Our own KTVU Channel Two News apparently wins “Best Local Newscast in the US” every year, and for the most part, I wasn’t particularly surprised. But they’ve really started slipping. A few months ago, they had a commercial in which a reporter was evidently on Endor in the middle of a midnight hurricane with a Blair Witch nightcam following her around as she did the report. The voiceover said, “Why did we send our reporter out in the middle of the woods in the rain at 3am? Find out tonight on the Ten O’Colock News.”
WT friggin F?
However, it’s better than Gary Radnich. Too bad they won’t send that yutz out in the weather. Or to Endor.
I could produce a local news show. I’d hire an attractive man and woman and then I’d have them start on the front page of the local newspaper and read the first three paragraphs of every article out loud on the air for twenty minutes. Then I’d have a different guy come out and flip over the paper and read the first paragraph of every article on the sports page for four minutes and forty five seconds. Then I’d have a fourth guy come out for fifteen seconds with a magic eight ball to do the weather.
Minimum wage in New York is $6.00 an hour. My crew works three and a half hours a week, but I’ll pay them for a full four. The paper costs fifty cents a day (a dollar on Sundays). The magic eight ball will be a start up expense the first week but after that my entire operation will run for $100 a week.
Local news is the worst thing on TV, absolutely. Yes, there are shows with shallower content and lower production values. But nothing else represents a more sweeping abdication of responsibility. While local news audiences are (mercifully) shrinking, there are still millions of people who rely on local TV news, only to be manipulated, scared, teased and misinformed over and over again.
There are no longer visionary leaders in local TV, and that’s unlikely to change as the corporations that own the stations become larger and fewer. The only hope is that the local news business will change radically with technology, and the task of informing people will move back into the hands of people who put journalism ahead of ratings, or money.
They do that here for snowstorms, even when it’s just a hint of snow. Forecast calls for an inch, or even just flurries? All three network affiliates are doing their “Snow Show” and pre-empting all other programming. They’ll have reporters at the salt domes showing the dump trucks filling the plows, another one at a local grocery store interviewing people as they come out will filled carts, and one more at the local Home Depot, showing emptied pallets that held salt and empty cartons that used to hold shovels.
I’ve seen a couple around here. There’s one by a regular (sort of anonymous) woman that’s not too bad, but there’s one for a local Toyota dealer that uses the owner’s daughter, Krystal Koons, who’s too blonde and toothy. She’s kinda scary.
Teaser:
THIS PRODUCT MIGHT KILL YOU!!! Find out what it is as 6.
Program starts:
Your weather FIRST
Some kind of weather is occurring.
(BREAKING NEWS if it is some kind of precipitation.)
Our top story:
There was a fire…
Police were called to a local…
Someone involved in sports did something…
(BREAKING NEWS if Ohio State player or coach involved.)
Human interest stories:
Somebody got sick after misusing this product. So be careful.
Martha Stewart-type craft how-to segment. (or a recipe)
Won’t somebody adopt this cute puppy?
Little Johnny has so many obstacles to overcome.
Weather:
Second longest segment of the program.
3 degree guarantee.
Sports:
Longest segment of the program.
The Buckeyes…
The Buckeyes…
The Buckeyes…
Here are some national team scores.
And now your local high school team report.
Final word:
Something taken from some bizzaro national story.
Like a chicken with no head that can count to ten or something.
Damn you. For you have reminded me of the chain of used car dealers in the area that chooses to sell their cars with a commercial of ** yodelling** teenage girls.
Do as we do to make it more palatable: make fun of the broadcasters. We have pet names for them: helmethead, buttchin, Shamu, gerbilgirl, hairdo, shovelchin, etc. Recently, an absence by Shamu coincided with the news that three whales had been taken at the village of Savoonga. We were sure she was taken in a horrible case of mistaken identity. But she resurfaced (ha!) a few days later.
Don’t get me wrong: local news can be abysmal. But IMO, the worst ‘local’ programming has got to be the magazine/talk show. Some small towner with clothing supplied by the local zip-n-save taking on the ‘big issues.’
I hosted a local cable magazine show fow a while, and even I was appalled at how bad it was.
Yeah, and you’d be hit with a copyright infringement suit so fast that your head would spin. At the very least, you have to rewrite those stories before you could read them on the air.
They FLIP OUT. They flip out, get everyone in the metro area to flip out, and then report on the flipping out, even if it’s just rain. They’ll start doing reports on all the cancellations that THEY CAUSED.
If I watched the news at all, I’d be scared shitless to step foot in Baltimore. It’s like they’re reporting on a foreign planet and I live there, and drive through it top to bottom and back again every day.
It’s much more like tabloids, and that’s why they get viewers. It’s celebrities, fires, violence, robberies. I can’t stand the local news.
And, yes, it’s just as bad everywhere. I thought it might be better when I moved to a big city. Nope. Still just as stupid.
Oh, the self-promotion they do. They ran a commercial a couple years back where they showed a news crew at picnic. Some guy goes, “The community is like the kernels of corn, and Denise and Vic are the cob, holding the community together.”
I’m just mad that my local ABC affiliate ditched the Bugs Bunny show to stick three hours of yammering babble onto the Saturday morning time slot. And the news here follows the same formula that you get in other places–here are the latest bank robberies, drunken car crashes, baby shakings, and murder suicides. Then it’s Mr. Weatherman, will it snow?
The weatherman will inform us that someone might have seen a snowflake in the metro area, so yes, it’s snowing. (OK, I’ll give the weatherman a break; one of ours is actually pretty funny and he likes to bring his dogs to the studio. At least the dogs are cute.)
Then there’s the sports, and then the wrap up which usually involves something a bit glurgey such as the brave little boy with leukemia who reads to other sick kids at the hospital.
Is it the worst thing on TV? I don’t know, possibly those infomercials that are on at 1:00 AM are worse. The local news broadcasts ARE bad enough that I’ve pretty much given up watching them.
I remember Aaron Brown from when he was on a local station in Seattle. He always seemed smarter than the material. I’ve heard some people describe him as smug, and I can kinda see that. But once, when he was doing the overnight World News Now for ABC, he gave all the hockey scores multiplied by pi. I’ll always respect him for that.
(Lord knows how much stuff World News Now pulled over the years. At some point, at the same time every Friday (something like 3:00 a.m.) they had a guy play the accordian and sing The World News Polka backed up by two dancers in trench coats. I did a web search once, and apparently they had multiple versions of the song, one of them done by William Shatner.)
John Siegenthaler (now the weekend anchor at NBC, I think) also used to be on a Seattle station. That guy’s got sailboat fuel for brains.
I defy anyone to come up with anchorpeople as bad as we have here in Las Vegas. I guess since we have the reputation as “Sin City”, the local affiliates felt the need to counter that with the blandest cookie-cutter newscasters in the world.
Any other cities have the requisite 60-something anchor who’s been on your station since the dawn of electricity? We have Gary Waddell. The local joke here is knowing we didn’t see a news story on his newscast because the guy we saw was awake.
The only one who, IMHO, does a halfway decent newscast is Paula Francis. CSI fans know her as the anchorperson you see on almost every episode.
But, as bad as newscasters are, most weathercasters are even worse. We have one enjoyable weather person here, Nate Tannenbaum, and he was just bumped to the 4 PM show to make room for some putz who thinks he’s actually funny . But for the worst in weather, no one even comes close to John Fredericks. He’s sort of in the mold of Lloyd Lindsey Young (NY and SF Dopers should remember him) but with none of his endearing qualities :eek: . The poster from Albuquerque mentioned the guy who brings his dogs in occasionally; this asshat mentions his mutt on every single newscast !
Speaking of weatherpeople, has anyone noticed that they tend to be the only local personalities who eventually go national? Spencer Christian, Ira Joe Fisher, Al Roker–all weathercasters.
Here in Connecticut, I think the local news is dedicated to making the state seem horrible. They find whatever shooting or stabbing happened in the crummy big cities and play that up. Or if they don’t have that, they find some tragic car accident. Grrr.
I generally agree with this, except for the “possible” exception of a station we watched when we lived in Houston.
It featured a restaurant report of violations area restaurants incurred, and the highlight of the day was when Marvin Zindler (sp?) yelled, “SLIME IN THE ICE MACHINE!!!”
oF COURSE, YMMV; you may find this an even more horrible example…
Remember that Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa become Kids’ News anchors and Bart keeps upstaging Lisa’s attempts at serious news with shaggy dog stories? The koo du graw (or however you spell it) was a new segment Bart liked to call, “Bart’s People.”
There’s a local dork who started as a sportscaster with a bad toupee and graduated to an anchor with a bad toupee and he seriously started a segment called – I’m not making this up – “Zappolo’s People.” :smack: The promo showed him listening to somebody nodding in empathetic sincerity while holding his hands in a steeple at his chin. I thought I was gonna hurl.
Part of the job description. If you get hired as a “reporter” for a local news station, you know that several times a year you’re going to be standing outside in the rain, providing us with the Hot News Flash that: it’s raining.
What I like is when they put a reporter, live, outside of the closed & darkened building where something significant happened 8 hours earlier. God forbid they tell us something without having a backdrop.
But I was pleasantly surprised to read that Minnesota TV stations do this, too. I thought they did it in California just because the weather is so boring, that any precipitation generates excitement.
