Changes in TV News

Ray Carter

I start work next week, and I'm not doing very much right now. I wondered why our Internship Producer was having our program start a little later then I expected. There was a reason, here's the story.

There's an interesting thing going on in local television. The trend for some stations is to fold their news department or consolidate with another television station; this leaves out a local news voice with unemployed journalists. A lot of people have been critical about media mergers, but the station I'm interning is changing that model.

KSDK-TV recently merged with ABC 30 to start producing newscasts for the station. For about 10 years, Channel 30 decided to forgo low rated newscasts and instead reran old episodes of The Simpsons. Needless to say, this wasn't working out for the station. They decided to have KSDK-TV produce two daily newscasts at 5 PM and 10 PM competing directly with each other.

The interesting aspect is that KDNL-TV still keeps separate offices and a studio downtown. Most tourists can usually see the giant 30 sign down the street from the Edward Jones Dome. A lot of people in St. Louis were abuzz with the interest in more daily news to choose from. What would the new newscast look like?

Will we see new or old faces? Will they build a new studio? Most metropolitan markets usually have 3 television stations to choose from when watching the 10 o'clock news. St. Louis now has 4. The Fox station in town decided to follow a similar route by adding in the Local CW Channel 11 News team. They kept all of their on-air staff and expanded Channel 11's newscasts.

This allowed both stations to compete with each other in an odd-way; even at 10 PM.
When going in for my interview, the Internship Advisor Ava sounded really excited about producing the new newscasts.At training, the other interns sounded really excited about the changes. They couldn't stop talking about it. The station has expanded their staff adding between 20 to 30 people, including more interns for the summer and fall.

Channel 5 also decided to break up it's popular morning anchor team of 20 plus years, and add two newscasts at 10 AM And 4 PM. This wasn't very popular. During both of my interviews at the station, countless interviewees all had Art Holiday Scholarship papers (morning anchorman). They gushed over how great of an alum he was to Mizzou. A lot of viewers had some harsh comments about the changes. The station only moved him to anchor the afternoon show. I was shocked that it was a big deal to viewers. People talked to me about it and I hadn't started the intern program yet; I had no comment.

The station went into over drive to accommodate viewers; even politely responding to facebook requests from people. I decided to check out the new changes, and they work well. I think it's a great thing that they're doing, and the new show makes use of the newsroom and outdoor studio. The main anchor Kay interacts around the newsroom and even interviews people via Google+. Soon all the negative comments turned to positives, and I'm sure people will still watch.

I think it's great that media companies want to invest news programming in St. Louis. A lot of people did criticize the station for the cutbacks that it had done a few years ago. A lot of familiar faces seem to disappear. I read a newspaper article that featured our station, and it gave the reason that more people wanted to see more local programming. I think it's a positive thing to see more stations compete, because it gives a broad voice to St. Louis residents. It will be interesting to see how the four stations compete against each other at 10 PM. As for next week we start our first full shift on Wednesday. I'm a little nervous,wish me luck!