It's 11 o'clock. Do you care where your local newscast is?
Not as much as you used to.
Viewership of local news is down across the country, and for the same reasons network news is hurting: the Internet, changing lifestyles, and a bottomless generation gap.
"Increasingly, people find local TV news repetitive and not nutritious," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).
"They say the stories aren't telling them anything they don't already know. They're put off by what strikes them as superficial."
Philadelphians are no exception, judging by the results of the May sweeps.
All four network-owned stations suffered major losses weekdays at 6 and 11 p.m. (or 10 p.m. for Fox29) compared to the same period a year ago, according to figures provided by Nielsen Media Research.
At 6, the combined audience for KYW3, 6ABC and NBC10 fell to 630,000 from 695,000, a 9.4 percent decline.
At 11, with Fox29's Ten O'Clock News included, viewership dropped to 1.032 million from 1.202 million, a whopping 14.1 percent plunge.
Where did those viewers go? Not to cable, or to other broadcast stations. According to Nielsen, they turned off their sets.
Viewership for all programs at 6 and 11 p.m. in our town, the country's fourth-largest TV market, plummeted by 21 percent and 11 percent respectively from May 2006 to May 2007.
Philly stations were not alone in their misery. Their brethren in No. 1 New York, No. 2 Los Angeles, and No. 3 Chicago all took hits in their early and late newscasts.
Executives from CBS3, 6ABC, NBC10 and Fox29 all declined to be interviewed for this article.
Nationally, many stations have been disputing their ratings for months, questioning Nielsen's sampling protocol.
In May 2005, the company began using "local people meters," electronic boxes that record automatically what each family member is watching, using a representative sample. In our area, it's 800 homes.
LPMs replaced "passive meters," which recorded what was showing on the set, but not who was watching. In addition, viewers from a 1,200-home sample (in Philly) filled out paper diaries with their choices.
As a result, viewer numbers plummeted, across the board and across the country. Stations say the new system isn't accurate. Nielsen says it's more accurate than the one it replaced.
Squabbles with Nielsen are nothing new for local stations, says PEJ's Rosenstiel. "If you attack the messenger, you certainly blunt the message."
