News Notes

In what has become a regular bit on his show, Conan O’Brien aired a supercut this week of local TV anchors from around the country saying the exact same thing. In this edition it’s “Is it time for dogs to have a social network of their own?” (video above).

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Former Philadelphia anchor Larry Mendte has penned a column in the April edition of Philadelphia magazine about the “desperate” state of local news in the city. Mendte, currently a commentator at WPIX in New York City, was fired from KYW in 2008 after a highly-publicized tryst with co-anchor Alycia Lane. He writes:

The world has changed, and TV news hasn’t. Anchors sit at a desk at a designated time, tossing to reporters at the scene of the story you already read about that morning. The weatherperson talks forever in front of a map; the sports anchor shows you 10 seconds of highlights from three games. As it was in the ’70s, so it is now. My kids and their friends from elementary school could do a similar newscast with Flip cams, Skype, a green screen and video from YouTube, and it would be a heck of a lot more interesting.

Local news has to start not only changing with the times, but catching up with the times. We already have the information; tell us what it means.  Read more

Facebook and Twitter are overrated.

According to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Facebook and Twitter are still relatively small drivers for news.  Many more people get their news online by going directly to a news website than they do by clicking on a social media recommendation.

Just 9% of Americans very often follow news recommendations from Facebook or Twitter, compared to 36% who very often go directly to a news website and 32% who find news by using a search engine. Read more

“Could this be the end of e-mail overload?” That’s the question dozens of stations asked recently in nearly identical stories about the email simplifying service Shortmail.

As he did last November when a slew of local stations used the phrase “push the envelope” in covering his plan to officiate a same-sex wedding, Conan O’Brien created a supercut of anchors repeating the same copy (video above).  The stations include affiliates of CBS, Fox, and NBC.

Social media was an important component to local news operations in 2011, and it’s safe to say that 2012 will bring more opportunities for audience interaction online. To help you navigate, the RTDNA is out today with a list of “5 New Years Resolutions For Your Station’s Facebook Page.” Here are some of their tips:

Dust off that dictionary. Sure spelling doesn’t matter on the air, but just like on your web page, you look foolish when you spell things incorrectly on your Facebook page. Facebook doesn’t have spell-check, so you may actually have to look things up. Do it…look it up. Your station loses credibility every time you spell something wrong.

Talk to me! People use Facebook as a community. You should do more than just push your stories or tease a chance at winning a prize if people “like” your page. Use your stories to generate discussions. Ask for people’s opinions. Be a friend in the community, not a billboard. Read more

It’s that time of year again: people everywhere are packing their bags and heading home for some much-needed holiday vacation time. Except, in many cases, for journalists. Across the country, producers, photographers, anchors and reporters are staying put, assigned to odd shifts because the news never stops. If you’re stuck with holiday duty this year, TVSpy has got you covered — we’ve compiled a survival guide with tips from people who have felt your pain. Read on for their suggestions.  Read more

Representatives from small-market local stations met with the FCC this week to argue the case for shared service agreements in the local news landscape, saying that such agreements can be necessary to survival for cash-strapped stations. Broadcasting & Cable has more details:

In their pitch to staffers with commissioners Robert McDowell and Mignon Clyburn, representatives of the Coalition of Smaller-Market Television Stations, the markets where FCC rules limit joint ownership, said that such agreements allow stations to preserve local -programming. They also tried to put in context the financial pressures on smaller stations that make such arrangements necessary.

According to data submitted to the FCC and based on NAB TV financial Surveys, the pre-tax profit average for markets 50-210 went from $908,462 in 1999 to only $42,003 in 2009, the last year for which figures were shown.  Read more

Broadcasting & Cable is out with its annual “Local TV Executives of the Year” list (subscription required). B&C contends that 2011 was a remarkable year for the local landscape — with tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, with Hurricane Irene, and with the ever-present problem of how to make it all work on a shoestring budget:

From floods to wildfires, and even that once-in-a-century earthquake that rocked the East Coast, local stations were at times forced to report under the most trying circumstances. Because that is what their FCC license mandates, and that is what their DNA tells them to do.

After the jump, read the full list of B&C winners. Read more

In the waning days of 2011, Neiman Journalism Lab’s Carrie Brown Smith takes a look at what the news industry has in store for 2012. Among her predictions is that with political ad spending on the rise, and with stations increasingly mastering social media, the next 12 months will be a good ones for local news:

As some metropolitan daily newspapers continue to slash their already drastically-reduced staffs, they no longer have quite as commanding of an edge in reporting muscle over their broadcast counterparts. In addition to the election-year advertising boon, local television, with its recognizable personalities, also has a clear opportunity in the digital space … Broadcast reporters in our market have already generally been more proactive in their use of social media to share stories and interact with the audience, and the door is now open for them to increase the public’s reliance on them for [free!] news and information. Read more

Earlier this week, WTVF aired a dramatic report on a man who crashed his truck through the window of a gas station convenience store in Nashville (video of the report is after the jump). The segment, complete with exclusive surveillance video of the crash, was reported on by WTVF’s Nick Beres, who talked to Poynter about the challenge of writing copy for dramatic video. Read more