A Matter of Snooze or the News

Four hourlong newscasts air against one another here at 10 p.m. Three half-hour shows pop up each night at 11. But the fiercest competition any of these shows contends with is not one another, nor is it the entertainment fare on other channels.

Their toughest, most relentless challenger is sleep.

“By the time we come on, obviously, it’s late,” said Cheryl Fair, news director at KABC-TV Channel 7. “And people are getting up earlier and earlier, so just getting them to make it to the start of our newscast at 11 p.m. is difficult. Then, to keep them watching all the way through our 35-minute broadcast, it’s certainly a big challenge.”

Indeed, during the May ratings sweeps, both KTTV-TV Channel 11 and KTLA-TV Channel 5 lost more than 40% of their audience during the hourlong 10 p.m. newscast. KCAL-TV Channel 9 suffered a 37% decline while KCOP-TV Channel 13 gave away nearly 60% of its viewers.

Conversely, ratings for entertainment programs that aired on the three major networks at 10 p.m. remained virtually constant for the entire hour.

Comparing the first quarter-hour to the second quarter-hour of the 11 p.m. newscasts is similarly ugly. KNBC-TV Channel 4, the top-rated newscast in town at that hour, lost 23% of its viewers, while No. 2 Channel 7 suffered a 26% decline. Only last-place KCBS-TV Channel 2 beat the odds a bit, giving away only 11% of its viewers from the first 15 minutes to the second.

(Ratings for other months so far this year show similar results at all the stations in the market.)

“Part of the problem is that, across the country, weather is the No. 1 reason people tune into the late local newscasts,” said Jeff Wald, news director at Channel 5. “But in Los Angeles, aside from a few El Nino months every five or 10 years, weather is just not that interesting.

“Generally, here, people want the top news stories, and quite often they know that when the show is half over, the hard news is over. It’s our job to make the rest of the newscast interesting, with teases and an effort to insert an important story for the top of each section. But it’s tough.”

Still, weather--no matter how mild--is about the only card that the stations have left to play in their attempts to hang on to at least some of their audience. And all of them hold it back until the second half.

“We do save something that is near and dear to people and that’s weather,” said Nancy Bauer Gonzales, Channel 4’s news director. “A lot of people are interested in it and will stay up at least for that--and we have Fritz Coleman, who, when it comes to weather, is the biggest draw in town.”

Channel 2 is the only station with a specific and aggressive strategy to stem this late-night viewer hemorrhaging to dreamland.

Part heavy promotion and part extensive original reporting, Channel 2 airs what it calls “Special Assignment”--a long-form investigation or feature that runs between four and seven minutes--most every night during the second half of its 11 p.m. newscast. These reports, begun in the spring of last year, have included the heavily hyped investigation into local restaurant health violations and the hidden camera reports on auto repair rip-offs.

“I’ve been in this market for 10 years, and this is clearly the most effective tool that I’ve seen to keep people around for the second half of the newscast,” said Larry Perret, Channel 2’s news director. “It disproves the notion that you have to give people everything quick and fast late at night or they will get bored and turn it off. I think people do want to see more than 30-second reports.

“The only thing that works in keeping the audience is content and, frankly, the other guys are cranking out newscasts like McDonald’s hamburgers. The challenge, especially with more and more and more cable choices, is to be unique. The truth is that viewers see these newscasts pretty much as being all the same. We all have the same hard news, weather, sports. That’s why we are intent on giving them these ‘Special Assignment’ reports that they can’t get anywhere else.”

These pieces, including Joel Grover’s “I-Team” investigations, do strain KCBS’ budget. But Perret said he makes up for it by reducing expenses elsewhere--for example, flying the station’s helicopter less often than his competitors.

Once upon a time, simple sports scores were enough to hold at least the serious fans until the end of the local newscasts. But that was before the advent of ESPN and the Internet.

Though none of the news directors would admit to being content with simply maintaining these current levels of audience retention, most of them suggested that as long as people continue to need sleep, the problem is inevitable.

“What you’re talking about is really a problem beyond the 11 p.m. news,” Fair said. “There are so many choices out there that people can customize their broadcast day in a way that I couldn’t growing up. There’s news on all day, practically every hour of the day. You don’t have to stay up until 11.”