Because there are few beat reporters in local TV, most stories involving government, local issues, business, the economy, etc. originate either in press conferences from interested parties, scheduled meetings, protests (better yet, because of the visuals) or newspapers. With the constant decline of coverage in every newspaper in the five county area, TV assignment desks have less and less of substance to work with. So the field is left open to the loudest and the best connected to shape whatever the public hears.

The study laments that crime -and fire-- play such a prominent part in coverage. But anyone who has spent a day in a local TV news room would not be surprised. Crimes and fires, at least the immediate impact of them, are easy calls for assignment desks and producers. These stories light up police scanners on the desk, require no special expertise, offer easy to get visuals, qualify as "breaking news," and, as a bonus, usually have opportunities for interviews with victims or stunned bystanders, adding a bit of "human interest" to the final product.

Do viewers care? Some careful studies correlating ratings to coverage suggest they do not, unless there is really some social significance or special horror. But these stories are irresistible to producers and assignment desks needing to fill time with diminishing staffs. Would viewers reward programs with more substantial coverage? Maybe, but the few experiments around the country do not offer guarantees of success. For one thing the evening news shows essentially replaced the long gone evening newspapers, and those papers, often tabs, were rarely citadels of high minded journalism. Also, the audience for substantial news long ago abandoned local TV news--in fact, a good deal of the audience that used to exist for local TV news no longer watches at all. Luring back that audience with a show of substance might work, creating some product differentiation, but it would take considerable time and money--resources unlikely to come from today's Wall Street oriented corporate owners.

Which brings us to another matter raised at the presentation of the study. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, one of the true heroes on the FCC, says he would like to see stations have to earn their licenses, or at least make the kind of gestures towards public service they used to make before deregulation waived all that aside. That would obviously be a good thing. But probably not enough. As long as one corporation can gobble up dozens of stations (and even own more than one station in a market), GMs and News Directors will be beholden to masters who demand profit over prestige. And there is never enough profit in these days of Wall Street pressure and highly leveraged ownerships.

Even with good will and deep pockets, local broadcast news in Los Angeles will always disappoint news purists. The area is too large and fragmented for most government stories to be of interest to all the audience. (Orange County could care less about LA city hall, and Santa Monica has little interest in Anaheim.) And big concept stories are both expensive not necessarily keys to a winning strategy--as the Times California section proved.

Even though stations make money, often more than most businesses, the days of minting money with 40 and 50 percent margins are gone. So the pressures for cutting staff in the newsroom are unlikely to abate. But there might be some silver linings. Small video cameras, laptop editing, citizen cell phone video and other technologies could lead to newsrooms with more producer/reporters (even with beats) and fewer stars. One day a news director might notice that cable news, for all its faults, features some in depth discussions as long as they are lively and pointed, and try to bring that energy to the local scene. And news on the Net will become an essential product for any newsroom that hopes to survive, because Net news is both more immediate and targeted. Whether these newsrooms will emerge from the current local license holders--or from start ups unencumbered by old models--remains to be seen.

From Marty Kaplan:

Joe suggests that a round-the-clock data sample doesn't do justice to particular timeslots when local news is doing a better job. In the dozen years that the Lear Center has been studying local news, we've captured video using a range of methods. For example, we've picked the highest-rated half hour of news on a station; or we've picked the highest-rated pre-primetime half-hour, plus the highest-rated post-prime time half-hour. Or we've collected all news from 4 pm on. Whichever method we've used, station managers and TV trade associations would say the same thing: "You're not being fair to us because you've ignored ___ " and then fill in the blank. We ignored their fastest-growing noon broadcast, or their hard-news-packed 6 am broadcast, or... " So this time, we decided to capture every minute of every broadcast.

It's possible that some stations air more civic news during some of their timeslots than during others. We're looking for the funding to do that analysis, and to mine our database in many other ways, like: What's the racial composition of victims and perpetrators of crime depicted in TV news? Does crime news occur in particular parts of LA? How do those numbers about place and race stack up against police statistics? As they say in the biz, stay tuned.