non profit that owns juneau stations, rado and tv... but collaborates with multiple other SE AK stations to do news.. theyll have a Coast Alaska Regional News Director who oversees news on all the stations.. and thsoe stations work together extensively to share resources and stories.
iHeart does have local reporters in Denver and they will go out and cover stories - most recently, this week, with the fires in the foothills of the Front Range. Between that and the number of properties iHeart has in the area, I believe there is a newsroom based at KOA. It doesn't get much of a chance to showcase its work, though: outside morning drive, there's two minutes at the top and bottom of each hour and that's it. Newscasts on KHOW run a bit longer; KDFD, the really rabid right-wing station, tends to stick with Fox News.
Denver has a surfeit of marginal talk stations on AM, carrying various network newscasts, but that's a whole other story.
There is a regional exchange for public-radio news stories, but CPR doesn't seem to do much with it (KUNC up in Greeley does). CPR seems more intent on covering Colorado Springs than Denver; Denver coverage, except for state politics, largely comes from its Denverite website.
Back in the 1960s, KOA-TV, when it was part-owned by Bob Hope, also owned KOAA-TV (formerly KCSJ-TV) in Pueblo; all indications I've seen point to separate newscasts on the stations. They did carry the same NBC and syndicated programs. When GE bought KOA-TV around 1968, the ownership group spun off KOAA-TV.
Regional networks have been old hat in some of the states around here (western Kansas, South Dakota, etc.) for a long time; often, there was a local newscast at 10 pm on the satellite stations.
Also how much does the local market need to emphasize national significance in their news stories to get a bigger audience. Eastern Washington State yes the stories and events are important to the area but not so much to the rest of the country. If it's Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York, Sacramento, San Francisco, Austin, Dallas and Houston then it's a different story some of the news stories will have the initial local significance but will turn out to have national importance like major companies moving from San Francisco area to places like Houston or Austin. Some of this is that national publications and wire services have offices in those cities and will have more attention in those areas.
Chevron announces its headquarters will leave California, relocate to Texas
The company expects all corporate functions will migrate to Houston over the next five years.
www.kcra.com
Elon Musk says he’s moving SpaceX from California to Texas after transgender protection law signed
Elon Musk will move SpaceX to Texas in protest of a state law that prevents California schools from telling parents if their children are transgender.
www.usatoday.com
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