Whenever we travel we usually watch TV a little in the mornings as we’re getting ready to go out and see the sights. Later in the day, around News Hour, we may watch more just to see if the USA is still in one piece. We don’t spend a large chunk of time watching but we do see enough for me to have formed an opinion about how much better Nashville TV stations (as a category) are than almost any other place we’ve been. Surely a big part of that is familiarity with the various personalities in our local area, and a lack of it elsewhere.
Do you observe similar things? Or do you find that almost anywhere else has better local TV than your home area?
What do you attribute the differences (if any) to? In our case, I believe Nashville has a much more entertainment-savvy culture than most places we travel and thus have a much slicker approach than other cities in the South.
Even when I watch TV coverage in other cities on YouTube or other streaming video, I have the same basic reaction to it. Maybe I’m biased, but our local TV is better.
If you’ve ever been in Middle Tennessee and watched any TV in this area, do you agree or disagree with what I have observed?
In Thailand, local TV just plain sucks. No other word for it. We use our set to monitor BBC News (piped in free to our condo building) and watch movies, because we’re just too busy to fool with subscribing to cable. (Local TV is the same all over Thailand. Unlike in the US, where you have a few stations per city of any size, the entire country here watches exactly the same programs coming out of Bangkok; there are no other TV stations anywhere else. It’s all treacly sopa operas with amateurish-at-best acting and silly game shows.)
But even when I grew up in West Texas, I always felt TV was better elsewhere, and I mean anywhere. Later, living in Albuquerque and Hawaii, I didn’t even bother to get a TV set – didn’t need it and was too busy – but when I did get to watch it, I always thought the news portions were very good, especially in Hawaii.
When we go anywhere now, we’ll watch local TV, even if we don’t understand the language, but just when we get up in the morning and kicking back at night. The only place we go in the US anymore is Hawaii. We were last there two years ago, and the local TV was just as good.
I’m from the Toronto area, probably the largest broadcasting market in Canada. Nearly everything on television (and radio) is slick, professional and glossy. That’s what I grew up with. Imagine my surprise when I went elsewhere, to find that much of local television looks and sounds amateurish. Now I live in what could righly be considered “the boonies,” where people get jobs in media to learn their trade, and then move on to a bigger market. That means that they haven’t quite got it down yet. It’s this kind of college-TV-club atmosphere that’s on a continuous loop, as those with experience leave, and those with none come in to replace them. Overall, presentation and production values are severely lacking.
Seattle TV is better than Portland TV, but not as good as L.A. TV. SanDiego TV sucks, as does Spokane TV, but Austin TV is fairly good. Kansas City TV is primitive and Denver TV is only slightly better.
These are all my own opinions, they are not nessacelery(sic), to be taken as fact.
If you can find a more hilarious example of incompetent TV than this one by all means please post it here or start a new thread for such stuff. Outrageous!
Holy crap! I’ve seen or heard some people get rattled on the air before, but that’s just excruciating! The guy was drowning in his own flop-sweat. I actually feel sorry for him, and can imagine how much he wanted to crawl under a rock and die.
When I worked in TV news (several years ago), some of the cities with a reputation of being better than their size were: San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis & Wichita. Per the OP, I do seem to remember that Nashville was well-regarded too.
I’ve never really noticed a difference in quality, but slightly on topic: I’ve noticed that one of the Buffalo news stations really goes the extra mile to find local connections to national stories. Sometimes it makes sense, but at other times it’s like they scrape the bottom of the barrel for a tie in. I don’t usually watch much tv on vacation, so perhaps it happens a lot in other areas too.
We put on the one channel an antenna receives here the first night we arrived in Big Podunk, TX. The big story was a disease infecting one local horse breeder’s stock. The rest was mostly road closures/construction. The message was pretty much - want news? Move to Houston!
I agree when I travel, it’s wierd seeing other local newscasters. I’ve become most accustomed to Detroit’s and Chicago’s, so I’m used to fairly sophisticated broadcasts. When I was in Lawrence, KS for work a couple years ago, it seemed almost every on-air personality was on par with that poor guy in the clip.
By the way, when the guy in the clip finally delivered the titular line (“Boom goes the dynamite!”), I felt like someone actually punched me in the gut-- it was so horrible!
I’m from Boston, so that’s my standard. It’s good, although the old UPN affiliate was a little lame. Chicago always seemed fine, although I could never get over the late night news at 9. I couldn’t watch the local stations out of Sacramento when I live in Davis. It was awful in comparison.
I worked in Wichita television for a number of years (production), and always thought the whole lot rather pedestrian (though it made for some great Christmas tapes). But then, I saw little or nothing of what our “peer group” was doing, so maybe this is a case of the mundane being exceptional.
Steve Doocey and Gregg Jarrett of Fox News both worked in Wichita. 'Nuf said.
When we first moved here to Las Vegas, we thought, “Geez, what terrible drivers they have here!” This was because every newscast seemed to cover nothing but auto accidents. Then it dawned on us - there really wasn’t much other news to cover here.
Since then the city has grown and now, sadly, Las Vegas has the same numbers of murders, robberies, political scandals and other “big city” news items to cover.
The newscasts are actually pretty good, but of late they seemed to have either fired or moved almost every newscaster on every station in the past few weeks! Not quite sure the reasons, but few of the “older” newscasters are still in the same time slots.
Still, compared to LA, the Las Vegas newscasts are just as good if not better.
Germany has gotten better, but in the old days, they had to be the most boring newscasts in the world. Their national newscasts consisted of one talking head, speaking in a monotone, with the occasional picture (not film clip) of some news event. They could have announced the impending end of the world and it still would have put you to sleep.
