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newsrooms provide reporting for the daily newspaper, a local television station, thelocal 24-hour news channel and sometimes a local radio station as well, combining toprovide far deeper coverage than a television newsroom alone.These news channels are modeled after the all-news radio stations that spreadthrough the U.S. in the 1960’s and 1970’s and are quite different from the 24-hourlong-form information and public access channels, some modeled after C-SPAN, thathave been started with partners including municipalities and government agencies.They are also different from the university-run channels, such as George MasonUniversity’s GMU-TV in Virginia, that provide community information along withclassroom and other educational programming. By contrast, the 24-hour newschannels are journalistic in their entirety, all news all the time, 24 hours a day.From the start, the local 24-hour news channels were also deliberately differentiatedfrom local broadcast news, focusing on neighborhoods and a newspaper-style “beat“system. This capitalized on their geographic focus and responded to the complaint bymany, including television news directors, that local television news in larger citiescovers such a large area that it was no longer truly local.“Some cities are next to impossible to cover, “said Marty Haag, longtime newsexecutive at WFAA-TV in Dallas, “because they are so large, so diverse, that newsorganizations have never wrestled with how to create a threshold of relevance for storiesin one particular area and bring that to interest level of people in the general audience.”“It’s so hard to do stories that people can react to,” said Sagan, who noted localnewscasts in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia are among cities where viewersmight not have any tie to the governments being covered in their local news. Sagan saidhe could imagine viewers exclaiming, “’It’s not even my state!” By contrast, Sagantermed the new channels “hyper-local” and therefore more focused on a core ofviewers.“One of the roles the hyper-local cable channels can fill is doing stories that arerelevant,” he added, noting each local news channel can focus on a particulargovernment.“In some of these large cities,” said Haag, “news directors wrestle with the idea thatpeople in Pasadena don’t care what happened in Thousand Oaks, the people in theBronx don’t give a whit for what happened in Yonkers. How can we take a story thatcomes out of your neighborhood and say to the viewer this is something of trends andof pressures and of concerns of people all over this city? You have to get the newsdirectors to say, ‘Short of zoning, what is the threshold of relevance, get stories ofinterest that are of interest to the public at large?’”One way to reach that threshold of relevance is to produce “zoned” newscasts ornews segments for different communities in a station’s coverage area, just as newspapersproduce different zoned editions for different neighborhoods. Some of the stories seenin Pasadena or Thousand Oaks would be about Pasadena or Thousand Oaks. Andsome of those stories would be seen only in the community “zone” where theyoriginate. And that, many noted, helped make hyper-local news more credible.“What works best in local news is knowing the people - both the players and thecitizens,” said Kojo Nnamdi, who has been a local news anchor on Washington, D.C.,public television and radio stations for over three decades. “By which I mean, all toooften, local leaders are characterized more by their official positions than by who theyBEA—Educating tomorrow’s electronic media professionals 61