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An experiment in substance

© Daryl Lease

I never had the occasion to catch an evening newscast by WBBM-TV in Chicago, but it sounded like something I wouldn't have minded sinking into the sofa to watch.

WBBM, it appears, offered an antidote for people weary of annoying, misleading teasers, weather teams that fawn over their new super megacool woppler doppler snow-sniffing radars, and effeverscent anchors who seem locked in a constant struggle to suppress bright, wide-eyed grins even when they're delivering horrendous news.

You'll notice I'm using the past tense here. For a little less than a year, WBBM experimented with a frivolity-free format that focus on the news, with longer investigative pieces and explanatory pieces. No celebrity gossip, no dieting fads, no bubbly repartee between the movie reviewer and the sports guy. Instead, one anchor on a bare-bones set, introducing pieces that harkened back to the more literate, early days of TV news.

Alas, the project failed. Thuddingly. The station recently pulled the plug because of poor ratings. During the July sweeps, The New York Times reports, the program's audience dropped to 20 percent below the ratings for the format it replaced.

"When you see a drop-off like that," Walter DeHaven, WBBM's vice president and general manager told The Times, "change is inevitable."

DeHaven says the station will still provide "quality, hard-hitting journalism" but with some adjustments to make sure the style and tone are more appealing to viewers.

Below are a few links about WBBM's experiment in substance over style:

http://ajr.newslink.org/ajrpottjun00.html

In this June 2000 piece in American Journalism Review, reporter Deborah Potter says "a solid newscast that nobody watches will last about as long as a soap bubble on a windy Chicago day."

http://www.cjr.org/year/00/3/grossman.asp

Lawrence K. Grossman laments the decline of TV news in the September/October 2000 issue of Columbia Journalism Review. It's sad, he notes, that WBBM's new format was considered a radical departure from the norm.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/30ma...

From the Chicago Sun-Times, here's an Associated Press story on the anchor's dismissal, signaling the end of the experiment.

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