Local TV News Entering Brave New World

Hearst-Argyle Television is among the elite band of TV station groups defined by the high quality of its TV journalism.

Twenty-seven of its 29 TV stations air news and, in any given book, as many as 23 may be ranked either No. 1 or No. 2 in their markets.

And those stations reap more than their share of industry awards. Just this year, WTAE Pittsburgh won a Peabody for an investigative series and WBAL Baltimore captured two Murrows -- one for a documentary, another for a news series.

Overseeing it all from corporate headquarters in New York is Fred Young, senior vice president of news.

Young has his own list of honors and accomplishments, which include RTNDA's First Amendment Service Award and the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters' Broadcaster of the Year Award.

It is also a distinction that Young has spent 46 years with a single company in a business where job hopping and market climbing is the norm. More than half of those years were spent at WTAE, learning the business and TV journalism from the bottom up.

In this interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell, Young shares some of the accumulated wisdom of those 46 years. He says that TV news is undergoing fundamental changes. The Web is not only providing another outlet for stations, but changing the way it is being produced and the urgency with which it is distributed. And, he says, day of the star-driven newscast is coming to an end.

An edited transcript:

What's the big challenge facing TV news these days?

It's maintaining the impact, the significance, the importance and the value of local television and making sure that the people who are out there who will all soon be receiving digital signals, many of them on high-definition television sets, understand that the best most comfortable source of local news should be your local television station supplemented the newer platforms of the Web and mobile. My goal is to make sure that we continue to play a very viable role in informing local communities.

But certainly young people aren't going to TV stations for news. How do you keep TV news relevant to them?

When there's a big story, it becomes relevant to everybody. Our challenge is to keep it relevant every day. You know, we're often accused of doing too much crime, but crime is relevant because crime, if it impacts you, is important. At the same time, we have to do investigations and we have to talk about politics and government.

The Web and mobile don't have communicators per se. The Web offers you video in snippets and, if that's the way you want to watch it, so be it. We still believe that the people who present the news, write the news, produce the news and organize it for the viewer are critical to the process of understanding the news.

Economically, the news is all bad. Station groups are feeling the pinch. How is that affecting the news business?

It's impacting the amount of people we can hire. The economic pressures to maintain the bottom line and to keep the stockholders happy have resulted in a lot of people losing their jobs across all forms of media, but I believe that as the economy comes back -- and it will come back as it has in the past -- we'll begin to refill our work force, but we'll be smarter the next time.

Smarter how?

As you reported in TVNewsCheck a week or two ago, we won't be paying outrageous salaries for people to single task. We'll be looking for people who can multitask, who are willing to get out and, to use an old cliché, get their fingernails dirty and to report and to produce and to work the 24/7 schedules that our business requires. I just think we're learning to be smarter.

Are we going to see the end of high-priced anchors, who don't multitask, who sit in the studio and read news?

I hate to stereotype because there are some great anchor people, many of whom work for us. But the ability of anchor talent to just leverage one station against another is going to end very soon because this is going to be all about what we can do within our communities and not what we can do to keep a small group of people happy.

The great anchor people of the past are just sort of leaving the business and we all know who they are. As news becomes more ubiquitous, I think that the team concept will be more important than the individual player.

Every TV station will look more like the Tampa Rays than the New York Yankees. As Warner Wolf points out on Imus every morning, the Rays have one of the lowest payrolls in the major leagues.