Is Local News Just About Weather and Elementary Schools?

[Pengwuino]

Local "news"?

Sometimes I think all local news is for is telling us what the weather will be like and what's going on at elementary schools. So far I swear they went on for 5 minutes about how the air conditioning went off at an elementary school for 2 whole days! WHO CARES?!??! I'm just waiting for the 10 minutes of what hollywood slut did what with who this time. Then maybe 20 seconds on what Obama is doing today. SNORE.

That's it.

DISCUSS!

 

[jtbell]

In most cities, there's not enough "hard news" that affects a significant fraction of the population, to fill up an entire half hour, let alone the hour and a half that most TV stations around here put on at dinner time. So you get elementary-school stuff, traffic accidents, house fires, and crime reports.

I watch it anyway because sometimes something comes up that does interest me. One half-hour segment is enough for me, minus the sports report which I usually don't watch. Now that I think of it, not all the half-hours include a sports report, so I should switch my DVR to record one of those instead of the 6PM one which I've always done out of habit. I'm old enough to remember when 6PM was the time for local TV news.

The main reason stations show so much of it is that it's profitable for them. With any show that they produce themselves, they get to sell (and keep the money from) all the advertising time they're allowed to have (something like 17 minutes per hour according to FCC rules). With network programming, they get only perhaps 25% of the advertising time.

 

[Redbelly98]

No local news is good news. No school shootings or bombings in my local town and surrounding ones -- I can live with that!

 

[Andy]

If you don't like it, don't watch it.

Simples.

 

[ThomasEdison]

Of course local news might not cover international events however I am somewhat disturbed that all news stations are pretty much ignoring the catastrophic flood in Pakistan right now; yet Haiti Earthquake news was 24/7. One fifth the country of Pakistan is flooded! Thats the size of Florida!
The casualties will be extreme.

 

[Astronuc]

I don't watch network TV or listen to local radio stations.

I get my news from the regional public station, which also reports BBC. Otherwise I read the online news from various sources such as NPR, BBC, AFP, AP, Reuters, and some online news sites.

I tend to follow the international news.

I catch some headlines in the local paper for local, state and some national news. The local paper had a map that showed a path of some severe weather - macroburst. It ended in my front yard. We were lucky that it didn't do more than break a branch in one of our trees. Another house nearby had a tree dropped on it, and the power lines were down at the main intersection just west of us. Some parts of trees from a house across the street and about a hundred feet or so blew into our front yard.

Earlier in the day, I had watched the lightning show out of my office window. All a sudden, a lightning bold hit about 300 feet from my window. It struck the ground between a tree and building, which were separated by a three lane road. I was expecting the tree to explode because I thought the lightning bolt was hitting the tree. But it must have struck a metal pole because the tree was undamaged. The lightning bolt was really interesting because it flashed about 6 times before going out. There were a few smaller trailers arcing off to the side, but the main leader was rather impressive!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The only local news that we get isn't local. We don't live in a mega-metropolis like Fresno.

Actually, that's not true. If there is any local news, my neighbor will tell me about it within a year or two.

 

[FrancisZ]

When I was very little boy, my grandparents would read The Daily News (Brooklyn Edition), my father The New York Times, and my mother Newsweek or TIME Magazine.

Later as I got older, I noticed that each tended to watch more televised news, although still of somewhat different venue. My grandparents generally watched the "Metropolitan New York" news (like Channel 4 NBC), whereas my parents (being of a more worldly point of view) watched MacNeil/Lehrer on PBS.

Today, both of my grandparents have passed on; my father is out of the house, so I don't know what he actually does; and my mother, somehow manages to strictly adhere to a nearly all MSNBC schedule.

I, on the other hand, somewhat nostalgically frequent TIME and Newsweek; on occasion, read BBC or NYTIMES online; and watch the Newshour whenever I get the chance (I have to fight off my mother for television time)--but I still can't figure out why Lindsey Lohan went to prison!

 

[collinsmark]

Local news has changed quite a bit over the last decade or so. But I'm supposing it is reactionary.

Most people (particularly over the last decade) increasingly get their national/world news online. The local news stations still have one niche though: the news that is local. If it wasn't for the news that was 'local', I wonder if sustaining numbers would still watch the local news.

It's an interesting trend. I worry about it sometimes.