The graphic is a bit of an overstatement. WISH-TV in Indianapolis does not air news 24 hours a day. But it's moving in that direction. Starting in January, the station will air 9 1/2 hours of local news every weekday, adding four hours to its current …
You've probably seen the story. By now, millions of people have. Reporter Boyd Huppert of KARE-TV in Minneapolis calls it the story that broke the Internet--a feature about a little boy and his elderly neighbor that's been viewed and shared all over the world. Plenty has …
Stop me if you've heard this before: A local TV station is creating the "newsroom of the future." It will soon launch "an interactive, social newscast with viewer generated news content." This time around, it's the Fox station in Philadelphia, announcing a weekend morning show with "unique" content provided by …
The video is black-and-white and grainy, but it makes the case. A manager at a company selling what it claims is health insurance instructs employees on what to tell prospects on the phone: "Tell them any f---ing thing," he says. Reporter Jeremy Finley's story for WSMV-TV in Nashville about United …
Forty years ago, as a newbie producer at the ABC affiliate in Washington, DC, I had to juggle live coverage of the Watergate hearings. The length of our midday newscast depended on when the network dumped out, and they usually gave us little warning. Some days …
News conferences are part of every journalist's work life. Some reporters can't go a week without covering several--largely because the newsmakers on their beat hold group sessions regularly but rarely schedule one-on-ones. It's not easy to get good material from a news conference, but some journalists are …
In the movie Broadcast News, a network producer accuses a reporter of crossing the line between journalism and entertainment. His reply: "It's hard not to cross it; they keep moving the little sucker, don't they?" They sure do. The line between news and advertising has been blurring …
Three more hours of news in one day? OK, so not all three hours are on the same station. But the announcements by stations in Chicago, Grand Rapids and Portland, Oregon that they're adding news all came on the same day, and that says something about …
One of my last beats as a network TV reporter was the environment, and I covered everything from air quality to endangered species to climate change. I found it fascinating and complicated--drowning in jargon and tinged with politics--and often hard to visualize. What to do? When dealing with …
Riddle me this: If big TV station groups keep getting bigger, what happens to local news? It's a question I tried to answer, in part, in this year's State of the News Media report. Over the years, as stations have been bought and sold and joint …
WOWK reporter Jessie Shafer is no stranger to live tweeting but even she was surprised when her Twitter stream blew up as she live tweeted a city council meeting. We've "Storified" the story so you can see how it all played out, including reaction from Shafer's Twitter …
Ask viewers what they want to see on local TV news and politics never pops to the top of the list. But ask people if they care about where their tax dollars go or about the services governments provide and the answer is obviously yes. …
