Everything you need to know about local TV news is in this book.

TV news has always been addicted to slogans. I should know, I used to write them.

My magnum opus? Live Local Late Breaking.

My boss used to joke that if we had only copyrighted Live Local Late Breaking, there would have been piles of money made. Not for me, exactly, because they owned my work, but for somebody. A lot of TV stations around the country picked up on the slogan — and nearly twenty years after it was first rolled out, many of them still use it.

So how does something like that spread from one television market to the next? Consultants.

Local TV news is consistent from town to town because of a small circle of consultants. Two companies in particular, AR&D and Magid Associates, have done more to homogenize local TV news in America than any other force. They may think they take different approaches (here’s AR&D sniping at Magid’s love of Live Local Late Breaking) but they don’t.

And woe to those who try to break the mold.

When Chicago’s WBBM tried to do a no-frills newscast in 2000, a show that covered serious stories — and did it without unnecessary sound effects, flashy graphics, and happy talk — they got creamed. Less than a year later, it was back to business as usual.

The station management didn’t give the new approach time to work — and how could they? The audience that had been trained to expect their news to look and sound a certain way was disrupted.

This is what the TV news consultants have wrought: an entire nation where there is no incentive to offer the audience anything new or different, a place where good ideas are shunned, and sameness is a virtue.

Branding, marketing, media