Although the earliest experiments with television in the 1930s included simple newscasts, and the first stations licensed provided local news, most local VHF television stations began creating their own newscasts as soon as they went on the air in the 1950s or 1960s. Doing so provided evidence of community involvement and an identity amid otherwise indistinguishable fare. UHF stations neither had the budgets nor the audience ratings to do so. Early local newscasts were brief and non-visual, for videotape technology, debuting in 1956, was too cumbersome to leave the studio and live remotes were all but impossible for their cost and complexity.

Some stations purchased newsfilm from newsreel companies. 16-millimeter film, while an excellent newsgathering medium, was costly and required at least three and a half hours to be processed, edited, and set up for the process of playing it back into a newscast. By the 1970s, as more and more viewers purchased color television sets, color film replaced black and white. Visual coverage of national news increased as the networks trusted their affiliates to cover important stories and send them to New York for the network newscasts. But until the 1980s, quality television news remained the near exclusive domain of the networks, and particularly of CBS. Local stations could not match the look or experience of the networks and rarely profited from news.

Between the mid-1970s and early 1980s came a local news explosion, attributable to a synergy of technology and economics. Sony introduced the 3/4” video cassette recorder, a portable machine capable of recording 20 minutes on each cassette. With it came simple and reliable editing equipment permitting the rapid assembly of stories from the field. Ikegami and RCA produced shoulder-borne television cameras to be used with the field recorders. Electronic News Gathering (ENG) was born, and by 1975, 65 percent of local stations in the United States were using ENG equipment, though many continued to use film into the 1980s. The earliest ENG equipment was expensive and was adopted slowly by all but the wealthiest stations. Field camera and recorder were later combined into the most popular news-gathering tool of the 1980s and 1990s, the Sony Betacam. Stations experimented with many new tape technologies in the 1990s, with many stations opting for smaller and cheaper formats like Sony’s Hi-8 or, later, Pansonic’s DV.

ENG made more pre-produced material and story “packages” possible, allowing for more news and greater advertising revenue. With the technological revolution came broader conceptions of local news. News could be more visual, immediate, and exciting. The ability to produce more news—through the expansion of local resources and a plethora of national and international sources—led stations to add newscasts. Those with existing newscasts expanded their operations. With the rapid growth of cable television in the 1980s and 1990s, many cable operators established newscasts of their own, often in towns and cities not well served by broadcasters.

With, at the very least, an early- and late-evening newscast to be filled each day, news directors developed new strategies, and looser standards of journalism, to fill the time and attract viewers. By the 1990s, many stations added morning and midday programs, producing six hours or more of news daily. Newscasts increasingly presented crime or minor tragedy (the fires and accidents which are inexpensive to cover and never in short supply) as news, and made stories shorter and snappier, especially those that were not easily illustrated. Reports on City Hall or problems in the schools offered little visual excitement and so took a back seat to sensational but unimportant news. Local news watchdog Rocky Mountain Media Watch ob-served that between 1994 and 1999, “violent topics consistently comprise 40 to 50 percent of all the air-time devoted to news” despite the fact that U.S. crimes rates were dropping.

From the mid-1970s to the present, newscasts have been fierce battlegrounds for viewer loyalty. Stations earn a substantial portion of their revenue from their newscasts, and aggressively promote their news. Popular syndicated entertainment programming leading into newscasts is used to deliver viewers to a station’s news product, and a popular newscast, in turn, boosts ratings for an entire evening’s programming. Stations peddle newscasts and newscasters with billboards and other advertising. But when programming and promotional strategies fail, stations turn from the expertise of their own managers to high paid consultants with a track record of ratings increases and a supposedly scientific approach.

The best known consultants are Frank Magid and Al Primo, but there have been countless imitators. For tens of thousands of dollars their firms conduct viewer surveys and focus groups. The results—a vague indication of what a few viewers think they like—are used to rebuild newscasts from the ground up. Newscasts are made “marketable.” The typical gimmicks offered by consultants or newly hired news directors included new or redesigned sets and changes in on-air “talent.” Consultants maintain vast nationwide videotape files of news talent, and records of their respective ratings, to help clients find the perfect personalities.

Finally, a new format is usually adopted. The most grating of these, known as “happy talk” (usually under the “Eyewitness News” designation), in which dual anchors bantered with one another about innocuous matters, has mercifully died away in most markets. Other common formats, some still in evidence, include “Action News,” with quick young reporters and barely edited video of the day’s highly visual carnage, or “News Center,” emphasizing reporting and relevance to viewers. As stations acquired adequate technology to produce live news coverage in the late 1980s, “liveness” was invariably made the newscast’s raison d’être. This often puts reporters in ridiculous situations, filing live reports from dark, long-deserted loca-tions, without the depth and quality a pre-produced report would provide.

Despite these variations in theme, local news in the U.S. has maintained an astounding consistency of format from its earliest days. Newscasts are divided into four or more segments, separated by commercials (which are, after all, the reason the newscast is there). Actual news, broadly defined, comes in the first two segments, often including a superficial recap of world and national events when local news is sparse. News is delivered by one or two anchors (usually an older Caucasian male and younger Caucasian female, with limited ethnic diversity in some urban markets), and contains a mix of readers (with an anchor delivering the story), voice-overs (with anchors narrating over videotape), packages (pre-produced stories by reporters), and live reports. One stylistic element has changed in fifty years of local TV news: the average length of soundbites—the time newsmakers are given to explain ideas to viewers—has dropped from an excess of twenty seconds down to seven seconds.

The third and fourth segments are usually sports and weather (with the one of greatest local interest coming first). In smaller cities, much is made of local school sports to lure the parents of schoolchildren to tune in (a sought-after demographic for advertisers). Hour-long news formats and 24-hour regional formats have more segments, but add little in variety apart from extra feature stories, and increasingly (aping CNN and its ilk) lengthy “news analysis” discussions between anchors and hired pundits.

Local television’s most urgent task is to persuade audiences of its own relevance to their lives. To ensure its very survival, it attempts to demonstrate that it provides something more or different than national newscasts and other TV fare. But localism alone is no guarantee of relevance, so local news often resorts to exaggeration. Routine storms are presented as threats to life and limb, errant teenagers as deadly gangs. Populist or consumer advocacy stories often pose as news. During the 1990s, some stations merged the content and aesthetics of tabloid newsmagazine shows with a colloquial reporting style in the hope of attracting a young audience, and desperate efforts to capture the youth market—traditionally the least interested in TV news—continue. Other stations copied the national cable news companies, offering several stories at the same time through the use of an irritating and uninformative “crawl” of words at the bottom of the screen.

But encouragingly, some stations took a new approach, eschewing crime and tragedy except where substantial numbers of viewers are affected, avoiding gimmicks, and focusing on explaining social and political issues. Some replicated the community-service focused “public journalism” model taking hold at many newspapers. Stations going this route—as did Chicago’s WBBM for a short time in 2000—remain rare, because those that have done so gained awards and praise, but few rating points.

Quality journalism is not entirely absent in television news, but rarely does it come before economic considerations. As shown by McManus (1994), active discovery of news, especially that which society’s powerful prefer hidden, is costly, giving rise to the common allegation that TV news legitimates the status quo. Such journalism requires the allocation of station resources and personnel over long periods to produce a single story.

Excellence in television news does exist, and is recognized in annual awards by the Associated Press and numerous industry organizations. In rare, but remarkable, instances local television news goes on the air full time to report on local disasters or major events, or invests in investigations that bring about needed changes in public policy. When local TV journalists resist sensationalism and premature reporting such coverage can provide a vital public service beyond the means of other media.

Television news operations are fairly autonomous departments within broadcast or cable companies. The senior manager of the news department is the news director, and may be assisted by one or more executive producers. These individuals are responsible for controlling the general look and feel of their newscast while satisfying the demands of their corporate superiors. The successful construction of each newscast is the responsibility of a producer, who in the smallest markets may double as anchor or news director. The producer must ensure that every element of the production is ready at airtime, and deal with problems or changes while the newscast is on the air. In large news departments this involves the coordination of dozens of reporters, videographers, writers, feature producers, tape editors, graphic artists, and other specialized staff. They work with the on-air talent to develop the lineup (story order) of the newscast and write portions of the show not provided by reporters or news writers. Control of day to day newsgathering operations is the domain of the assignment editor who has the unenviable task of ensuring that everything of importance is cov-ered. As the center of incoming information and the dispatcher of a station’s news coverage resources, the assignment editor has considerable power to determine “the news.”

The technical production of a newscast is accomplished by a staff independent of the news department. Studio production is supervised by a studio director (or newscast director), who works closely with the producers and talent to ensure that each production is flawless. A well-directed newscast is one that calls no attention to its complex technical elements. In larger markets the studio director coordinates a large production team, but in some small markets may perform a remarkable solo ballet of switching, mixing audio, timing, and myriad other tasks. Even the largest news operations, though, are slashing their production staff through the installation of robotic studio cameras and other automation.

Local television news is highly dependent on new technologies, regional news even more so. But while some basic production equipment, like digital cameras and non-linear editing, provide higher quality at lower cost than ever before, other important technologies require massive investment beyond the reach of smaller news departments. The next major development after the field recorder was the rapid increase in the use of microwave systems to transmit live or taped stories from remote locations (also called ENG). Now, all but the smallest stations operate microwave-equipped vehicles.

By the late 1980s, most news departments were using computers to write and archive scripts, at the very least. Many had begun to use integrated news production software designed to simplify writing TV news scripts, arrange them for a newscast, and deliver them to teleprompters for the news anchors to read. Television journalists now make extensive use of computerized information retrieval services and databases, and many television stations have established their own expansive websites to provide updates of stories, special services like highly localized weather forecasts, and to encourage viewer feedback. Increasingly, station websites are being called upon to turn a profit as well, and so most feature extensive advertising and cross-promotion, but little news.

From the late 1980s, Satellite News Gathering (SNG) became the technology to most change the industry. It made regional television news possible, permitted local stations to cover national and international events, and dramatically extended the news-gathering reach of stations. Local TV news was thereby delocalized. An entrepreneur, Stanley Hubbard, is credited with beginning the SNG revolution. Domestic satellites launched in the early 1980s had the new capability of handling signals at a higher, more efficient, frequency band than before—the Ku band. Hubbard began Conus Communications to provide access to these satellites for a “cooperative” group of local stations. The stations would be able to reserve satellite time cheaply in five minute increments to “uplink” a story from the field to their studio and to the rest of the stations in the cooperative. Stations began to purchase sophisticated Satellite News Vehicles (SNV) to transmit localized reports from the scene of major stories anywhere. Not coincidentally, Hubbard also sold SNVs. The networks established plans to help affiliated stations with the cost of purchasing SNVs (at around $300,000 each) in order to create their own cooperatives of live sources and to ensure that they alone would receive any important story from a network-funded SNV. The latest news vehicles have both satellite and microwave transmission capabilities and, due to digital technology, are smaller, lighter, and cheaper.

Stations may receive stories from one or more satellite cooperatives they belong to, their own network (if an affiliate), a national cable news service like CNN or MSNBC, Reuters or Associated Press, other specialized services, public relations firms, and their own news gathering resources. Helicopter news coverage also became common in the 1990s.

The proliferation of sources and the ability to send and receive stories instantly and inexpensively within virtually unlimited geographic areas gave rise to regional news, which has emerged in several forms. An early example of regional television news was an agreement between seven SNG-equipped Florida stations to share resources and personnel, presenting an image of seamless statewide coverage to their audiences. In 1986, News 12 Long Island was started by Cablevision and other investors. Using a mix of ENG and SNG, the cable news channel presents 24-hour news coverage, often live, of the vast Long Island area, which had previously been underserved by the New York stations.

Many other local and regional 24-hour cable news operations have since been created, including some carried by different cable operators spread over a large area, such as New England Cable News and some large city cable operators, most notably Time Warner in New York, have also established twenty-four-hour news stations.

With the flurry of station sales and purchases taking place since the start of extensive broadcast deregulation in the 1980s, station ownership by non-local investors became common. In a sharp contrast to the heavy investment in news of the 1970s, many news departments now run on shoestring budgets to maintain the illusion of community service at little cost to their corporate parents. In many small and medium markets, news departments operate with a staff of a dozen or fewer, and—as with many of the regional news operations—eager young reporters work as “one man bands,” acting as videographer and reporter on the several stories they cover daily. Their salaries are among the lowest for college graduates. Owners unwilling to invest in news often close their news departments and more profitably counter the competition’s newscasts with syndicated programs. Many news departments are experimenting with new ways to pay their own way. News or weather programs are provided to other stations in the same market that have no news staff of their own. Increasingly, revenue-generating commercials and cross-promotions are presented as news, as when one San Francisco station directed viewers to its website to purchase Who Wants To Be A Millionaire board games, as part of a feature news story.

Local television journalists often produce their product with little knowledge or concern about who is watching and why (though they do better in this regard than their national counterparts). When stations do research their audience, what they discover may tend to lead them to ignore the substance of their newscast for the superficialities. It is rarely determined how much viewers actually learn from TV news, but existing research suggests it is very little, and often not what producers intend. Distant ownership makes the lack of connection with audiences more acute. By some accounts, the pressure to sacrifice public-service journalism for corporate financial interests has reached crisis proportions in local TV. The firing of reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson by a Florida FOX affiliate in 1997 because their investigative reporting threatened bad publicity for key advertisers has gained the most notoriety, but a national survey in 2000 showed that pressure and intimidation in the newsroom is commonplace, with nearly 40 percent of local broadcast journalists admitting to avoiding stories which might threaten their company’s financial interests (Pew).

Other research has shown that contrary to arguments made by the FCC as justification for deregulation, conglomerate-owned stations generally do a poorer job of public service than those owned by smaller companies (Napoli, Project for Excellence in Journalism). And local TV, like its network mentors, continues to ignore vast portions of the population—especially the poor and urban working classes—and present community issues almost exclusively through the eyes of local business owners (when not through the eyes of its corporate parent). While television news has come far, a reorientation toward genuine community service and away from entertainment and profit are desperately needed. As Walter Cronkite observed nearly four decades ago (Time, October 14, 1966), a half-hour news-cast has fewer words than the first page alone of a decent newspaper, so anyone relying on TV for their news in formation will never be as well in formed as they ought to be.