Listening To Audiences Is Key To Local TV’s Survival
Listening To Audiences Is Key To Local TV’s Survival - NewsLab
This post was originally published on this site
During a recent family gathering, an uncle ambled up to me with a serious look in his eye and leaned in close. “You work in the media?” he asked in the middle of a party on a beautiful summer day.
I nodded. He continued. “How much of what you report is made up?”
Tense moment. I tried to lighten the mood. “About 50 percent,” I said, “but we’re never sure what half.”
He stared me down, and I could see this was the wrong approach. As I tried to back pedal out of my joke, I’d locked in his belief that news was made up. One uncle a world doesn’t make, but this isn’t the first time I’d heard this profound doubt in the veracity of journalism. My rock-solid foundation of belief in local news as a force for good is not shared by all, perhaps even most.
In a research project I observed, a room full of young professionals expressed outright distrust for local TV news. One participant bluntly said, “If I see it’s a local news reporter, I don’t trust it.”
They would rather get their news from their neighbors or social accounts they follow.
The toughest habit for local TV news leaders to break is the belief that they alone should decide what their audiences see. For years, high lead-ins and limited competition allowed this flawed approach to persist. But the landscape has changed, and it’s time for a fundamental shift in how local news directors operate.
Many still rely heavily on “gut instinct,”
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.