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ESSAYWHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN:THE RISE OF 24-HOUR LOCAL NEWSCHANNELSAdam Clayton Powell IIIacpowell@usc.eduThis is excerpted from a series of research reports in 2003 on the future of local television, radioand Internet news, part of the Local News Initiative at the University of Southern California’sAnnenberg School for Communication.Local 24-hour cable news channels are operating in two dozen cities in the U.S. andare gaining audiences and revenues, somewhat at the expense of the broadcasters whooffer “appointment” local news. As these local news channels proliferate and prosper,some predict the marginal or lowest audience local news broadcasts will becomeeconomically unsustainable. This would repeat the growth pattern of all-news radiostations in commercial and then public radio over the past four decades, growth that allbut eliminated once prevalent “appointment” local news on the vast majority of radiostations in cities across the U.S.“The audience, the delivery and the economics are all changing”, said DeborahPotter, Executive Director of NewsLab [for footnote purposes, all sources are listedalphabetically at the end] and those changes are all exerting powerful forces that arereshaping—some say squeezing—local television news.Local 24-hour news channels are now available in markets large and small, from NewYork City’s New York 1 and the Cablevision News Channel 12 services in Connecticut,New Jersey and Long Island serving the most populous local region to news channelsin cities as small as Las Vegas, according to an annual survey by the National CableTelevision Association [Cable Developments 2002, Volume 26, Number 1, publishedby NCTA]. Those who work at the 24-hour local channels and those in broadcastnewsrooms who compete with them point to the local news channels as sources of solidcoverage of breaking news, beat reporting and enterprise features. Advantages they haveover broadcasters include 24-hour coverage and geographically focused coverage.“The problem is that stations have a mandate to cover areas that are too big,” saidPaul Sagan, who stepped down as news director of WCBS-TV to start New York 1 in1992. “The trend at regional news channels is to cover one city, one government.”These channels also exhibited a different relationship to the audience: for example,Robin Smythe, General Manager of Orlando’s 24-hour news channel, said hernewsroom served “customers,” not “viewers.”Partnerships across media are also typical of local news channels, providing financialand journalistic resources from day one. In Chicago, New England and Florida, notedGreg Klein, who directs research for the National Cable Television Association, joint60Feedback April 2003 (Vol. 44, No. 2)