Local News Is Driver For NBC O&O Revival

Last year when Comcast was trying to convince regulators to allow it to acquire a controlling interest in NBCUniversal, executives insisted that they were committed to broadcasting and restoring NBC to its former place atop the Nielsen charts.

They have not accomplished that yet (they’ve been in charge only 10 months), but they are trying, most certainly at NBC’s string of 10 big-market TV stations whose ratings and reputation have fallen along with those of NBC primetime.

At a time when most other TV station groups are still keeping a tight lid on costs, the new owners are pumping “tens of millions of dollars” into the O&Os, says Valari Staab, a longtime ABC local broadcaster who was hired away from KGO San Francisco last spring by NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke and NBC Broadcasting Chairman Ted Harbert to lead the turnaround.

According to Staab, president of the NBC Owned Television Stations, those millions are going into greatly expanding news, shoring up neglected news infrastructure, generating more enterprise reporting, better promoting newscasts and stories and otherwise recharging the non-network daytime schedule.

Most telling, the group is in the process of hiring 130 new employees, mostly reporters, producers and photographers, but also a slew of creative services pros. Once completed, NBC stations will have boosted its head count by more than 5% to around 2,100.

So, can Staab and her fortified regiment of broadcasters produce the return that her bosses are looking for?

“I absolutely think we can,” she says during an interview in her sixth floor corner office at 30 Rock, NBC’s landmark New York City headquarters. “We didn’t get here overnight, it’s not going to get markedly better overnight, but if we can get these stations good, solid news operations and market it correctly, we can make these stations competitive fairly quickly and then eventually strong.”

The most visible manifestation of NBC’s investment has been new newscasts popping up at stations, particularly in the middle of the day. Since August, it had added 10 in eight markets:

• An hour-long newscast at 5 p.m. on flagship WNBC New York.
• A 30-minute noon newscast on KNBC Los Angeles.
• A 30-minute noon newscast on WMAQ Chicago.
• Two 30-minute newscasts on WCAU Philadelphia, one at 4:30 a.m. and one at 11 a.m.
• A 30-minute newscast at 11 a.m. on KNTV San Francisco.
• A 30-minute newscast at 11 a.m. on KXAS Dallas.
• A 30-minute noon newscast on KNSD San Diego.
• Two hours of news on weekend mornings on WTVJ Miami.

The 10 newscasts works out to an extra 1,100 hours of news per year, Staab says. By NBC’s count, those hours swell to more than 2,200 if you count newscasts at stations and at local Nonstop multicast channels added after Comcast’s takeover in January, but before Staab’s arrival in June.

Comcast promised regulators thousands of additional hours of local news at the NBC stations and at its Telemundo Spanish-language group, but Staab says she is pushing for more and better news not to please Washington, but because it’s the key to reviving the stations.

“In this day and age, to be competitive, you have got to be enterprising stories. You have got to be breaking news, you have got to be adding to the stories that you cover. You can’t just cover the daybook. You have got to hold people accountable at companies and in government.”

To support the expanded news efforts, NBC is building new studios or sets in four markets (New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Miami), establishing new investigative or consumer news units in five (New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco and Hartford, Conn.), upgrading its fleet of ENG vehicles, purchasing 20 new cameras and restoring helicopters to WNBC and KNBC.

And to make sure viewers are well aware of all that’s new, Staab has restored the promotions department at all 10 stations to full strength. Under the prior regime, promotions had been centralized in New York and each station had just one promotions person. In the new order, there will be between three and five.

Staab and the NBC stations are retreating slightly on one front.

With WNBC in the lead in 2009, the group began rolling out local news-and-information multicast channels in each of its markets. By the first of this year, it had four of the local Nonstop channels up and running — in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington. Then, in May it said it would launch three more — one for Dallas, one for Miami and one encompassing Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego. That’s seven Nonstops covering every market but Hartford.

Now, according to Staab, the plan is to create one national Nonstop channel using some of the local programs created for the original local channels and allowing for local news insertion. “We are going to take a look at what everybody is doing and see what we think will make it on the national network and what we think is too local.”