Why all the local TV news?

Stations have been inundating the L.A. air with news throughout the day and night (32 hours each weekday), which may or may not be the ticket to keeping local broadcast operations alive. I write about the economics of TV news in the February edition of Los Angeles magazine. Some snippets:

News generates nearly half of a station's annual revenues and usually turns a profit, especially in large markets like Los Angeles. It's cheaper to put together a newscast than it is to buy high-end syndicated talk shows--in some cases, a lot cheaper. Once the anchors, reporters, producers, helicopters, and satellite dishes are in place, the incremental expense of scheduling another 30 or 60 minutes of news is relatively low. What's newsy at 1 p.m. will probably stay newsy at 3 p.m.

KABC, just as an example, is said to be paying $240,000 a week to broadcast Oprah, at least twice as much as it would cost to produce an hour of news in that same 3 to 4 p.m. time period. The station hasn't announced what will replace the talk show when Oprah Winfrey exits in 2011, but featuring news would save around $6 million a year, probably enough to offset any ratings declines. Advertisers would likely sign on because they consider news to be quality programming and because there's little chance their commercials would be skipped over by DVR users (who records newscasts for future viewing?).

Last September the 15 highest-rated stations in the Los Angeles market were being viewed at some point of the broadcast day by 728,000 households, down from 1 million households for the same period a year earlier. KABC lost 57,000 viewers; KNBC, 29,000; and KCBS, 27,000.

The audience is not only smaller but older. The Council for Research Excellence, a Nielsen-funded organization, asked people from different age groups to chronicle how much time they spent in front of a screen, be it TV, computer, video game, or smart phone. Those in the 18- to 24-year-old bracket clocked more than eight hours a day, but they were watching live television only 41 percent of the time. Those older than 65 were watching live television 84 percent of the time.

By the way, my piece includes a couple of comments from Nancy Bauer Gonzales, who had been news director of KCBS and KCAL until she was replaced last month by Scott Diener, former head of news operations at the CBS duopoly in Dallas-Fort Worth. From what I understand, there's a lot of nervousness about cuts.