There’s more news on local TV than ever–more than five hours every day, on average–but is it any good? It depends on where you look and whom you ask. On some stations, serious reporting is hard to find, squeezed out by crime and fluff. And even at stations where good journalism is valued, there’s no let-up in the pressure from managers to do more with less. “Less time, less resources to work with and yet the demand for more and more product causes stress and causes people to burn out,” says Mike Donahue, a veteran reporter and anchor at KOIN in Portland, Ore.
Donahue’s is just one of the voices in a new documentary, “Running on Empty: The Brain Drain in Local TV News,” produced by two Quinnipiac University journalism professors, Karin and Bill Schwanbeck. If it sounds like an unrelievedly gloomy look at local television news, that’s about half right. Former reporters and news directors paint a grim picture of a business content to replace experienced journalists with cheaper, less capable rookies–a business that largely refuses to invest in quality. According to the Schwanbecks, only four of 40 stations in the top ten markets give investigative journalists time to cover stories in depth: WFAA and KDFW in Dallas, and KHOU and KTRK in Houston.
The film doesn’t stop there. It also examines some efforts to change the paradigm, including non-profit journalism centers and online sites. But it’s clear that those efforts alone won’t fill the gap.
Producer Karin Schwanbeck says she hopes the documentary will spur some change, possibly an effort by the FCC to hold stations more accountable. But she admits she’s not optimistic. “I’m not sure if it’s too late,” she says. “The genie is out of the bottle and I’m not sure if we can put the genie back.”
Given that assessment, why is she still preparing young would-be journalists for jobs that might not exist? Because, Schwanbeck says, she hopes they’ll be the ones who might be able to make a difference. “As Dan Rather would say, ‘You have to learn to write and you have to learn to fight.’”
any idea where or when this airs?
For now, it’s available online. The embedded video is the full documentary.
The best advice I ever got from my dad (an excellent journalist who trained many excellent journalists) was to study history, English, political science, law–not communications. Why? The technology always changes, and you’ll always have to re-learn the tech stuff, but wizardry is worthless without solid news sense.
It depresses me beyond all explanation to watch both local and national news. Daily I search for the most basic city-hall coverage of my little burg, to no avail. Daily I channel-surf, looking for some semblance of intelligent, concise political analysis (or even a complete rundown of 5W+H), yet leave unsatisfied. These days, I get most of my news from the BBC, CNN En Español, and MSNBC by way of satellite radio, This Week with Christiane Amanpour, Fareed Zakaria GPS, and from my personal selection of international and domestic RSS read-ins online.
Out here in viewer-land, I’ve learned the depth of alienation most viewers express about broadcast news. People are fed up with inane, black/white, dualistic false choices framed as “debate.” We as journalists (even those of us not currently working in the industry) must take up our responsibility as members of the Fourth Estate and as the voice of the people in a participatory democracy. We need to take back our profession, get rid of the inane blather, moralizing, and gossip tarted up as reporting, and get back to letting folks know what’s going on. We need to respect their intelligence and stop talking down to them. We need to get out of the newsroom and invest some shoe-leather in covering not only breaking news, but also the slow, dull, ponderous investigative work that leads to compelling big-picture reporting.
Yes, as some folks out there may recall, Bosnia isn’t sexy. But history tells us why it matters.