This news broke last week on Oregon Media Central, but KOHD made it official: KTVZ will be the only game in town for local TV news broadcasts, as KOHD is going to be rebroadcasting KEZI news out of Eugene, with a few packages created by a few Bend-based reporters. KOHD will still exist as a station, but they won’t have a local news broadcast. This comment sums it all up nicely.
Honestly, I liked the look/feel of the KOHD broadcast, and felt they did have some good people, but their Web site absolutely sucked. While KTVZ’s is full of ads (they have to pay the bills), at least there is useful content and conversation there. For those of us who aren’t able to be in front of a TV when the news actually is broadcast on TV, online local news is important to me. Thanks to Barney’s inability to ever stop working (I don’t think that dude sleeps), KTVZ has the best online local news content. (The Bulletin’s might be good, too, but it’s mostly hidden behind a paywall.) KOHDs site was usually riddled with typos, layout errors, and ugly grammatical errors, and I never considered it a useful place for online news.
That being said, competition in a market is always good. But it appears KTVZ doesn’t have any now, since KOHD and KBNZ are both just broadcasting sister-station content (and KTVZ-parent company NPG also owns the local Fox affiliate, so that eliminates the other major network).
Update: Forgot to even check, but Jon at HackBend is all over this, too. I knew about the news a few days ago as well, but with Band concerts and other family functions and work projects, this is the first I’ve been able to post anything.
Comments
Wow…a little harsh on KOHD’s Copy/website layout…did you ever inform them? Having come from the web producer background, that input would have helped motivate “the powers that be” to get a better CMS (which I doubt they could afford anyway.) The TV News game is a tough one these days and it makes me sad to see (any) competition leave the Central Oregon market. I was pulling for this underdog. A one news station town isn’t necessarily a good thing.
I agree: A one-news town is a Bad Thing™. I had e-mailed them before in the past, or have exchanged emails with KOHD folks who have commented here, but nothing’s come out of it. I didn’t feel it was my place to sit there and critique a site, as much as I really wanted to sometimes. Some of the stuff would have been obvious to anybody who was actually browsing their site and read their content that I just assumed that a) either somebody else was e-mailing them, or b) nobody at KOHD cared enough to actually be looking at their site’s content. If nobody was emailing them to correct it, that means that nobody was reading their site. If nobody at KOHD was reading their own content, why would it matter what I said? Know what I mean?
Again, it’s sad to see them go, as I do think it’s good to have a couple horses for this type of thing, but I don’t think their Web site helped them at all.
Wow, I had a completely different reaction to this. More of a, “Seriously? People actually care about this???” reaction truth be told.
I understand why this may seem important on the surface but, underneath, I just don’t believe it is. KOHD news went away not because KTVZ is that much better, but because we, the viewers, have been fleeing TV news in droves. And given the usual recipe for TV news, can you blame us?
A local half-hour TV show gets, what, 22 minutes of real air time? They spend half that covering state and national stuff (which viewers have likely already seen elsewhere), weather (which you can’t get *anywhere* these days – hello, iPhone), and sports (ditto.) What little time remains is as much on teasers for news coming “after the break” than on any actual reporting. So… what, maybe 4-5 minutes of local news coverage in each half-hour?
Note, too, that calling those left-over crumbs of programming “reporting” is often a bit generous, btw. What little is not a sensationalized run down of “who died, who almost died, and ways you might die”, is news that might be interesting if it weren’t so dumbed down and funneled through on-camera news-people whose primary job is to look/sound good, while having no actual expertise or insight on what they’re reporting. (Too harsh, that? Well… I’ll recant if/when someone points me to an online discussion about a newsworthy topic where the “talking head” had something interesting to say, or even dared to participate.)
The fact both you and John quickly leapt into a discussion of the relative merits of the online sites of these two stations is telling. That is where this battle for viewers’ attention is being fought. And it’s by no means a one-horse race. KTVZ is competing with bendbulletin.com, tsweekly.com, topix.com and, yes, even hackbend.com and bendblogs.com. Oh, and kohd.com too, btw (right?). This is the growth sector for local news, not TV, and it’s not an either-or field the way TV news is; viewers don’t have to decide which program to watch in a given time slot. It’s a much richer, more diverse landscape of audience tastes and sensibilities, and KTVZ will at best capture a modest fraction of the audience.
In short, we may be losing a TV news program, but we ain’t losing much news. If any.
(There, how’s that for stirring things up! 🙂 )
Home-run Robert K!
My thoughts (rants) were more a.) just rooting for the underdog and b.) pointing out the fruits that come from competition.
Now…my dream of dreams since leaving the Seattle News market:
If somebody would create an independent assignment desk/news bureaus in local areas that sells their video/pictures/print to the highest bidder in town? Why isn’t anyone doing this… It costs KTVZ a truck, gas, a reporter, etc … and it costs the Bulletin a car, gas, a reporter, etc. (and so on) [all to cover the same event]
Someone could be doing this as a freelance service and selling it back to them…
In a world where (local) content is king, who wouldn’t pay for such a service?
BTW, if anyone’s interested I took the time to turn my comment above into a more polished post over on BendTech… http://blog.bendtech.com/2010/03/this-just-in-kohd-discontinues-local-news-nobody-cares/
KOHD Is Still Broadcasting News — Sort Of
HackBend, BendTech and this site all posted stories about KOHD ceasing their news broadcasts. Well, apparently they’re not ceasing them entirely, just making them much shorter with little blips through…