Local News Drying Up?

If you are to believe a study by Duke University, local news operations are drying up in small towns around the country.

The most stunning fact produced in the study….only 17-percent of the news stories produced in the communities studied were based on events that actually occurred within that community.

Huh?  That’s crazy. If you believe that, it means local newspapers and radio stations are just recycling public service information and ripping off other media to fill their news holes.

We don’t have that problem here. In fact, Fairfield would have been an outlier in the Duke study. The radio station and the newspaper are almost totally driven by local events. News is the tail that wags the dog here.

Local news is so important to us. We invest a disproportionate amount of our time making sure it is current and correct, whether it be on the air or on our headlines on wfiwradio.com. We update news several times a day.

My first move upon arriving in the general manager’s job was to make sure all news was generated within our newsroom and I re-engineered the news format to include interviews so we could use the actual words of the newsmakers. We strive to have at least two segments of news audio in each major newscast.

The Duke study decries the loss to communities of depleted news commitments by local media. It weakens the community. Consumers don’t have a grasp of local political issues.

 In my heart of hearts, I believe strong local news coverage is an essential asset to the well being of the community….

…And it is just good business for us.