Inventing Local TV News: A Case Study of Pitt Parade

Abstract

Local television news is ubiquitous. Today there are more than a thousand local commercial television stations broadcasting in more than two hundred markets. What local stations produce is mostly news programs. While about 90 % of what is seen over a local station originates somewhere else, from either a network or a syndicator of programs produced by independent production companies, about 10% is locally produced. Most of these local programs are news programs and stations have been expanding their newscasting: they do newscasts in early morning, local news inserts during morning network talk shows, news at noon, news in evening, and late at night. Many stations now do an hour's newscast in late afternoon and early evening, with some stations in larger markets doing two hours or more of news. Local television news comprises a large share of mass media news, what W. Lance Bennett calls our only broadly shared window on reality.1 One of assumptions about early years of local television is that little effort went into news. Jim Snyder calls this the light bulb theory of development of local news.2 Citing an article by Jeff Greenfield, media critic for ABC News, and a memo by Av Westin, also of ABC, Snyder writes: Westin and Greenfield seem to think that everyone in local news was just muddling along, doing their craven, mediocre thing until early seventies when, according to Westin, light bulb went on 'over col-