SO LONG
Two Twin Cities TV stations drop daily in-depth segments
by Deborah Potter

Local TV news is all about branding. Action News. Crime Tracker. On Your Side. The catch phrases come and go as easily as stations change consultants, and once they’re gone they’re not often missed. After all, what’s in a name?

Sometimes, it turns out, plenty. Consider what’s happened in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

TV news in the Twin Cities used to be unique. As the average story length at stations around the country shrank to less than 90 seconds, Minneapolis viewers could look forward to daily TV reports with depth, no matter which station they watched. For years, all three major network affiliates aired long-form stories in their late newscasts, stories that regularly ran longer than four minutes, and occasionally up to ten.

The topics ranged from hard-hitting investigations to soft-focus features, but the reports shared common elements: strong, well-developed characters, not just sound bites; top-notch writing; and excellent photojournalism and editing. They stood out from the sameness that permeates local TV news. They were worth watching. And now, they’re harder to find.

Only KARE continues the commitment to daily long-form reporting with its signature feature, Extra! Last year, within weeks of each other, KSTP stopped producing its showcase Focus 5 segments and WCCO unceremoniously dropped its Dimension franchise, the one that started it all 15 years ago.

KSTP news director Scott Libin says he threw in the towel after three years because “it wasn’t working.” The station had hoped that adding longer reports at 10 p.m. would improve the newscast’s ratings. Instead, Libin says, “we often saw unacceptable erosion in our second-quarter-hour numbers.” According to station research, many viewers tuned out Focus 5 because they saw it as a signal that the news of the day was over. Libin says he was sad to see the segment go, but adds, “Our job isn’t to produce newscasts to our own tastes, but to serve the needs and interests of viewers—who often have a very different idea of what matters.”

WCCO spokeswoman Bronwyn Schafer Pope says her station says her station now airs longer stories about four times a week. “We are doing these kinds of pieces all the time,” she said. “Really, truly, the only change has been that we don’t call them Dimension any more.” But insiders say the stories are shorter and produced more quickly. Both WCCO and KSTP retain active investigative units. But a reporter at one of the stations says, “They’ve minimized our ability to do great things. Now they want us to do good things really fast.”

That’s what drove award-winning reporter Trish Van Pilsum to leave WCCO for the Fox station across town, KMSP, where she’s been promised that she can keep producing “meaty and satisfying” stories. Van Pilsum believes those kinds of stories can change the way people look at the world, and, not coincidentally, the way TV journalists look at their jobs. “Daily news is critical to what a
newsroom does, but eventually it sucks the life out of everybody,” Van Pilsum said. “It’s good to have work for people to aspire to.”

Dimension didn’t start out that way. Former WCCO news director John Lansing says it was born of a marketing need—to produce promotable stories that could draw and hold an audience—and it worked. Lansing says Dimension long ago disproved the widely held notion that local stations can’t succeed by airing long stories. “The point is that quality works,” he says. “But news directors confuse short and fast with compelling and interesting.”

That’s a mistake, says KARE news director Tom Lindner, who firmly believes viewers are willing to stay tuned for well-produced, long-form storytelling. “People not only sit still for it, they sort of crave it.”

Lansing is now senior vice president for the Scripps Howard television station group, whose television stations in Detroit, Cleveland, West Palm Beach and Cincinnati all showcase long-form reports and draw ratings, Lansing says. One station he’s particularly proud of is WCPO in Cincinnati, which is producing hour-long documentaries on local issues that have garnered a bigger audience than the programs they’ve replaced on the prime-time schedule. Says Lansing. “It’s local news that has meaning and impact.”

In Minneapolis, the shift in the local news landscape seems to have benefited the one station that stayed the same. According to Linder, KARE’s numbers were up at 10 p.m. in November from a year ago. The two stations that dropped their long-form franchises were flat.

Which makes me wonder: Is anyone in Minneapolis hearing the refrain from that old Joni Mitchell song? You know the one. “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

This article was originally published by American Journalism Review, January/February, 2003.