You know the famous “Breaking News!!!” story that TV stations just love to use on a daily basis?
The one where viewers often say, “What is so breaking news about a shooting on Troost?”
Well, WDRB, the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Kentucky, is now promising viewers (video below) it will stop using the silly term, according to the media site TV Spy.
In addition, the station has proclaimed a contract with viewers (below) that is pretty remarkable and another with advertisers.
“You hear the term, ‘Breaking News’ quite frequently these days,” says a promo the station has started running. “It’s a marketing ploy to convince you that at television station is better at bringing you the news first, as it happens. The problem is, it’s just not true.”
RADIOMAN KC
Nice. Lets hope that action by one station gains widespread public attention so when stations keep on, keeping ON, they’ll pay a price for it.
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Permit me to seem a little self serving about my not-for-profit website, “What Local TV Stations Don’t Want You to Know.” It’s not a new site but not much has changed, I’ve noticed, over the ten years since I wrote it.
It was very popular among journalism schools in those days… because most people never talked about LOCAL news trickery. I got a lot of mail then. Even invites to go on talk radio in major markets to trash their visual competitors, TV… which I always turned down. I was out of the business. Said my piece, and I’ve left it up there because so many people in TV wrote me, asking how I’d been able to sneak into their morning editorial meetings.
(Laughing), I didn’t, but local station management moves around so much all local TV News is pretty much the same, thanks to ratings consultants and copy-cat formats.
I’ve left this site up on the ‘net because it’s too much trouble to take it down!
Publish the link if you wish, or delete this reference, John. It’s reported you’re leaving? That’ll be KC’s loss.
http://sites.google.com/site/radiomankc/smoke-mirror-tv-news