Ask almost anyone about the most endangered sector of the news industry, and the reply is likely to be newspapers.
Not so, says Leonard Downey, the former executive editor of the Washington Post.
Television news is even more threatened, Downey said according to KTAR.com during a visit to Arizona State University.
"As much as newspaper newsrooms are being squeezed, local television newsrooms are being squeezed more," Downie was quoted as saying. "I think there's just as good a chance of local television news disappearing as newspapers disappearing — and probably more of a chance actually."
His comments echo those made by television insider Bob Long, the news director at KNBC TV in Los Angeles, who told the California Media Collaborative over a year ago that he felt that local television news was on the verge of becoming extinct, because of plummeting
ratings and a fragmenting audience.
“The only people watching traditional
news are baby boomers, and they can’t live forever,” he said, referring to
television ratings that have “bottomed out in just about every major media
market.”
He noted that when he first started in television news four decades
ago, KNXT (now KCBS) received a 30 to 40 rating. Today, KNBC’s 11 p.m. newscast,
the most watched newscast of the day, gets a paltry 1.5 rating. Five o’clock
newscasts are fortunate if they even get a 1 rating.
Viewers in Los Angeles have seen the downsizing happening before their eyes. In March of this year, veteran news anchors Harold Greene and Ann Martin of KCBS, along with several news reporters, were let go. "The jettisoning of such experienced on air talent exposed the weakening of the once robust local station business," according to an LA Times article.
Why is this important? A survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) a year ago showed that nearly half of Californians still watch local television, while only 31 percent
say they read a newspaper each day. Even though television
programming does not provide anything close to the depth of reporting the
state’s newspapers offer, it is still a source of information that many Californians rely on.
If the ability of television news to do substantive reporting shrinks even more, along with more downsizing of newspaper newsrooms, there is a a real danger that Californians will have access to even less information than they currently have about what is happening in their communities and regions.
LOUIS FREEDBERG
