TV Week reports Fox and NBC are teaming up for local news coverage. The video-sharing arrangement will start in January in Philly, where their O&Os have been testing it since the summer. Later, they’ll add their O&Os in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and DC. They say they will also make the video available to other local media outlets in each market.
They’re doing this to save money, and it will probably work because they’ll be able to cut the number of jobs at each station. But I can’t help thinking it will also make their newscasts look even more alike. Two voiceovers of the same car wreck look very similar even when shot by different photographers. If two stations are running the same video of the same story shot by the same person, even that small bit of differentiation is lost.
(Full disclosure: I work at the CBS O&O in D/FW, where this is slated to launch sometime next year. So I will soon see firsthand how it works.)
Update: More details here from Broadcasting & Cable. In Philadelphia, 20-25 “Local News Service” staffers will cover non-enterprise stories and share them between the two stations. The idea is to eventually take the service nationwide — in essence, a sort of video AP for local TV.