• by David Kaplan , December 13, 2004

Television viewers want their local stations to provide more global news coverage, but with a local context that is not currently provided by network or cable news, a study from Radio and Television News Directors Foundation says.

Local news is often described in station promotions as the 3 L's: "live, local and late-breaking," the study noted. So when it comes to coverage of international issues, local television news operations have long occupied that spot between the rock and the hard place. Substantial portions of the viewing audience rely on local television news as their principal source of information, be it local, national, or global. However, local newscasts, by design and definition, traditionally have not functioned as worldwide news distributors, the study noted.

Of the eight stations the RTNDF studied, four of the half-hour broadcasts represented early evening news, while the remaining three half-hour news shows, as well as the one-hour broadcast, occupied the late time slots.

For both early and late broadcasts, around two-thirds of all stories were War on Terror-International Leads (66 percent early news, 64 percent late news). Another 13 percent of the early evening news stories were part of the War on Terror-Domestic Lead coverage--but this dropped off to only 3 percent of the stories on late evening news broadcasts.

One-fifth of the global news stories in the early evening were part of the Collective Global category (21 percent); this increased to one-third of all stories in the later daypart (33 percent). Early evening global stories were also generally longer (36 percent were longer than one minute, versus only 13 percent of all late news), more likely to appear in the opening news block (91 percent, versus 49 percent of the late news stories), and more likely to rely on local station production (40 percent, versus 25 percent in the late time slots).

The RTNDF conducted three focus groups in June and July of 2004, one each in Omaha, Minneapolis, and Memphis. Forty-one frequent viewers of local television newscasts participated.

"For some viewers, the question of global perspective coverage was not whether they wanted it, but what other news and information it would supplant in a typical newscast," a spokesman for RTNDF said. "Some participants suggested what could be cut, with weather and crime coverage mentioned more frequently, but there was no unanimity. Without a doubt, viewers interested in seeing global perspective coverage wanted it to be localized, incorporating local views and local issues and local context, leaving the broader framing of the international news issues on television to the network and cable newscasts."