The late local news isn't what it used to be in Baltimore.
In fact, the nightly program that for decades has served as the flagship broadcast for all major stations and the home of such familiar faces as Rod Daniels, Denise Koch and Mary Beth Marsden isn't half of what it used to be for the oldest and largest stations here when it comes to audiences.
Though Baltimore residents are often depicted as being deeply committed to tradition, area viewers are tuning out a decades-old media formula that once served as a nightly ritual marking the end of the day for tens of thousands of Maryland families.
Station managers insist that their late newscasts are still a important part of their programming strategies, but analysts wonder whether 11 p.m. newscasts in cities like Baltimore aren't on their way to becoming obsolete much like evening newspapers.
While ratings can be open to multiple interpretations, it is hard to miss the message of this startling snapshot of the weeknight news landscape: In the past five years, from one May sweeps ratings period to the other, WBAL has lost 62 percent, WMAR 56 percent, and WJZ 52 percent of their 11 p.m. news audiences in the key demographic on which most advertising is sold — viewers 25 to 54 years of age.
That steep decline came into sharp focus last week with the arrival of the first May sweeps data since the introduction of a new audience measurement method a year ago. Baltimore station managers believe that these Local People Meters have accelerated the trend.
"That kind of decline isn't the result of one thing – it's the result of a bunch of things," says Bob Papper, Hofstra University professor and director of a benchmark annual study of local TV newsrooms in the U.S. done by the Radio, Television Digital News Association.
"Some of this is the result of the steady graying of the news audience on one end. But another big part involves the younger side of that prime demographic being nibbled away especially by the Internet," Papper said. "You're talking about people who have learned via the Internet that they can get what they want when they want it when it comes to news. So, appointment viewing, like an 11 p.m. newscast, is really becoming a problem for television stations, because people just don't live like that anymore – and they know they don't have to."
Or, as David Blum, a Baltimore advertising agency executive, puts it, "This decline in viewership for late local news is symptomatic of living in an instant world today."
"The access to news 24/7, which started with cable television networks, then went to the Internet and now is right in front of you on your mobile phone, has in some way made the delivery of that information on late local newscasts obsolete," says the senior vice president at GKV, a full service Baltimore-based communications firm.
Pointing to the long-held belief that many viewers tune into the late news for local weather and sports, Blum offered an example of how even that sense of an exclusive franchise for local TV has been undermined by new technology and a hyper-local mentality.
"Whereas local weather used to mean a local personality giving me a sense of what the temperature was going to be and whether or not it might rain in the general area, I now have an application on my mobile phone that has a weather station at a high school that's close to my house," Blum says.
"So, it's telling me what the temperature and the wind is from that particular location – and I can call up a map to see exactly where the rain is. Now, I know I'm an early adopter with more technology than the average guy probably, but that kind of technology is filtering down, and that's the kind of force that furthers audience erosion at 11 p.m. even for the mainstay of local weather."
All of the general managers in Baltimore acknowledge that lifestyle and technological changes have taken a toll on the late news audience the last five years, but they also all point to one major factor, which they believe has made the loss of viewers seem worse than it is: the introduction last June of controversial Local People Meters by Nielsen Media Research.
"As an industry, we can't deny that demographic trends and lifestyles have put a damper on the 11 o'clock news, because you can get news in so many different places," says Bill Hooper, the general manager at WMAR. "We understand that. But there has been much more of a decline in the recent year and it coincides with Nielsen changing their methodology to the Local People Meters. That is not the factor, but it is a factor in these declining ratings."
Previously, Nielsen had relied on a decades-old method of handwritten diaries. The new People Meters offer instant, real-time demographic data that supposedly rules out the variable of faulty recall by viewers in filling out their diaries.
