MEDIA : Channels Air the Little Picture : Trend toward ‘hyperlocal’ news coverage finds a conduit on cable. Broadcasts can be targeted to areas as small as several neighborhoods.

The lead news story on Channel 75 was about the Jelly Bean--a tiny shop near the high school where a clerk had been caught selling cigarettes to a minor.

On the screen, the young merchant could be seen trying to explain why he hadn’t asked the girl for an ID, a mistake that had earned him a citation from the police. “She looked old enough,” he said sourly before turning his face away from the camera.

This small-time sting did not rouse news directors at area TV stations, nor did it excite the editors at the local newspaper. But the police visit to the Jelly Bean was meat and potatoes for the cable News12 Neighborhood Network that serves seven communities on Long Island with all-news programming, 24 hours a day.

“What we’re trying to create here are news channels dedicated to specific communities,” said Barry Romanski, director of news development for the 8-month-old experiment. “The idea here is to get as hyperlocal as you possibly can.”

Hyperlocal? This comes in an era when satellites and lasers, the Internet and the telephone have shrunk the Earth into a global village. CNN and its soon-to-be competitors are scrambling to bring news instantly from around the world and round the clock. The news biggies are talking about expanding their audiences to new continents, not narrowing it to mere neighborhoods.

“We think this is an area where we’re somewhat going against the grain,” acknowledges Joshua Sapan, who is the CEO of Rainbow Programming Holdings Inc., which is creating Long Island’s Neighborhood Network. “We’re not contradicting those who say that the global news is important. But at the same time, your own block is fiercely important to you. As the world becomes more global, it simultaneously becomes more local.”

In fact, Sapan and others at Rainbow are among television’s programming pioneers for the news business. Already a number of TV executives have begun experimenting with mini-CNNs, in some cases as a knockoff of Rainbow’s News12 Long Island, an all-news television channel started almost a decade ago.

In New York, Chicago, Washington, Seattle and other cities, programmers have been adapting or re-creating 24-hour local news formats. These channels offer “wheels” of local news that are cycled throughout the day, often with updates at the hours when most viewers look for news.

Sapan and his company are now taking that experiment and making it more local, cranking down the focus from a suburban area to a smaller community.

“Because people have been trained with CNN or their local news, they want news from every perspective: international, national and particularly local. And they want it right now. They want it on demand,” said David Bartlett, president of the Radio and Television News Directors Assn.

Like many experiments in the world of new media, “nobody is quite sure where it will go and especially how it will make money,” said John Morton, a media analyst at Lynch, Jones & Ryan. “But everybody at least wants to be familiar with it because someday, something is going to work.”

Rainbow Programming Inc. already has a record at experimenting with cable. The company, which put together the Bravo channel in 1980 and the American Movie Classics channel in 1984, launched News12 Long Island in 1986. The 24-hour show became the precursor to several other local all-news shows, and it now reaches 700,000 households and is the “newscast of record for Long Island,” as Pat Dolan, Rainbow’s vice president for news, puts it.

“Just as News12 Long Island in a way pioneered the local 24-hour news channel, I think they are also, in a sense, pioneering this hyperlocalism,” said Rich D’Amato, a spokesman for the National Cable Television Assn. in Washington. D’Amato noted that the experiment comes at a time when the Long Island area has the technology to allow a news organization to target smaller areas, or “addressable boxes,” as those in the news business call them.

Rainbow’s neighborhood channel is sold through its parent company, Cablevision Systems Corp., which can target areas as small as 500 homes. This means that in an overall area of 50,000 to 70,000 homes, the programs can be directed to communities--in this case, seven neighborhoods.

For an extra $1.95 on a $32.95 monthly bill, each of those neighborhoods can get a different news show on their Channel 75. So far, the number of viewers is not something to brag about. In January, only 2,500 homes were subscribing to Hicksville’s station.

Moreover, the channels do not yet sell advertising and don’t hope for an overwhelming profit from the local pizza parlor or auto showroom if they do.

Sapan hopes that if the community embraces the hyperlocal news stations, that loyalty will translate into profits because it will enhance a cable system’s total package.

News12 Neighborhood News runs a lean and fast operation. It is housed in a few cubby-like rooms inside a Cablevision office park. There are no unions; the staff members are young, and each reporter churns out as many as 15 stories a day--including pictures--for the various channels.

When the experiment started, Romanski said they hoped for a 60-minute news show that would be repeated and sometimes updated every hour. As they began to hunt for news to fill this hour each day in such communities as Hicksville or Farmingdale, the length of the basic show grew shorter and shorter.

Now the news “wheel” is 10 to 15 minutes and features such stories as the arrival of the newly designed $100 bill to the area (one customer’s C-note bled onto a damp counter) or the efforts of a youth who organized a blood drive to earn his final badge as an Eagle Scout.

“My favorite kind of story--I hate to say this, but in terms of the timing, it’s true--is a house fire,” says Ellen Carey, bureau chief for Hicksville and the other six hyperlocal shows. “From the time of the call to the time on the air is about an hour, max.”