Don't call ABC soft!

Last week, I quoted an NBC press release which said that NBC Nightly News had the most hard news for the week of Oct. 16. The analysis came from Andrew Tyndall, who concluded that NBC had 49 minutes of hard news, compared to 39 minutes for CBS and 36 minutes for ABC.

To suggest that ABC had the least hard news is misleading though. ABC devoted 12 minutes of World News' week to a series on healthcare. Tyndall "classified it as a hard 'feature' because the news being covered did not happen within the 24-hour news cycle," an ABC spokeswoman notes. But it was still hard -- and when you add the 12 minutes to the totals, ABC is on par with NBC for hard news.

Click continued for Tyndall's description of hard/soft and news/feature...




Andrew Tyndall:

I have a strict standard for 'hard news.' It depends both on the 'hard' and on the 'news.'

'Hard' is easy to understand: it means 'serious or consequential.' Thus the entire Prescription for Change series was 'hard' and all of the North Korea reporting (except for schoolchildren singing Do Re Mi) was 'hard' too.

'News' is defined as opposed to 'features-interviews-commentary' and is a measure of the timeliness of the events being covered. To be breaking 'news' those events must have happened within the current 24-hour news cycle. Thus Prescription for Change was a hard 'feature' series, not news. Similarly, Diane Sawyer's interview with the North Korean general was a news story -- his statement was breaking news -- but her scrapbook impressions were feature material not news.

Features, interviews and commentary can be hard or soft. 'Soft' is usually found on the show business, celebrity, sports and human interest beats. ABC and NBC typically run soft F-I-C on a 1:3 ratio with hard. Since Couric arrived at CBS, its soft:hard F-I-C ratio has changed to 1:2. Theoretically speaking, not all 'news' is 'hard.' In practice, the network nightly newscasts run very little soft news. On the rare occasions that soft news happens, I add it to the F-I-C category.