Television
News Makers
Is there an audience for a CNN-style cable channel devoted exclusively to Texas? The state’s reigning media conglomerate hopes so.
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Belo has been involved in three of these ventures. The company wandered into cable news in 1994, when it acquired WWL, the CBS affiliate in New Orleans. At the time, WWL was rebroadcasting its evening news show on a cable channel owned by Cox Communications (the project was a joint venture between WWL and Cox). The station’s decision to do so went against conventional wisdom, which held that a newscast would pirate its own viewers if it was shown again at other hours. Instead, WWL found that it attracted separate viewers who couldn’t catch the news at its regular time. “It was serving an unfulfilled need,” Huey says. Though NewsWatch Channel 15, as the show was called, repeated verbatim what had aired a few hours before, its ratings were better than respectable and even exceeded CNN’s in the local market.
Two years later, Huey hired away the general manager of NewsWatch Channel 15, Skip Cass, to test his hunch that there was an audience for a cable news channel in Texas. Cass found there was indeed a hunger for regional news: Because of the deep roots that many Texans have and the degree to which Texans travel around the state, they’re far more interested in knowing what’s going on in Texas than in Hollywood or New York. “The market research firm we hired said the appetite for local and regional news in Texas is beyond anything they had seen before,” Cass says.
In 1997, while plans in Texas were being hatched, Belo helped launch a local news cable channel in Norfolk, Virginia, where it owns WVEC, an ABC affiliate. That operation, called Local News on Cable (LNC), is a joint venture between WVEC; Norfolk’s paper, the Virginian Pilot; and Cox Communications, which owns the channel. LNC primarily rebroadcasts the latest WVEC newscasts but also offers some original news programming, and the latter revealed a trend that Belo found particularly interesting: Single copy sales of the Pilot typically rose when LNC’s anchors mentioned that a more in-depth report would appear in the paper the next day. That started Belo executives thinking about the advantages of cross-promotion.
The same year, Belo acquired the Providence Journal Company, thereby gaining a Pulitzer prize—winning newspaper, nine TV stations, and NorthWest Cable News (NWCN), one of the most sophisticated regional cable news shows in the country. Launched in December 1995, NWCN is available to 1.9 million households in six states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, and California. Unlike Belo’s New Orleans or Norfolk operations, NWCN airs only original news programming, and it has found a large and loyal audience: It consistently draws more viewers than CNN Headline News, and during periods of breaking regional news or extreme weather, it sometimes even beats the local network affiliates as well. “This was another confirmation of our sense that there is a huge appetite for regional news,” Huey says. “We said, ‘Let’s do it first, and let’s do it right.’”
So, on January 1, Belo will begin broadcasting 24 hours of Texas news, sports, and weather. Like NWCN, TXCN will offer only original programming. Cass and Ackermann plan to hire a staff of one hundred that will be, on average, younger than that of a typical Belo TV station. “It isn’t true that we’re hiring all rookies,” Cass says, “but certainly, in some cases, we are looking at people who have a different set of skills and background than someone at WFAA, KHOU, or KENS might have. Producing news that is always on is a different business.” Two thirds of the staff are expected to hold jobs in the newsroom, giving the channel an unusually large ratio of news to business staff; Belo’s theory is that by offering a better product, it will be able to attract a larger audience, and therefore more advertising.
But what audience? Belo intends to target Texans from age 18 to 54. “They’ll be somewhat younger, interested in news, and live a lifestyle busier than most,” Ackermann says. “They are on the go.” And while cable channels in other parts of the country are in urban markets and have therefore focused almost exclusively on urban viewers, TXCN will go after rural viewers as well, given the state’s population mix. To achieve that goal, Belo has signed agreements with two cable operators—TCI and Marcus Cable—that will bring TXCN to more than 1 million cable subscribers, or approximately one third of all subscribers in Texas. And it hopes to sign additional agreements that will boost that percentage even higher. At the moment no deal has been struck with the state’s largest cable operator, Time Warner, which serves more than one million subscribers in Texas, primarily in the cities of Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Time Warner has several reasons not to carry TXCN: It is the corporate parent of CNN, which will be one of TXCN’s main competitors, and it recently announced plans to start its own news channel to serve Austin and Round Rock. The company already runs four such channels in other parts of the country, including New York and Orlando. According to Kirk Varner, the corporate vice president for Time Warner Cable, Austin was chosen as the site of its latest venture because of the city’s rate of growth and the technical capacities of the cable infrastructure there—not because of Belo’s decision to start TXCN. “We’ve had this in the hopper for over a year,” he insists.
Competition notwithstanding, one of the greatest challenges to Belo is going to be keeping up with technological advances. Lately the business of television has gone through a transformation in the way video news is produced. The set that Belo is building will be state-of-the-art, filled with equipment that went on the market only in the past year or two. (Belo plans to invest around $15 million on capital costs and an equivalent amount on operating costs before it sees a profit, which may take five years.) Essentially, TXCN’s newsroom will be entirely digital, giving its editors the ability, for instance, to call up any video image from a computer server rather than having to fast-forward through reams of tape to find the shot they’re looking for. The new equipment will also allow two or more editors to work on the same images simultaneously instead of having to go through the clumsy process of tape duplication. Ackermann—who had spent most of his career at CBS during the era of multiple tapes and all the confusion they caused—gets really worked up when he talks about these new capabilities. “This was unheard of!” he cries. “We can do things we never did before!”
Even so, for the most part TXCN’s newscasts will follow a predictable format: the day’s big stories, then secondary stories related in a little more depth, then weather and sports. (In general, viewers will never be more than ten minutes away from an update on the weather.) There may also be area-specific inserts of news deemed too local to appeal to the entire state. During breaking news, however, TXCN will devote great amounts of time to covering events as they unfold. Good thing too: That’s how CNN transformed itself from the Chicken Noodle Network into an establishment powerhouse. “If Jessica McClure was stuck in a well today,” Huey promises, “we would own that story.”
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