Question for TV news folks ...

Last night, again, KCBS/2 in L.A. came on at 11 p.m. with a police chase (this happens 2-3 times a week). The car just drove around, sometimes unsafely but mostly not, on surface streets. Wasn't speeding. Little traffic. The police was on his tail for a little while, then dropped off. Some intersections had police vehicles. The helicopter stayed with it the whole way, but didn't even have the spotlight on some of the time.
And 35 minutes later, the news ended in time for Colbert. It was 35 minutes of nothing but the anchor talking with the chopper reporter, no commercials, no news, no weather, no sports, nothing else.
To TV news people, tell me why this is the procedure. Why do they sacrifice all the news and sponsors for nothing?
Why can't they use a split screen? Continue with the regular news on one side, the police chase on the other. And if something happens with the chase, go to full screen. I don't get it.

 

Police chases and earthquakes supersede all other news in L.A./California. It’s been that way for, like, a while.

But you knew that already.

The “why” I’ll leave to others.

 

Ross was the sports anchor on an NBC LA news team with Tom Snyder and Kelly Lange and weatherman Pat Sajak. The weekend anchors were Tom Brokaw on news and Bryant Gumbel on sports.

And to answer your question, it’s cuz we watch. We’ve all been sucked in wondering how these things will end.

 

I got to know Ross and his wife very well when I covered the Dodgers. They had two sets of twins.

Part of my question was about a split screen. Have the chase on one side and the regular news on the other. Then switch ovder if something happens with the car. It's better to have Evelyn Taft telling us it's going to be windy than Pat Harvey wondering how much gas the car has.

 

I agree with you.

They use all 35 minutes then just switch programming like it never happened. 99 percent of these end with the person giving up but we never know that.

There was a show a few years ago called Why I Ran that interviewed drivers from some chases. It was interesting to hear their stories.

Why I Ran (TV Series 2008– ) - IMDb

 

The answer is, because people will sit there glued to the chase no matter what. No one looks away from a police chase.

If channel 7 cuts away or goes to a split screen, every single TV set in LA switches to 4 or 2 to see if they still have the chase on.

 

OK, but if nobody is running commercials, what’s the point? Do they at least have a branded banner for these things?

 

Because they'll eat the loss of the commercial space to avoid getting dragged in the ratings for that half hour.

 

The equivalent in this market is live tornado warning coverage. If any county in the DMA is issued a warning, all four affiliates break in with live coverage, and lots of times they’ll pick it up early if there are warnings for the border counties in Mississippi.

But at least for the main station I watch, they’ve gotten pretty smart about having sponsorships for the various tower cams scattered around the state they use for tracking. I’d expect the next step to be banners in the corner of the radar and maps like you see during soccer.

 

Has the regular news ever been worked into this format?

Anchor: James, did the driver’s vandalism have anything to do with the Lakers’ loss tonight to the Nuggets, 114 to 110?

Copter reporter: Hard to say, Shauna, but the Kings also lost to the Sharks tonight, 3 to 1, so that could be it, too. You see them driving slowly through that neighborhood? That’s because of speed tables. The city council just voted to spend 20 million dollars on those and other “traffic calming” measures....

 

I only briefly worked in television news but from following it for some time and occasionally writing about it I can tell you this -- chase coverage builds ratings and helps establish your station as the place to go for breaking news. In an environment where people often switch from station to station few people change stations during a chase.

If one station did not go with the split-screen format you propose in chase coverage people would switch to that station in a search for better coverage of that chase. Without a helicopter reporter explaining what is going on the coverage suffers.

 

Like they did with OJ and the NBA Finals. First, OJ was the small screen, but eventually the Finals got pushed to the small window. Here's thinking that might have gone differently if Jordan was in the Finals instead of Olajuwon.