I realize that the first reaction to the NBC-Fox local newsgathering partnership (below) is likely a negative one for people who work in local TV news. I don’t know many details of how the partnership will work, but conceptually I think it’s a smart move given the economics of local television right now. Why?
1. Local TV stations will have to reduce staff anyway. There’s no way around it. 2009 will be the worst year for local TV in recent memory. Pooling resources preserves more jobs through cost savings than going it alone.
2. The partnership also helps preserve enterprise coverage. NBC and Fox said “Local News Service” crews will focus on non-enterprise stories: press conferences, accidents, flooding, etc. — the stuff that everyone covers and walks away with essentially identical versions of it. By saving costs here, stations can assign their dedicated staffs to enterprise stories (which can also be enterprise sidebars on non-enterprise stories), preserving diversity of coverage. The alternative is both stations laying off staff and still assigning a good percentage of their resources to covering the same non-enterprise stories as everyone else, which results in less enterprise coverage overall.
3. While the partnership will result in on-air duplication, few viewers will really notice it. It’s a rare event to find a viewer who switches back and forth between two stations, comparing their newscasts. And the number of viewers who watch multiple newscasts a day is in decline due to the 24/7 availability of news on the web. Consultants over the years have drilled into producers’ brains that they need to freshen, rewrite, re-top, re-edit stories before running them again or viewers will tune them out. Well, all that freshening yields very little benefit given how many resources it consumes. Remember, nobody watches more local TV news than people who work in local TV news.
I know that TV newsrooms are driven by competition, and the idea of cooperating with a competitor on daily coverage — especially breaking stories — is about as unnatural as it gets. But the alternatives here are much worse. This is the new reality, and I think we’ll be seeing more and more stations partnering in the coming months. If you disagree — or have any other perspective to add — please leave a comment below. (Full disclosure: I work for msnbc.com, a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft.)