This is the time of year when local television news usually turns to stories about dirty restaurant kitchens, cosmetic surgery gone awry, and the hidden dangers of hair dye to lure viewers and boost ratings.
The November “sweeps,” one of the semi-annual periods where viewership is tracked for the purpose of determining the rates for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ad spending, is notorious for programming that’s aimed at the broadest, basest audience.
This year is a little different.
With the country at war and people afraid of boarding a plane or opening a letter, L.A. stations are taking a more subdued approach to the sweeps period.
Plans made before Sept. 11 were torn up and replaced within a matter of days.
“Literally, the day after the Sept. 11 attacks we realized it could not be business as usual for us,” said Cheryl Fair, news director at KABC-TV Channel 7. “We didn’t want to do stories that seemed frivolous.” The station scrapped many of the stories planned and sent reporters to Israel and Pakistan. Replacement features have included a piece on a dentist from Loma Linda who is helping to care for Afghan refugees and a health story on small pox.
“Normally, you’re looking for more pop culture kinds of stories… something a little splashy that might get some extra viewers to watch a particular station,” said News Director Roger Bell of KCBS-TV Channel 2. “All those kinds of stories pale in comparison to the events of Sept. 11 and seem trivial.”
A few days after the attacks, Bell said he and other KCBS executives met to reassess their plans and decide how to present news and promotions. More trivial stories were bumped.
“Sweeps or non-sweeps, the face of local news has changed,” he said. “Certainly for the whole month of November and even before that we’ve tried to emphasize coverage related to Sept. 11 and terrorism and we’ve tried to do it, I think, in a responsible way.”
The sweeps period is no small matter for local television. Careers can be enhanced or broken based on whether viewers are drawn to this or that series of reports.
“The stations live or die by these ratings,” said Nicole Simpson, broadcast director of L.A.’s Optimum/OMD, the media-buying unit of ad agency DDB Worldwide. “If you drop by half a point, it can mean millions (of dollars lost).”
A show’s ratings and “cost-per-point” determine ad rates. If a program has a cost-per-point of $2,500 and a 10 rating, it will cost an advertiser $25,000 to run a 30-second spot. For a typical show, that means nearly $500,000 in ad revenue per half-hour. If the show’s ratings fall to a 5, the ad price would be sliced in half.
It might seem that stations wouldn’t have to work as hard to boost ratings in this sweeps period, given the interest in news about terrorism and the war. But average Monday-through-Friday ratings for some afternoon and evening news shows were actually down in the first week of November compared with the like year-earlier period.
KABC fell from 7.3 to 5.7 in the 5 to 6 p.m. period, while KNBC-TV Channel 4 dropped from 6.7 to 4.8. KCBS increased to 2.5, up from a 1.9 rating. All three stations saw a ratings decline in their 11 p.m. newscasts.
The trick has been to come up with stories that will attract viewers to ongoing news events. Some recent promos illustrate the trend: “Is the Southland doing enough to show its patriotism?”, “Are local emergency rooms prepared for a major emergency like a biological attack?” and “What is it going to take to make the nation’s airports and airlines even safer?”
“(Local stations) will be doing series or investigative reports about how the terrorists will affect you in Los Angeles,” said Joe Saltzman, assistant dean of USC’s Annenberg School. “They’ll try to use the Sept. 11 fears to capitalize on them.”
He blamed the sensationalism not on the news stories but on how they are promoted. While working as a senior producer for a local television station in the 1970s, Saltzman said he learned that “the news guy has to live up to the promo.”
KABC’s Fair and others said their stations are taking a more cautious approach to news promotions.
“In November, it’s all about promotions. Well, we don’t want to hype anything. We want to promote but we don’t want to hype,” Fair said. “People need to get the information in a balanced, even-handed manner. The world is scary enough right now.”
Jose Rios, news director at KTTV-TV Channel 11, agreed that stations have to be more careful than ever to not “scare up a (ratings) number.”
“We pay attention to language. We pay attention to what we say and how we say it,” he said.
John Quarderer, vice president of research and consultation innovation for Frank N. Magid Associates, an Iowa-based firm known for its research on television news viewing, said “Our advice to clients is, ‘Keep close to what’s on people’s minds,'” he said. “Is the World Series the first thing on people’s minds or is it, ‘Did somebody get a letter with anthrax?'”
