Headlines in news coverage are extremely important; I kid you not.
I say that if for no other reason than it was a headline that brought me to today’s spiel which ponders the necessity for and the indispensability of the television news anchor.
I’ll back up a bit.
91.7 WVXU, the NPR station in Cincinnati recently ran a web story with the following headline: WCPO-TV’s 4 p.m. news shows the future of TV newscasts
I had to read it aloud a couple of times but you got my attention, WVXU.
I certainly want to know the future of TV newscasts, who knows if I will be around long enough to find out for myself. While I do eat my vegetables, I also regularly enjoy large sandwiches (Grinders, we call them here in New England) containing highly processed meat products, generous amounts of mayonnaise and accompanied by heavily salted snack treats.)
Unless we reanimate Roger Grimsby, Bill Beautel, and Max Robinson, I’m not changing my dietary structure.
Moving right along, after navigating this most captivating of headers, I learned through the magic of reading that WCPO, which is the Cincinnati ABC affiliate and is owned by the E.W. Scripps Company is making use of computer technology, known as “Scrippscast” to reduce the function of the anchor and allow the story rundown to more or less flow organically, or more accurately in this case, synthetically by using scripted reporter self intros, topical graphics, and other artificial segues and transitions.
I guess the anchor can go about tidying up the workspace while show moves along.
Now, I’m working here largely off of WVXU’s initial reporting before I started looking into things myself but after reading a few of the claims and rationale for this stunt by management, I did come across something pretty familiar when it came to who this type of newscast might be geared towards.
And that’s something I will come back to momentarily.
In the meantime, this format is being utilized during the 4 PM newscast at WCPO and anchor Jasmine Styles is present during the hour-long show, just apparently not doing much. I haven’t been binge-watching these shows so I’m guessing it’s similar to having an actual person sitting behind the wheel of one of those new driverless cars that of course never lose control or deviate from their GPS steered routes.
Among the reasons I’ve read and come across for this anchor-ignoring effort are that the audiences want to see the anchors do something more than just sit there. Well, they do that already. They tie a show together, they add color and depth, and they insert that much more humanity into an ever-increasing mash of technology and mind-altering graphics. At least this is what the good anchors do.
Another justification cited for trying this mechanical exercise out yet again (Yep, I said again…wait for it) is that it permits the anchors to work more on other stories. That one you will have to explain to me slowly because if the anchor is still behind the desk during the show, they’re not out working on stories. Nobody likes to see an anchor out there getting dirty in the streets more than me but how often is that really happening around the country with any regularity?
If you surgically remove the front and center talent from your shows, you may get a little more content out of your higher priced employees but you’re likely to lose audience numbers. Why? Your core viewers are always going to be the older, more sedentary types who crave regularity (in so many forms) as well as reliability and consistency.
And now, here’s what I’ve been teasing but you probably won’t find worth the wait:
Still another raison d’être for a self-propelled newscast with no leader to follow is the idea that a video story to video story hand off, minus the anchor intervention, will appeal to the younger viewer. Yes, the younger viewer, you know them, they’re the ones who are fixated on their phones, laptops, tablets, and watches. They’re the ones who don’t watch TV news at all and if they do catch any of it, it’s attached to social media anyway.
The TV newscast, local or network, is AM radio with pictures, plain and simple and the younger, hipper audience is not biting. If they do become wrangled at all, it won’t be anytime soon.
The other reveal here, if it is a reveal at all, is that this entire concept has already been tried before for the exact same reasoning, to save money and appeal to America’s youth.
NewsFix, as it was called by its Tribune overseers in 2011, arrived in Houston to some fanfare and a bit of curiosity, it spread quietly to Dallas and then Miami before dissipating and disappearing by 2019.
I didn’t take a viewer poll but based upon what I could gather from the research, nobody who watched it, liked it very much and those it was directed towards were out riding their skateboards.
There will always be money saving efforts cloaked in the cover of ingenuity in news and every other struggling field.
Do you want major league sporting events to be more affordable and family friendly? Reconsider how much you’re paying the guy in left field every year, for 10 years straight no matter how he produces.
The same goes for your anchors. Sitting in a control room, I often wondered how bad it would be if you thought about compensating an anchor a little less, your street reporter a little more and redrafting the workload a tad.
At the end of the day, the reporter still has to be there, but an anchor may price themselves out of the game or another innovative thinker 12 years from now may come up with a brand-new concept to do newscasts minus the anchor.
If that happens, I’ll save the draft of this column so ChatGPT can refresh it and it can run again in 2035.
My roast beef and provolone grinder will have surely done me in by then.
Bill Zito has devoted most of his work efforts to broadcast news since 1999. He made the career switch after serving a dozen years as a police officer on both coasts. Splitting the time between Radio and TV, he’s worked for ABC News and Fox News, News 12 New York , The Weather Channel and KIRO and KOMO in Seattle. He writes, edits and anchors for Audacy’s WTIC-AM in Hartford and lives in New England. You can find him on Twitter @BillZitoNEWS.
