Local TV 

"Mixed signals of health and challenge" characterize the local TV 
sector, and "the next few years may determine whether the industry 
ultimately heads up or down." 

With viewership of local news on the wane, more people in local TV 
appear pessimistic rather than optimistic about its future, the 
report says, pointing to higher news-gathering costs in the face of 
sagging news budgets, heavier workloads for smaller reporting staffs, 
and a format many find to be "repetitive, formulaic, sensationalized, 
or insipid." 

There is some good news too: the business generally is healthier for 
local news than for network news, and networks still want to own 
more local stations. Also, advertisers and political campaigns still 
look to local TV to sell products and candidates. 

Local TV content is "dominated by the ethos of 'live, local and late-
breaking,'" the report says, particularly when it comes to covering 
crime. About three-quarters of local TV stories are local, and 70 
percent of stories are less than a minute long. Crime stories 
outnumber all others by at least two to one, and 40 percent of 
stories "are about fairly typical everyday incidents." Six out of 10 
local TV stories involving controversy "gave only or mostly one point 
of view," the report says, pointing to "an alarming tendency toward 
onesidedness and a steady disappearance of enterprise." 

"The notion that it has to bleed to lead in local television news is 
an exaggeration, but it is grounded in some reality," they conclude. 
A growing trend in local TV: "Centralcasting," in which local 
stations seek to cut costs by contracting to an outside concern for 
newscasts to air on more than one station. 

Again, not all the news is bad when it comes to local TV: The PEJ 
report says people tend to trust local TV more than any other type 
of news, even though most people seem to feel local TV shies away 
from complex issues. 

"In the end, the issue for local television is similar to that for 
newspapers," the report says. "It is such a robust business that 
declining viewership has not hurt revenues. Yet even more than 
newspapers, local television news invests little in improving the 
product," and that product is "getting thinner" as budgets are 
stretched further and as competition from the Internet increases.