GOOD NEWS ON LOCAL NEWS
There are some bright spots, particularly on cable
by Deborah Potter

Sometimes it seems as if all the news about local TV news is bleak. Budgets cut to the bone, news departments shutting down, not to mention the content: crime, more crime, and "special reports" on worthless car alarms and the pain of de-clawing cats. But there is some better news, if you know where to look. On cable.

"My not-so-secret wish is to create a New York Times of local television," says Philip Balboni, president of New England Cable News. What he's created already is a solid, some say scrappy, local cable news channel that offers something quite different from the standard fare on other Boston newscasts. NECN deliberately downplays crime and does much longer stories on a broader array of subjects than the competition. When the channel won a duPont-Columbia award two years ago, the judges praised its ability to "outshine the reporting of many local broadcast newsrooms."

NECN was one of the pioneers in local cable news, but ten years after its debut it has plenty of company. More than 30 outlets now offer all-news programming on cable and still more are on the way. Time Warner already has seven local news channels, including ten-year-old NY1 in New York; over the next year, the company plans to launch five more.

There's no single model for producing local cable news. Some channels just simulcast or rebroadcast news programs from a co-owned local station-shoveling out the same old stuff. Others, like SNN (Six News Now) in Sarasota, Florida, are partly or wholly owned by a local newspaper, which helps to generate content. NECN, owned by Hearst and AT&T Broadband, has partnerships with the Boston Globe and three other newspapers, as well as half-sister station WCVB. But despite their differences, most share the mantra of the Cablevision-owned News 12 Networks in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut: "As local as local news gets."

Research last year by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, as yet unpublished, found significant differences between broadcast news and local cable coverage in the four markets studied. The cable channels in general ran longer stories, focused more on local issues, and used fewer "feed" stories than the broadcast stations.

Rick Willis, news director at Time Warner's News 14 Carolina in Raleigh, says his new shop is unlike any other television newsroom he's ever worked in. "I am not driven by ratings at all," Willis said. "My measure of success is, 'Am I providing a valuable service to Time Warner subscribers?'"

At NECN, Balboni's ambition is to offer viewers a substitute, not just a supplement, for local broadcast news. "In Boston, we do believe there is no reason why someone could not rely solely on NECN for their news," he said. The ratings show that most Boston viewers aren't doing that yet, but while the audience for broadcast news has been shrinking, NECN claims its viewership (now at 1 million households on average per week) is growing-an average of 14 percent a year.

Not all local cable channels have been as successful. Two California outlets folded last year: OCN in Orange County and BayTV in San Francisco. But there's no sign of a chill in the industry. "I think it's the future," said Wayne Lynch, until recently vice president of news at News Channel 8 in the Washington, DC, area. "People are going to watch news when they want it, and they're going to come to cable to do it."

There's no evidence that local stations feel threatened by local cable news channels. Paul Irvin, former news director at Washington's WUSA, says he never considered News Channel 8 to be much competition. "They weren't taking away from our base audience," he said. But the very presence of a hyper-local station based in the Virginia suburbs was a factor, Irvin said, in WUSA's decision to open a Virginia bureau this year. Lynch thinks local cable news has had some additional influence. "I believe the affiliates in Washington have gravitated to covering more of the stories we think we pioneered," he said, citing transportation and county politics as two examples. Willis says that's true where he is, too, pointing to News 14 Carolina's decision to assign a beat reporter to state government. "One week after we started, I noticed an unusual increase in the number of state government reports airing on the other stations," he said.

What local cable news clearly offers is another choice. Not flashy or slick, but useful and predictable-much like all-news radio. And it's an alternative not just for viewers but also for journalists. As Rick Willis put it, "My wife told me, 'You don't sigh before you go to work in the morning anymore.'"

This article was originally published by American Journalism Review, October 2002.