We asked our colleagues at Northwestern to offer reflections on the conference. Here are some. Feel free to join in, in the comments section below.

Tom Ksiazek
Media, Technology & Society Northwestern University
"The consumer is in charge." "We're not in the driver's seat anymore." These statements would be hard to swallow for any businessperson, let alone a television executive who has become accustom to an industry dictated from the top down. Yet, in the hypermediated present they are the reality. This was the general sentiment echoed throughout the recent Local TV News Experience conference hosted by the Medill School and the Media Management Center at Northwestern University.

In fact, the impetus for holding the conference was to present research on how to better address these concerns in the realm of local television news. Researchers Limor Peer, Ed Malthouse and Bobby Calder presented their findings from both a content analysis and audience survey over six months of five local television stations in Chicago. Their hope was to provide those in the audience (mostly local television players) with actionable recommendations to reverse the well-documented decline of television audiences.

The results of the content analysis painted a rather stark picture of local television news. For instance, over one-third of the sampled news stories were about crime, fire, and accidents. Further, only 9.6% of all stories were categorized as "news you can use." Finally, two-thirds of all stories had "no impact" on the lives of their viewers.

Okay, so what is to be done? Enter the results of the audience survey: 1,400 viewers responded to a survey that asked about their experiences with local news, resulting in seven "motivators" and four "inhibitors." Motivators are positive experiences and include "Makes me smarter" and "Anchor camaraderie," among others, while experiences such as "All-the-same" and "Too negative" make up the inhibitors. The idea, according to Ed Malthouse and Bobby Calder, is to measure the relevance of these experiences for a particular news audience. Then, craft a strategy to alter the content of the news to either enhance the motivators or limit the inhibitors. Finally, one would continue to measure these experiences, as well as news consumption, and continue to alter the content where appropriate.

Hank Price, President and General Manager of WXII-TV and Senior Fellow in Broadcast News Strategy for the Media Management Center, and Seth Geiger, President of SmithGeiger, offered inspiring words of wisdom in reflecting on the results of the research. Price called for a "revolution" in local news with diversification of distribution and new goals for serving fragmented audiences with content that meets their wants and needs. Geiger endorsed Price’s recommendations stressing the need to cater content offerings to both the cognitive and affective needs of viewers.

The final session of the day consisted of a panel discussion with all five news directors of the stations included in the research. The panelists repeatedly emphasized that they are well aware of the changing landscape of local news and they are already reacting. However, in general, they seemed resistant to any sort of "revolution."

It remains to be seen what implications the research on viewer experiences with local TV news will have. For now, it will serve as a model of innovative thinking regarding the uncertain future of an industry that faces increasing competition and declining audiences.


Rich Gordon
Associate Professor/Director of Digital Media in Education, Medill
The research suggests a need for TV stations to think completely differently about audience: instead of trying to assemble the largest local audience, to identify a target demographic or psychographic group and create a newscast based on their interests and desired experiences. It makes all the sense in the world, especially considering the overall shrinkage in the size of the broadcast TV audience. But the problem is that there are many other stakeholders (Nielsen, advertisers and ad sales staff) who continue to measure success based on size of audience. What will it take to change their mindsets?


Jack Doppelt
Professor, Medill School of Journalism
I came away from the conference with a number of strong impressions that will stick with me. The one I want to follow up on is for how we in journalism education, as well as those in local TV news, go forward from here.

The key, as the presenters emphasized is "engagement." I tend to agree that we need to engage with our audience, the more the better, and to do that we of course need to know who our audience is and what works optimally in engaging with them. From what I could tell, though, the first presenter, Limor Peer, had a much more narrow definition of what it means to engage. The definition the survey used in doing its content analysis related to "news you can use" and "impact on viewers," two terms I associate with more actionable forms of engagement.

The next presenters, Ed Malthouse and Bobby Calder, teased out a much broader definition of engagement, one that might subsume intangibles such as trustworthiness and making the person smarter and positive emotional reaction, not to mention even relaxation and anchor camaraderie.

As I think about the difference between those definitions from the perspective of either the individual journalist or the journalism educator training journalists on how to engage their audiences, it matters dramatically if one is trying to engage with a known audience by getting them involved enough to act on something or if one is trying to engage them by making them smarter or getting them to feel warm and fuzzy about the anchors.

Example just to ruminate on: If you're deciding whether and how to cover for local TV news a story relating to the misinformation about the friendly fire killing in Afghanistan of former pro football player-turned soldier Pat Tillman, under the more narrow definition, one might conclude not to cover it or to frame the story in a way to have audiences interact with each other through blogging. But under the broader definition, one might conclude that it is enough to inform audiences in a way that has them remember it because that will make them smarter. Or even easier, that it would suffice to use the story as a way to have the anchors interact with each other about it so that audiences feel more engaged with the newscast itself.

My sense is that the latter would allow local TV news to be comfortable in the conclusion that they're already doing that, so why change? Interesting to me is that when the panel of five Chicago news directors responded to the presentations, that is exactly the feeling I got; that they were saying thanks for the input but are doing that anyway. Much more to do on this...

Jon Marshall
Journalism Methods Coordinator, Medill
It was interesting to listen to all the local news directors talk about the need to find ways to differentiate their content, both on their broadcasts and on their Web sites, in order to reach increasingly busy and fragmented audiences. I suggest if their owners are serious about this that they can invest some of the large profit margins earned by local news into hiring more reporters who can do the kind of deep, enterprising stories that will make their stations stand out.

Archives July 2007

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