Do you read local newspapers or watch local news?

[JaredL]

diablito,

I used to watch the news here in Pittsburgh fairly regularly and still do on occasion. It's absurd at times. Local news goes for an hour and a half and they clearly can't fill the time. I have no idea why it's so long.

It's also so over the top with Steelers coverage that it's shocking. Last summer the big stories were Hines Ward going back to Korea, Ben Roethlisberger taking a trip to Switzerland as some sort of going back to his roots deal, and then of course the more understandable Big Ben nearly dying in a motorcycle crash. The last story is fine, but the first two lead the news every single day. The #1 story in Pittsburgh was "Hines Ward in day 4 of his trip to Korea, met some people gave a speech or two and was treated like a rock star with people going crazy to see him" and "Big Ben went to a swatch factory" type stuff.

In late summer the biggest story was mayor Bob O'Connor dying of cancer. He went to the hospital complaining of fatigue and was diagnosed with some weird spinal cancer. They thought he would be fine and back to work after a couple treatments but he never left the hospital and died a few weeks later. A few days into it they are doing somewhat standard reporting, interviewing doctors and whatnot. During this major news story (can't think of many possible local news stories that are bigger than the mayor getting treatment for a super rare form of cancer) they cut away for BREAKING NEWS. The breaking news that trumped the mayor's story was that on the second to last play of practice, Big Ben caught his thumb on a shoulder pad and left practice early. They didn't know at the time if it was a shoulder pad or a helmet, and what the effect would be. It reminded me of the bombing during the Atlanta olympics and other stories where the reporters repeat the few details over and over again and then spend a lot of time speculating and interviewing people who clearly don't know any better than the viewer and are also just speculating.

The other thing they do, which is common elsewhere, is to localize national stories by looking at the effect here or the opinions of locals on them. They'll talk to families whose children are in Iraq, old people about social security, business owners about tax issues, and that sort of stuff. It is often really obvious that they are desperately reaching for stories. The worst recent example was when they sent a reporter who happened to be flying through airport security after they changed it to disallow liquids. Pittsburgh is small enough that basically it doesn't matter. The only thing to report is that some people had to throw stuff away and it took an extra five minutes. However, they somehow made a 10-15 minute piece basically repeating over and over again that everything was pretty much normal. I would much rather they shorten the local news to 15-30 minutes and have longer national news.