When Bob Papper
talks, people listen. Papper is a veteran news reporter, director and
consultant. He is the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Hofstra
University. Papper is in charge of the Radio Television Digital News
Association’s recently released study Local
News By the Numbers [link]. RTNDA annually does surveys of newsrooms around
the US. Paper’s radio and TV study is part of a larger series of reports
chronically newsroom capabilities.
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| Bob Papper |
Knowing Papper’s
credentials, I am surprised at the way he portrays the current radio
programming landscape.
His frame of reference seems to be radio news as it was
when Les Nessman was doing the top-of-the-hour newscasts on WKRP.
This is obviously
an out-dated perspective. Let’s look at Papper’s methodology and conclusion and then
look at a more real world assessment.
INSIDE LOCAL
NEWS BY THE NUMBERS RADIO SURVEY
Papper and his
associates conducted the survey in the fourth quarter of 2016. They interviewed
430 News Directors and General Managers representing 1,151 individual stations.
535 (47%) of the 1,151 stations said they air local news in some form. The
methodology does not say how many of the in-tab stations were commercial or
noncommercial.
The chart on the
right shows the formats of the in-tab stations. Note that NPR News/Talk is not
listed as a format. Are NPR News stations included in News/Talk, All News or
All Talk? Papper never says if NPR News stations are included or what category
they are in, if they are listed at all.
Also, Papper says
the 71.2% of radio stations in the survey run local news – 70.8% of the AM
stations and 71.3% of FM stations. The overall percentage running local news is
up just over a point from last year. AM stations were down four and a half and
FM stations up almost 6%. 72.6% of commercial stations run local news vs. 67.9%
of non-commercial ones.
Papper concludes
that commercial stations are running less local news and noncommercial stations
were running the same amount of local news as the previous year. Newscasts are
important to Papper. He notes that commercial stations were almost twice as
likely as noncommercial stations to have added a newscast in the past year.
Analysis like this seems to exclude long-form news magazines.
My conclusion is
that Papper’s study doesn’t represent reality as I know it.
RADIO NEWS IN THE MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL
MARKET
To provide a more
realistic perspective I did an informal review of the number of news people now
working at stations in the Twin Cities market. For each station or group of
stations I used station websites, so I may have missed a few.
At commercial
stations I saw 15 news employees listed.
CBS owned WCCO-AM and local owner Northern Media both have 6 news folks,
KSTP has 3. I could not find ANY local
news people at the 9-station iHeartMedia cluster or the 5-station Cumulus
cluster.
Rumor has it (and I
could not confirm) that all of news content on iHeart stations is produced in
Denver. No wonder why they frequently mispronounce the names of Twin Cities’
places and people.
It is a vastly
different picture for the noncommercial stations. I counted 91 news people at
six Twin Cities noncommercial stations. Minnesota Public Radio lists 64
broadcast new folks, more than all of the rest of the stations combined.
Community station KFAI, Urban Contemporary KMOJ, Jazz KBEM, alt-rock Radio K and CCM powerhouse KTIS all have
news staff.
So my questions to
you, Professor Papper, are:
• Why did you not
measure the capacity for news generation and total amount of news created?
• Why did you chose
not delineate NPR News stations in your survey because that is obviously where
the most radio news now lives.
• Why did you not
consider the size of the audience reached with news programming?
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