Accurate, concise, and contextual news coverage.
In the last week of October, in a newsroom serving a market small enough that half the county knows the anchor’s kids, a finished four-part “special report” went onto a server and into a holding pattern. Nothing about the story changed between October 22 and November 3. Same facts. Same people waiting for answers. Same …
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A retired news director called me from Tri-Cities, Tennessee. He’d spent twenty-three years at WJHL, the CBS affiliate in Market 93. The reason he was calling: he’d just found out the station’s entire physical tape library — Beta SP, 3/4-inch U-matic, even a shelf of 2-inch quad tapes from the 1970s — got hauled to …
How Ratings Culture Distorts What Gets Covered in Local TV News By Dana Whitfield | April 9, 2025 Ratings culture is the set of incentives, daily rituals, and ownership pressures that push local TV newsrooms to chase audience measurement numbers above public-service journalism. It is not a single policy or a bad habit. It is …
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The Local News Accountability Project How Ratings Culture Distorts What Gets Covered in Local TV Newsrooms By Dana Whitfield | April 15, 2025 Ratings culture isn’t some abstract industry term. It’s the daily reality of how local TV stations decide what you see. News directors watch the numbers. Consultants spin those numbers into strategy. Producers …
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How Ratings Culture Distorts What Gets Covered in Local TV Newsrooms By Dana Whitfield | April 9, 2025 Ratings culture is the set of incentives, habits, and management pressures that push local TV newsrooms to treat audience measurement as the primary editorial filter. It sits alongside adjacent forces such as sweeps periods, consultant-driven story selection, …
Continue reading “How Ratings Culture Distorts What Gets Covered in Local TV Newsrooms”