At 6pm on any given day on the ABC-affiliate WCVB/Boston, the following thirty minutes have nearly the same structure: within the first fifteen minutes, reporters cover an average of six stories, typically about house fires, car crashes, drug-busts. After a commercial break, the news anchors jump into the lead story, maybe about some white-collar crime. Next comes the weather, another commercial break, and an uplifting story of a celebrity visiting a children’s hospital to end the past twenty-eight minutes of crime and violence on a light note.
Source: Pew Research Center
While the audience is shrinking, television continues to rank first among sources of news for Americans. The basic structure of that story hasn’t changed in decades — crime stories continue to dominate and the trend toward fast-paced newscasts filled with shorter stories that lack depth prevails.
Sensationalized and formulaic, it is no surprise that conventional broadcast news leaves people feeling glum and emotionally paralyzed, surrendering to thoughts like “this place is nothing but violence,” “why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” and “why bother donating, there will just be more starving children tomorrow.”
Lost in much of the discussion about the future of local news is the pressing need for reform in local television, which often remains an afterthought. A large part of the reason for this is that local news outlets work under media conglomerates whose primary goal is to turn a profit and still believe that a story has to “bleed to lead.”
By neglecting the communities they serve and prioritizing costs and profits, broadcast media groups are cheapening the quality of local news.
Not only do groups like Sinclair and TEGNA continue to produce identical-looking news across their many local stations, but they also lobby for relaxed government regulations in order to save and make money: in October 2017 the Federal Communications Commission abolished the Main Studio Rule, a nearly 80-year-old policy that required AM, FM, and television broadcast station to maintain a main studio located in or near its community of license. The policy was intended to force newscasters to be connected and accountable to the communities their programming reached, but was lifted to “reduce regulatory burdens and costs for broadcasters.”
By neglecting the communities they serve and prioritizing costs and profits, broadcast media groups are cheapening the quality of local news. This is particularly harmful for rural America, where just two-thirds of residents have regular broadband access at home, and only limited data services on their mobile smartphones. That means millions of Americans without regular internet access are relying on broadcast television as their sole form of entertainment and information about their communities.
The lack of innovation in broadcast news is concerning, and with the current practice of media monopolies it is easy to feel hopeless for the future of broadcast news. But although the broadcast landscape may seem stark, there is work being done to make positive–and practical–change to televised news storytelling.
For the past three years, Northeastern University School of Journalism has teamed up with two leading local news stations, WLS-TV/Chicago and WCVB-TV/Boston, to create Storybench: a research project focusing on digital storytelling. Besides doing research on news trends and audience demographics, journalists at Storybench are also experimenting with new ways to tell a news story. Given access to news stories from six newsrooms around the country, journalism students have “remixed” the stories to be more engaging, in-depth, and overall less formulaic.
Originally aired segment:
Storybench “remixed” segment:
Taking the same sound bites and video clips from the original reporter, Storybench students were able to enhance the story with a new approach, using animation, providing cultural and context, and highlighting the most important parts of a story rather than the most sensational. The “remixed” segments are slightly longer, too, allowing time to explain the event with clarity and detail while still being an appropriate length for TV.
Researchers and journalists at Northeastern’s Storybench are proving that televised news can change for the better. If newsrooms start to rethink how stories can be told, they can then begin to rethink what kind of stories can be told.
They have the potential to help make sense of civic life by focusing on localizing federal policy and big campaign issues in ways that no national outlet can, and making everything from tax policy to immigration, sea-level rise to small business regulations, more relevant to specific communities. They can root the national-level partisan arguments in the lived experience of local people and give citizens a better shared sense of reality and why policies matter.
Rather than watching the news and wondering “why should I vote? Why should I donate or volunteer?” perhaps in the future we will watch and learn how to register to vote, what local nonprofits to donate to, which programs to volunteer with.
Journalism 2.0 