News in the Desert

Yesterday, we had a story about how many viewers have decided to stop watching or consuming news. You can read that story here.

One FTVLive reader weighed in with watching local news in a small market with no competition.

Hi Scott,

 Regarding your story today on how people are tuning out local news. I have a theory, it’s just not a good source.

 I recently moved from Southern California to Yuma, AZ. In SoCal, the #2 TV Market, the news product is solid. Good production, top anchors and reporters and tons of resources to gather and report the news of the day.

 Here is Yuma, to put it bluntly, it’s a shit show. It’s like watching a high school class put on a newscast. First, there is only one station in town and all 4 networks have the identical content just at different times of the day. This means you are only getting the information that news department chooses to cover. The anchors and reporters are amateurs, fresh out of school and not at all polished, that’s to be expected in a small market. But the number of mispronunciations, poor editing and generally uninteresting stories makes the local news unwatchable. They do one segment of truly local news; the rest is all packaged crap from the network with no real connection to the area. Most of the news is outdated by the time it hits the air because it’s pulled from the Today Show, GMA or the network evening news from earlier in the day. To be honest the newscast is more about how many commercials can you run and propping up local businesses with pretend news stories that are clearly paid content.

 The community would be better served with an out of town newscast from Phoenix or San Diego depending on what side of the viewing area you are.