Overview

In the age of synergy, do the vast resources of large, diversified corporations lead to higher quality journalism? Or do local owners tied to community tend to make for better, more informed newscasts?

For five years, the Project for Excellence in Journalism has conducted the largest examination ever undertaken of local television news in the United States to deconstruct what local TV news offers citizens and examine what kind of content viewers preferred.

In light of the FCC proposed rulemaking to change limits on media ownership, the Project, a research institute affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, decided to review and re-categorize the data to determine whether ownership type has any bearing on newscast characteristics, ratings or quality. The analysis is not a commentary on the quality of specific stations or companies, but is meant to examine the tendencies of ownership structures.

The findings-an analysis of 172 distinct news programs, some 23,000 stories, over five years-suggest that ownership type did make a difference.

Among the findings:

• Smaller station groups overall tended to produce higher quality newscasts than stations owned by larger companies-by a significant margin.
• Network affiliated stations tended to produce higher quality newscasts than network owned and operated stations-also by a large margin.
• Stations with cross-ownership-in which the parent company also owns a newspaper in the same market-tended to produce higher quality newscasts.
• Local ownership offered little protection against newscasts being very poor, and did not produce superior quality.

The study, executed in collaboration with Princeton Survey Research Associates, was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The data show stations owned by big companies were capable of high quality. However, for reasons that are impossible to determine from the numbers, these stations didn’t tend to produce high quality when most viewers were watching.

Ownership type made no apparent difference in terms of the diversity of people depicted in the news, one of the characteristics of newscasts the FCC has expressed interest in. Ownership type also made little difference when it came to the range of topics a station covered. In general, there is striking uniformity across the country in what local television stations define as news.

Taken together, the findings suggest the question of media ownership is more complex than some advocates on both sides of the deregulatory debate imagine. Some of the arguments favoring large companies are unsupported by the data-even contradicted. On the other hand, some of the arguments for the merits of local control appear similarly difficult to prove. And some of the arguments for synergy, in particular cross-ownership, are reinforced by the findings.

But overall the data strongly suggest regulatory changes that encourage heavy concentration of ownership in local television by a few large corporations will erode the quality of news Americans receive.

The Study Background

These conclusions are based on a study of local television news around the country that began in 1998. Over the past five years, the Project has studied newscasts in 50 different markets of all sizes in all regions of the country, or roughly a quarter of all the stations that do news in the country. The research analyzed how newscasts were put together, examining them broadcast-by-broadcast, story-by-story, assigning them quality grades, and then correlating the results to audience data from Nielsen Media Research.

This data was not originally intended to explore the question of ownership. But when the FCC asked for research to enlighten the public discussion about ownership limitations, the Project recognized it had an enormous and unique body of data that could inform the debate.

Moreover, this was data without an agenda, collected across a broad swath of television markets to understand what Americans receive from local television news.

To re-sort the data, we grouped stations into five different ownership categories-size of station group, network owned and operated versus affiliate, cross-ownership versus independent, locally headquartered versus out-of-town ownership, and publicly-traded versus privately-held ownership. Within these broad categories, most of the subgroups analyzed contained at least 50 stations. The smallest (with the exception of cross-ownership outlined below) contained 18.

How Do We Define Quality?

The Project did not define what constituted good or bad quality in local television news. To develop that criteria, rather, five years ago we assembled a Design Team of 14 respected local television news professionals-managers, reporters, anchors, producers and station group heads-from a diverse cross section of companies and regions around the country.

Through survey questionnaires and long-form open-ended discussion, they determined that a local television newscast should: 1) cover the whole community 2) be significant and informative 3) demonstrate enterprise and courage 4) be fair, balanced and accurate 5) be authoritative 6) be highly local.

To examine the validity of these criteria, PSRA conducted four separate focus groups in two cities, Tucson and Atlanta, for the Project. The focus groups demonstrated that respondents not only recognized the differences between high and low scoring newscasts in the study, but they preferred the high scoring ones to the low scoring ones and articulated as their reasons the same criteria the news professionals had identified. Subsequently, a national survey of local television news directors conducted by the Project’s academic partners at Wellesley College and included in the 1999 report confirmed the same criteria as the design team for quality news broadcasts.

A team of academics and professional content analysts devised a methodology for measuring these qualities. This methodology effectively deconstructs each newscast by counting such basics as how many topics are covered (cover the community), how many sources and points of view each story contains (balance and accuracy), who the sources are (authoritativeness), how much effort was demonstrated in reporting the story (enterprise), the degree to which stories are made locally relevant (localism), and the degree to which stories touched on underlying themes, issues or trends (significance and informativeness). A more comprehensive explanation of the criteria of quality and the entire study methodology is enclosed in Appendix III.

To pick the stations, the study divided the TV markets in the country into four quartiles by population and randomly selected markets within each quartile. To account for differences in time zones and markets, the study examined the most-watched half-hour timeslot in each city, one sweeps week and one non-sweeps week of weekday broadcasts for each station. Once all the stories were coded for a newscast, the daily scores were then averaged into a station grade of “A” through “F.”

The study’s main findings were published each year in the Columbia Journalism Review. In brief, they found a discernible diversity of quality in local television news. The study also found that, overall, the highest quality TV news stations-those receiving “A” grades-were more likely to enjoy positive ratings trends than any other grade. Over the five years, 16% of stations studied received “A” grades.

The Ownership Analysis

In re-sorting the data to address the FCC’s proposals, we grouped owners into categories by:

• Size of ownership
• Network owned-and-operated stations (O&O’s) versus independently owned affiliates
• Stations in cross-ownership situations
• Publicly versus privately owned companies
• Stations located in the hometown of their corporate headquarters versus those with out-of-town owners.

We also looked for examples of duopolies-TV markets in which a company owned more than one station-and stations in which the ownership had changed during the time of our study. In addition, we examined each ownership type by timeslot and for diversity of sources.

It should be noted that the original study examined some stations more than once to maintain a sample that divided the country equally each year by population. To study ownership, we eliminated duplicated broadcasts, using only the most recent year’s data.2 This resulted in a sample of 172 different newscasts.

1 This update is designed to provide readers a more complete understanding of the methodology in the Project’s five-year study of local television news. In addition, it includes supplemental analysis, in response to questions raised about the effect of including some stations in the data more than once if they were studied in multiple dayparts. This new analysis, on page 5, reinforces the original findings. In re-examining the data, Princeton Survey Research Associates also discovered a miscalculation in its original weighting of some stations and has corrected it for this report. There is no material change in the findings as a result. In the two instances in which specific numbers changed more than 3 percentage points, it is noted in a footnote. PSRA regrets its miscalculation.

2 If the same station was studied more than once but at different newscast timeslots, both were included in this study of ownership.

Which Ownership Produces the Best “Quality” News?

Ownership Size and Quality

What category of ownership best serves the public interest when it comes to news?

Our five-year data sample suggests that when it comes to overall quality, smaller is better.

Stations owned by small companies, those with three stations or fewer, were more than twice as likely to receive “A” grades than stations owned by either the ten-largest station groups, or the next 15 largest.

In all, 30% of small-company stations earned “A’s,” compared with just 12% of the 10 largest and 13% of the next 15 largest station groups.1

O&O’s versus Affiliates

One argument offered by proponents of bigness is that larger companies would have the resources to provide higher quality news to communities. This might be particularly true of so-called “O&O’s,” stations owned and operated by the big four networks, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, because of their financial resources and the companies operating their own network news divisions.

The data suggest the opposite is true. Network “affiliates,” those stations not owned and operated by the networks, generally had higher quality scores than did O&O’s.

Statistically, affiliates were 50% more likely to turn out “A” grade content than were O&O’s. Or, put another way, 18% of affiliate stations earned “A’s'” versus 12% of O&O’s.

Local Ownership and Quality

On the other side, some critics of bigness have long argued that local ownership makes for better journalism, because of a greater psychological investment and involvement in the community. Interestingly, the data suggest something different.

Local ownership offered little protection against stations being very bad, and their stations were less likely to be very good.2

In our five years of study, we had 53 stations broadcasting in the same market as the corporate headquarters, and 113 stations with out-of-town owners. Stations with local owners tended to be below average when it comes to overall quality. They were only a third as likely as stations without local owners to receive an “A” grade, and the locally-owned stations were more likely to receive a C.

Cross-Ownership and Quality

Another hypothesis offered by proponents of deregulation in recent years is that cross-ownership-owning both a television station and a newspaper in the same market-also might encourage quality. The newspaper in town usually is the news gathering organization with the greatest resources, the most reporters, the strongest expertise, the deepest beat system, and often the most active investigative teams. Putting these resources on the air, creating joint projects, and exploring the potential of convergence, the argument goes, can only make the television station better.

Here our universe of analysis was small, just six stations, but this represents nearly a quarter of the 26 cross-owned TV stations in the country. The data offer some evidence to support the argument favoring cross ownership. Stations with cross ownership were more than twice as likely as other stations overall to generate “A” quality newscasts.

Public versus Private Ownership and Quality

What about public ownership versus private? Another argument that has circulated over the years, and which may have gained some velocity recently, is that the short-term pressures and extraordinarily high profit expectations involved with publicly traded ownership of local television may discourage quality. Even executives at some publicly traded companies have wondered aloud in recent years whether it would be better to take their companies private. Moreover, several of the most admired news companies in the United States, such as the Washington Post Co., have two-tier stock structures that, in a public ownership posture, keep control largely in the hands of family members.

Our data suggest that the simple distinction of public versus private ownership did not, on its face, mean much in terms of the quality of the local news their stations produced.

Private companies slightly out performed public companies, primarily when it came to making their news more local. But these differences were not large enough to be significant.

Companies that have changed hands

We also looked at companies that had changed owners during the five years of our study. Here, we found no discernible differences between stations that had changed hands and those that had not. This may reflect the fact that some buyers improve stations while others weaken them. But it does suggest that changing hands is not on its face damaging or helpful. The fact that a station had changed hands did not mean its new owners generally felt compelled to cut costs and find efficiencies to justify or help finance their purchase.

A New Analysis

Some parties interested in the eventual FCC’s rulings questioned whether it was fair for our February 17th report to include some stations more than once even if the timeslot studied was different. These critics, who were hired by networks advocating deregulation, found the distinction between 172 distinct newscasts and 154 stations confusing, even though this was done in the interest of fairness, so as to include more quality scores from stations if they were studied at different timeslots. To respond to this concern, we have reviewed the data to see if any of the findings about quality presented in the February 17th report were substantially changed if we included only the single most recent appearance of each station, regardless of timeslot or daypart. This more limited selection criteria resulted in a data base of 21,218 news stories broadcast on 154 distinct news programs/timeslots at 154 stations.

This new analysis reinforces the findings about ownership and quality. For instance, when it came to the biggest versus smallest company-owned stations, the quality gap actually widened slightly. In the new analysis, 33% of small company stations earned “A’s” (up three percentage points) compared with still just 12% of big company stations (unchanged). None of the small company-owned stations, furthermore, earned “F’s” in the new analysis, (compared with 4% in the broader analysis).

Similarly, the gap in quality shows a small increase when comparing O&O stations to Affiliates. Under the broader analysis, 18% of the Affiliates earned “A” grades, versus only 12% of their O&O counterparts. In limiting the analysis to include all stations for just one year each, Affiliates improved slightly, with 19% of those stations earning “A” grades. Meanwhile, the percentage of O&O stations earning “A’s” declined slightly (to 10%).

Is there an ideal ownership type?

One obvious question may be what would be an ideal owner from the standpoint of serving the public interest.

Research can never offer a definitive answer to a question like this but it can be suggestive.

On the surface, the data would offer this glib answer:

The ideal owner would be a small company, headquartered in another town, which owned a limited number of affiliated stations but also owned the local newspaper. It could be either public or private.

Of course this answer is probably an illusion. Most small companies are unlikely to own a newspaper in town as well as a TV station. They are also less likely to be out-of-town owners.

The realities of the marketplace tend to preclude utopian results. The perfect corporation is as unlikely as the perfect market.

But the findings do suggest different ownership structures have virtues as well as weaknesses. O&O’s, for instance, excel at offering communities a variety of viewpoints in their newscasts but don’t fare well for overall quality. Small companies score best for overall quality, but mid-sized companies surpass them when it comes to enterprise and localism.

Above all, ownership matters. The statistical margins here are too great to be dismissed as random. One would hope that federal regulators would include in their definition of public interest the question of the content and character of news. For the data show some ownership structures are more likely to produce it than others.

Most importantly, the data raise serious questions about regulatory changes that lead to the concentration of vast numbers of TV stations into the hands of a few very large corporations. The findings strongly suggest that this ownership structure, though it may prove the most profitable model, is likely to lead to further erosion in the content and public interest value of the local TV news Americans receive.

Looking closer at each ownership type offers further insights into their value.

1 The original report included the following: “Not only were smaller companies better, the biggest companies were more likely to stand out as notably bad. The largest owners were twice as likely as small companies to produce “F” grade newscasts.” In the updated figures, the biggest and smallest companies were about equally as likely to produce “F” grade newscasts.

2 The original report read, “Local ownership offers some protection against stations being very bad, but it does nothing to encourage stations to be very good.” The percentage of locally owned stations earning “A”‘s was originally reported at 10%, compared to16% for non-locally owned. In the updated figures, the gap widens to 7% for locally owned and 21% for non-locally owned, strengthening the original findings.

Big Versus Small Owners

To examine size, we separated the TV companies studied into four categories, using the FCC rankings of audience reach1: the 10-largest TV groups; groups 11 through 25 in terms of audience reach; medium sized companies (any company below the top 25 in reach and owning at least four stations); and small companies (companies below the top 25 in audience reach and owning three stations or fewer). In our sample, there are 65 stations owned by the top-ten media companies, 47 owned by the top 11-25 companies, 37 mid-size-company stations and 23 small-company stations.

Here we found clear distinctions. The smallest companies produced higher quality newscasts.

Are there certain qualities that characterize larger companies versus smaller ones?

In general, small company stations are more local, do more enterprise, source stories better and air more long stories.

Size seemed to have no bearing on how many sources stations cite in their stories, the level of balance in newscasts or the tendency of stations to focus stories around their larger implications.

In the areas where size did make a difference:

On Enterprise: Across the board in local television, we have seen enterprise declining. The percentage of stories with reporters on the scene is down. The use of syndicated material and wire feeds is up. The percentage of stories in which a station sends a camera but no reporter is rising.

Here the data suggest size plays a part, but the very smallest companies were not necessarily the best. Rather, mid-sized companies-those with four stations or more but not in the top 25 companies-showed the most enterprise. They were followed by the smallest companies. The top 10 and 11-25 companies in the country fared worst.

In particular, mid-sized-owned stations were the most likely to send a reporter to the scene of a story (31%), followed by the smallest owned-stations (26%). The biggest companies were least likely to do so (22% for the top 10).

Similarly, mid-sized companies were less likely than larger ones to base stories on syndicated material, wire feeds, reports from other news organizations or from corporate press releases (14% at mid-sized companies, versus 23% at top ten).

When it came to investigative reporting, size made no difference. The numbers here are small across the board. In all, only one percent of local television stories were investigative.

On Local Relevance: Size also seems to matter when it comes to how well stations do at making stories locally relevant. Mid-sized companies scored best, followed by the smallest companies.

For instance, four-in-ten stories at small and mid-size-company stations involved issues that affected the entire viewing community, compared with about a third at the biggest owned stations.

Mid-sized and small companies were also slightly less likely to air stories with no connection to the local community-such as a car chase from a faraway town, or a distant sensational crime story. Mid-sized company stations aired the least of such stories (9%). Small-company stations, with presumably the fewest resources, were second lowest (12%). Top-ten sized stations aired the most (15%), the next biggest companies followed (14%).

Smaller companies also aired more stories about local topics in general. Fully 86% of stories from mid-sized owners and 80% of stories from small-sized owners were local, compared to slightly less, 77% from top ten owners.

On Sourcing: The smallest owners were slightly more likely to have a credentialed expert in the story than the largest owners (27% versus 23% among top ten).

When it comes to the number of sources in a story, or even the number of viewpoints, having the biggest or smallest owner seemed to make no difference.

On Story Length: Whether a story was long or short is not a part of a station’s quality grade. But in each year of the study, stations that aired more long stories and fewer very short stories enjoyed better ratings trends. They also tended to score higher for quality.

When we examined stations by company, we found that indeed the smallest-owned stations did produce more long stories, though by small margins. These stations average 37% of their stories over 1 minute compared to 33% at the top ten and the top twenty-five, a marginal difference.

Perhaps slightly more telling, the data offers evidence of small stations doing fewer very short stories. Stories under 20 seconds accounted for 12% of those on small-company and mid-size company stations versus 17% at top ten and 19% at the top twenty-five.

Why would bigger companies not fare as well as small? Wouldn’t they have potentially more expertise to draw on, better research and more experienced staff?

One possible explanation is that when a company owns several dozen stations, particularly a company engaged in many activities other than local TV news, the content on those local stations becomes more difficult to track. Individual properties can more easily blur. It may become easier to develop something of a financial portfolio mentality, seeing properties primarily as items on a balance sheet. This is only one possible explanation.

Another possibility is that local news stations owned by big companies may feel added pressure of a certain kind. There may be more intense concern with helping subsidize other operations or to take advantage of synergy opportunities. All of this may tend to relegate quality as a concern, or make it more difficult to balance against other concerns.

Further analysis would require more information, such as a comparative examination of specific stations and specific companies, to determine why some stations owned by big companies score better than others and whether some big companies overall score better than others. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this study.

1. Our measurement of audience reach followed the FCC’s policy of discounting for the difference between the reach of UHF versus VHF stations.

Network O&O’s Versus Affiliates

Another way to measure the effect of large company ownership is to examine local stations that are owned and operated by the networks, the so-called O&O’s. Four of the six largest station groups are owned by broadcast networks with central news divisions: CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC (in declining order of group size).

Moreover, the size of the O&O groups has grown in recent years. As networks have seen a declining return on programming in their entertainment divisions, the O&O station groups have become more important for network profits. For example, in 2002, according to Jessica Reif Cohen, an industry analyst for Merrill Lynch, Fox’s TV stations generated $1 billion in cash flow even as the Fox network posted a $130 million loss.1 Since the last relaxation of the ownership rules in 1996, the networks have been able to compensate for their losses in entertainment by acquiring more stations (both in new markets and by creating duopolies). Thus it is reasonable to expect that this expansion will continue if the new ownership limits are relaxed. Already, two networks (CBS and Fox) have surpassed the current ownership limitations on audience reach and technically are in violation of the regulations.2

Did being a network O&O, a corporate sibling with a national newsgathering operation, improve the kind of local news citizens see?

As mentioned in brief earlier, the data suggest the answer is no. O&O’s were less likely than independently owned affiliates to be “A” stations (12% vs. 18%).

They were also much less likely to earn “F’s” but more likely to earn “D’s” in our study.

Did specific patterns stand out between O&O’s and affiliates? There were some.

In general, affiliates demonstrated somewhat more enterprise, cited more sources and tended to be more local.

O&O’s, by contrast, tended to air more points of view and scored better when it came to finding the larger implications of a story.

Specifically:

• On Enterprise: O&O’s relied more heavily on syndicated material and feeds (25% of stories versus 19% for affiliates). That, and some other differences, translated into O&O’s also being less likely to send reporters out to cover events such as trials and press conferences. Perhaps the easy access to network feed material at O&O’s made them more likely to rely on this material.
• On Sourcing: O&O’s were somewhat more likely to rely on unnamed sources or only passing reference to sources (38% of stories versus 34%).
• On Localism: Affiliates were more likely to air stories that affected everyone in the community while O&O’s were more likely to air national stories with no local connection-those car chases and exciting footage from faraway.
• On Balance: O&O’s overall scored slightly better when it came to airing a mix of opinions in controversial stories.

1 See Diane Mermigas, “CBS, Fox reap rewards of robust owned stations,” Electronic Media, Oct. 28, 2002.

2 In separate decisions, the FCC approved Fox’s purchase of the Chris-Craft station group, and Viacom’s purchase of CBS-the transactions which pushed each company over the ownership cap-on the condition that each company move to divest itself of its assets in order to return to compliance with FCC regulations. Neither company has divested yet. In February 2002 a federal court ruled that the FCC needed to justify a cap on ownership or else it would be declared illegal. This ruling has been put on hold pending the outcome of the FCC’s current rulemaking process. See Bill McConnell, “Court to FCC: Prove it!” Broadcasting & Cable, Feb. 25, 2002.

Cross-Ownership

Another ownership category likely to be affected by the FCC ruling is cross-ownership within a market-that is, one company owning both a newspaper and a television station in the same metropolitan area. To understand what these changes might mean, we looked at instances where such cross-ownership situations already exist and compared them to the rest of the stations in this study. Six stations fell into this category: WSB in Atlanta, WBRZ in Baton Rouge, WFAA in Dallas, WZZM in Grand Rapids, WFLA in Tampa and KRON in San Francisco.1

While this number is small, the six stations represent almost a quarter of the 26 stations across the country where a cross-ownership exists.2

In our data, cross-ownership led to better grades. Stations in cross-ownership situations were more than twice as likely to receive an “A” grade than were other stations. (Incidentally, none of the six earned an “F” grade in quality, compared with 7% of all other stations, though the small size of this ownership category is too small to infer much from that).

Interestingly, these higher grades for stations in cross ownership did not translate to better ratings trends. These stations were twice as likely to have high grades but declining ratings trends. They were also more likely to have low grades and declining ratings trends.

Why? One possible explanation is that the category size is small. Another possible explanation that could be considered with further study of more cross owned stations is that it has something to do with being owned by companies more heavily focused around newspapers than television. It is possible, perhaps, that newspaper-oriented companies have weaker grasp of the norms of broadcasting than do television stations. Or, perhaps, cross-ownership itself may not encourage ratings success. Trying to import print norms and telling print stories on TV may turn away audiences rather than attract them.

Newscasts on cross-owned stations were noticeably different than others, at least according to the empirical breakdown.

On the whole, they were more likely to do stories that focused on important community issues, more likely to provide a wide mix of opinions, and less likely to do celebrity and human-interest features. Cross-owned stations were also, however, slightly less enterprising than other stations-perhaps in contrast to the expectation that the combined resources of a newspaper and TV station in collaboration would lead to more.

Here are some specifics:

• On Significance: Cross-owned stations aired more stories that looked at important trends and ideas in their communities (19% vs. 14% for all other stations). They were less likely than other stations to air celebrity news or human-interest features (10% vs. 14%).
• On Balance and Accuracy: Cross-owned stations aired more than one side of the matter in roughly half of all controversial stories (46%) compared with only 39% in all other stations.
• On Enterprise: Here cross-owned stations didn’t fare as well. Their scores for enterprise overall were lower. In particular, a third of all the stories on these stations involved sending a camera without a correspondent (32%), compared with almost one-quarter (23%) at all other stations. On the other hand, these stations relied less on syndicated wire feed material (15% vs. 20% for other stations).

It should be noted that many cross-ownership situations date back to before the FCC rules against cross-ownership were instituted in 1975 and were allowed to continue thanks to a “grandfather” clause. In many cases, these stations are operating in an environment where collaboration between co-owned TV and newspaper outlets has been “taboo” for two decades and broadcasters may have been more sensitive to the appearance of relying to heavily on their print counterparts. This concern is only now starting to wane, due in part to the symbolic impact of lessening FCC oversight and the growing strategic emphasis inside news companies on “convergence.”

The data on enterprise deserves some further reflection. On its face, cross-ownership might have suggested that the joint resources of a newspaper and TV station would have freed up people to do more original work. But the fact that the cross-owned stations actually scored lower on our enterprise index in general, and particularly in the area of sending out reporters to cover stories, suggests something else may be at play. It is possible that cross-owned stations actually have fewer reporters than others to send out. Or, perhaps, newspaper companies, more so than other companies, are using their TV stations as cash infusers to the rest of the company. It is possible that the six stations we happened to have studied were unusual. But the generalized sign of higher quality at cross-owned stations, for some reason, did not include those stations doing more enterprise.

1 At the time we studied KRON in winter 1999 it was owned by the Chronicle Company, which also owned the San Francisco Chronicle; the Chronicle Company was eventually broken up and the two outlets are now owned by different corporations.

2 See David Pritchard, “Viewpoint Diversity in Cross-Owned Newspapers and Television Stations: A Study of News Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Campaign,” available through the FCC’s website.

Local Versus Non-Local Ownership

Many critics of large, chain ownership over the years have postulated that local ownership is better because the people who run the company would be more concerned with the community if they lived there. This, the argument went, would lead to more sensitive, serious and informed coverage of local concerns.

The data offer no support of this argument.

We defined a local owner as one whose headquarters is located in the metropolitan area of the station. For example, Sinclair Broadcast Group would be a local owner for its Baltimore, Maryland, station, WBFF, but not for its St. Louis station, KDNL. (We exempted the network O&O’s located in New York and Los Angeles, since historically local news is not the heart of these company’s activities.)

Locally owned stations tended be below average in quality.

In all, only 7% earned “A’s” (compared with 21% for non-local stations).

They were almost as likely to earn “F’s” as non-locally owned stations (6% vs. 7%).

Are there specific characteristics of local versus non-local ownership?

The data suggest there may be. Locally owned stations tended to be slightly less enterprising and, perhaps surprisingly, also tended to be less likely to cover local topics.

The locality of ownership seemed to have no significant bearing on such questions as the quality of sourcing in stories, story length, or the tendency of stations to frame stories around their larger implications.

Specifically:

• On Enterprise: Locally owned stations were about as likely to send reporters to the scene of scheduled events such as trials and press conferences (25% of stories vs. 26%). These differences, however, are small.
• On Localism: Locally and non-locally were similar in their coverage of local stories (78% for local versus 80% for non-local).

Non-locally owned stations performed better in regard to story sourcing, and as often follows, presented more stories with multiple viewpoints (40% for non-local vs. 37% for local ownership). In addition, non-locally owned stations were likely to present slightly longer stories, and were somewhat more diverse in the range of story topics. All of these factors contributed to the differences in quality scores.

What else might account for the finding that locally owned stations are less likely to be the very best? One possible explanation may lie in the pressures associated with operating in one’s hometown. Perhaps having the boss nearby is a kind of inhibition, from soaring too high or too low.

Owners and family members may watch the program and are more likely to be members of local civic groups, charities, or the community social and power structure. Station management may be more likely to hear from these owners about news content. Perhaps these connections lead employees to be less inclined to reach outside of community norms or take chances. These same pressures, however, may also keep locally owned stations from dipping too low in quality, even if doing so would help profit margins.

Public Versus Private Ownership

Another issue embedded in the FCC debate, and even discussed among executives of some publicly owned companies, is whether private ownership allows for a greater chance of serving the public interest. The argument here, to oversimplify, is that being freed of the pressures of quarterly profit reports, focus on one’s stock price, and meeting industry based measures of profitability and efficiency, would allow companies to better focus on the long-term and on quality.

Our data, based on 54 privately held stations and 118 publicly held, suggest a slightly greater tendency toward quality at private companies, though the findings are not nearly as strong as in other ownership categories.

Overall, 19% of privately held stations in the markets studied earned “A’s”, versus 15% for publicly held stations. And 35% of privately held stations earned “B’s” compared with 31% for publicly held.

Private stations could also produce very poor quality. They were more inclined to “F’s” (9% versus 5%)–though less inclined to “D’s” (13% versus 18%).

The differences between these two ownership categories are much less than those we found for large versus small companies, O&O versus independently owned, and cross-owned versus others. In general, we think these differences are too small to conclusively support the argument that private ownership better serves the public interest than does public ownership.

What are the particular traits that differentiate privately versus publicly owned stations?

The differences, again, are less discernible than for other ownership categories.

Privately held stations demonstrate more of some kind of enterprise, for instance, and slightly less of others.

For many indicators, such as sourcing, focus on the important underlying trends in stories, the mix of viewpoints, there is little difference between public and private companies in our data.

Specifically:

• On Enterprise: Privately held stations were more likely than public company stations to send a reporter to the scene of a scheduled event (29% versus 24%). They were a little less likely to air wire stories or feeds from other sources (18% versus 21% for public). But on other indicators of enterprise, they scored slightly lower than public companies.
• On Localism: Publicly held stations tend a little more toward national stories that have no connection to viewing area (14% versus 11% for privately owned).
• On Story Length: Privately owned stations tended, by a small margin, to air fewer very short stories than publicly owned stations. Overall, 37% of the stories on private stations were 30-seconds or less in length, compared with 40% on publicly owned stations.

Timeslot, Diversity, and Ratings

Timeslot Makes A Difference

One question about the data is whether differences in timeslot might alter the results. Over the five years of study, we have found a consistent tendency for early evening newscasts to be stronger than late night. Generally, 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. newscasts-those preceding prime time-tend to be stronger journalistically than 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts-those following prime time. Since we compared stations at the highest-rated timeslot for news in each city-comparing 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. programs to 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts together-we wondered if that might be skewing the findings about ownership.

To find out, we decided to examine the data within timeslots-comparing late newscasts, those following prime time, to each other and early newscasts (5 p.m. and 6 p.m.) to each other.

Late Newscasts

In late news, the tendency of smaller owners to produce better newscasts actually became stronger.

• · The smallest owners were 16 times as likely as the largest owners and three times as likely as the next 15 largest companies to receive “A’s” in their late news (33% versus 2% at top ten, and 11% at both the next 15 largest and mid-sized).1
• · In late news, none of the smallest owners earned “F” grades, compared with at least 6% to as high as 15% in the other size groups.

Early Newscasts

Earlier in the day, we did see a change. Here the stations in the largest ownership category tended to outperform the smaller companies.

• Four-in-ten of top ten owned stations (39%) received an “A” in the early hours, versus a nearly three-in-ten of the smallest owned. (27%), and that was true of 26% of mid-sized stations, and 15% of stations from the 11-25 biggest companies.2
• The biggest company stations were also more likely to receive “B’s” than smaller stations at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.
• The largest owned stations also received no “F’s” at this hour-along with the mid-sized-compared with 5% of the second-largest group of companies and 9% at the smallest group.

The differences are important. For one thing, it means that while smaller companies outperform larger ones overall, this is not true across the board.

Second, larger companies are capable of producing higher quality newscasts. Yet for some reason, they often fail to do that when the most people are watching.

Some broadcasters believe that late news needs to be quite different than early news-faster paced, more headlines, more quick stories. Yet the data we have gathered and interviews we have done with news professionals make it clear that there is a difference of opinion about this.

The research also clearly finds that late newscasts generally are losing more viewers than early newscasts, and the lower quality in general of these late newscasts may certainly be an important factor.

If it is conventional wisdom among some broadcast professionals that late news needs to be flashier, the numbers across the industry seem to suggest this is a mistake.

What does all this mean about the size of ownership? It suggests quality is not out of reach for large companies. There is nothing endemic, in other words, that prohibits these larger companies from better serving the public interest. Indeed, some of the very best newscasts we have seen come from some large companies in early timeslots.

But these companies, with broader resources than their smaller competitors, have chosen for whatever reasons not to provide that quality to citizens across the day, and even when the largest number of viewers are watching. The number of big companies that choose to produce quality in late night (2%) is strikingly low.

Other Ownership Categories and Timeslot

What about other categories of ownership at different timeslots? Here the data are less helpful. The data, for instance, includes only four O&O’s in the early timeslot and seven locally owned stations in the early timeslot. Those category sizes are too small to draw any conclusions from. The same was true for cross-ownership stations.

Diversity And Ownership

The PEJ study over the last five years also examined the diversity of sources in local news by race and ethnicity. Who was represented on camera as experts, for instance, versus perpetrators of crimes?

This data on diversity has never been released before. Diversity is not a factor in a station’s quality score and thus was not a component of the earlier Project for Excellence in Journalism Local TV Study. We collected the data with the intention of releasing it at a later date in conjunction with another analysis. We still plan on that. However, the FCC has indicated that diversity is one of the subjects it considers relevant to its inquiry. In light of that, we decided to release whatever findings we had about ownership diversity right now.

Does the size of the company have any impact on the diversity of sources?

The answer appears to be no.

Across ownership size, O&O versus affiliate, local versus non-local, and cross-owned stations versus others, we saw little difference in the presence of minorities on camera according to the type of station owner.

This is not to say everything in the area of diversity in local news is fine. Overall, only 12% of all stories included a minority on camera as the subject of a story, an expert or a person on the street.

Another two percent of stories featured minorities as victims of crime or suspected perpetrators of crime.

Across the five-years of data, moreover, certain subjects and persons were strikingly absent. In 23,806 stories analyzed, for instance, only .2 percent, or 32 stories, concerned the poor. Only .3 percent of stories, or 57 overall, concerned the elderly.

By contrast, more than 500 were stories about celebrities.

Ownership And Ratings

Does one type of owner tend to succeed better in ratings than another?

The study does not look at ratings in their simplest form, but measures economic success by looking at ratings trends: is a newscast’s audience growing or shrinking? We do so by collecting three years of ratings-12 ratings books-and developing a trend line.

Here we found that ownership type does seem to play a part in the ratings trends of stations.

Overall, positive ratings trends were more likely at the biggest companies and O&O’s.

Interestingly, this is not the list of owners who produce the best quality.

For whatever reasons, the very largest companies had a greater ability to generate positive ratings trends-or a lower tolerance for negative ratings trends-than did smaller companies. But they also have a much higher tolerance for producing low quality.

This tendency is at odds with the overall findings of the Project’s study of local television news over the last five years. That study found that quality was the path most likely to lead to ratings success.

The ability of larger companies to generate ratings success while producing lower-quality content thus raises another concern if the ownership rules are lifted.

It suggests allowing large corporations to own more and more stations would encourage lower quality in local television news. These companies already show less of a commitment to quality, and economies of scale raise the possibility they will extend this format to new acquisitions.

1 In the original report, small-owned stations were cited as 20 times more likely as the largest owners and 6 times as likely as the next 15 largest to receive “A” grades in this category.

2 In the original report, top ten groups receiving “A”s were listed at 32% and small groups receiving “A”s were listed at 20%. In the updated version, the percentages changed slightly, but the range between the two remains the same.