In news the new credo is think local.
First it was newspapers. Facing declining circulation and ad revenue, papers across the country have begun beefing up their local coverage, aiming to tighten their hold on their core markets while trimming costly bureau operations.
Now it's TV. NBC Universal plans to start up a 24-hour hyper-local New York news channel on one of the digital cable channels of its New York affiliate, WNBC.
Modeled after the round-the-clock cable news channels, the new NBC channel will provide weather and traffic info and news headlines and features in half-hour cycles.
The channel will launch in the fall and compete directly with NY1, a Time Warner Cable channel that already offers much of that sort of coverage. The new channel will operate independent of WNBC, which will continue to air its newscasts at their traditional times.
The announcement comes at a time when local TV stations are struggling against declining ad revenue, with election spending falling far short of expectations and the iffy economy cutting into spending by many other categories.
NBC says it intends to launch the new channel without hiring additional staff but rather by reassigning job functions among existing WBNC staffers.
Network executives say they will know by second quarter next year whether the new channel will be successful, and if it is, they plan to launch similar channels in other major markets where NBC owns local outlets.
That will most likely kick off similar launches by other networks and television groups.
The value of such spinoffs, if they work, is the opportunity to broaden the affiliate’s ad base to include smaller advertisers who could not justify the expense of buying time on the affiliate.
Just how much viewership these additional channels might draw is a big unknown, as is their potential for generating ad revenue.
But if they can be launched without additional expense, they are no-lose propositions, giving the local station that much more penetration in the market. Whatever revenue comes in is a bonus.
It also better positions those affiliates to compete with local newspapers, which have become increasingly aggressive in building up their web sites as they intensify their local coverage, in some case competing directly with local TV by arming reporters with video cameras to carry out on stories.
NBC plans to retrain its existing New York news team to produce more stories that can be distributed across all of its TV as well as online outlets. That means changing duties and shifts and creating new positions as former ones are revised and phased out.
The WNBC newsroom will be revamped into a content center for broadcast, cable and the web, with the aim of eliminating duplication of teams from different platforms covering the same story. "Rather than focusing on any one distribution platform, WNBC is redesigning its operations to be content-focused rather than platform-driven, something that is essential to ensure long-term growth in today's media environment," wrote John Wallace, president of local media at NBC, in a memo to staffers yesterday explaining the new structure.
This is similar to a newsroom structure Gannett has in mind for the newsrooms of its papers across the country, where stories are created for distribution across multiple platforms.
