I find it really troubling that in a time when people want to be connected and informed like never before (and have the technology to be so) so many in smaller news organizations try to be every thing to all people, and end up failing spectacularly trying to out perform larger operations at games the larger operations are finely tuned for. Smaller outfits, especially those limited in geographic area, should play to their strong suits. In this case, they should do as much as possible about having LOCAL news.

Watch your local evening news, and if your station does the 5-6:30 model, it's almost certain that the 5:30-6 section will focus on national news, occasionally different anchors, and will have the lowest ratings. The three 30 minute sections' ratings usually follow this model: ¬_/

And news stations will tell themselves "Oh, we put national news in the middle because it has low ratings." I get that if you're forced to play the short view and juts have to fill time. But I do honestly think that if you put more effort into that, over time, you could cultivate a worthwhile news show there. Possibly even just make the 5-6 one hour, and use the expanded time to help flesh out the rest of your stories and make them all run an extra minute longer.

It's just as someone who's worked nearly all of my post-high school life (being 31) in local news, it's always frustrated me how only a few hours a day of local content are produced locally in most places. I think it's a vast misuse (unuse?) of available resources.