Yesterday, Jim Romenesko introduced readers to “Michelle” and “Lisa DeVries,” a pair of middle-aged, prosperous white moms who, according to management directives, comprise the target demographic for two local TV newsrooms. The newsworthy bit: Michelle is a cardboard cutout. Lisa is a stock photo on a poster. Regardless, they exist to remind reporters about the ideal viewer to keep in mind when developing story ideas.
“When you pitch, pitch to her,” reads an internal memo from a news director at one South Carolina TV station. “When you write, write to her. This is who we need watching in February. Women 25-54 is her demo.”
Apparently, this is nothing new. A former employee of a different TV station in the Palmetto State not-so fondly recalls “Marci”—“Married, Affluent, something something”—whose photos graced the newsroom a few years ago before they were defaced with graffiti and Marci eventually “died a slow death in many colorful ways, thanks to the staff’s imaginations.”
It turns out that the management mindset behind these maneuvers has been the subject of serious academic study. Responding to the Romenesko item, Dartmouth political scientist (and former CJR correspondent) Brendan Nyhan tweeted that the cutout was like seeing James Hamilton’s “excellent research on newscaster pursuit of marginal female viewers in action.” That’s a reference to the Stanford communications professor and author of several books about media markets, including All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News.
I thought Hamilton might be able to shed some light on the thinking behind Michelle, Lisa, and Marci, and what it might mean for newsrooms. What follows are excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity.
So this cardboard cutout thing in TV newsrooms. It’s all about the ratings?
If you go back a number of years — say, in the 1990s — there used to be a limit on who had access to ratings data. In part it was because they didn’t want to explicitly encourage the idea that you would shape content toward ratings. Even today at The New York Times editors may have analytics that they don’t share with reporters because they don’t want the news judgment to be heavily influenced by a search for eyeballs. But in television they are increasingly open about the relationship between content and demographics.
For a while at the network level you had the oligopoly of boredom, where if there were only five channels everybody could agree to offering public affairs stuff that might not be as interesting. But starting with the proliferation of cable channels, you saw more pressure to target.
And these fictitious viewers—Michelle, Lisa, Marci—they’re, what, the average viewer?
In my research I found that if you look at the network evening news, which I looked at in the late 1990s and 2000, the average viewer was over 50, but what I found was that there’s strong evidence that content was directed by two economic factors: Who is the marginal viewer, and what is their value to advertisers?
In television you can’t look at the average demographic and necessarily understand how they are structuring their content. In some ways you can take their preferences for granted. What you want to focus on is who tunes in sometimes and other times does not tune in. That’s your marginal viewer.
I think that person [Michelle, the cardboard cutout] is probably younger than the average viewer. And the advertiser value is important because younger viewers demand a higher premium in the marketplace for a couple reasons: number one, their preferences are more likely up for grabs; number two, their time is at a premium. There’s a feeling in television that you can have people over 60 any time of the day. Survey data also revealed that women are much more likely to make purchasing decisions in the household than men.
When I put it all together for the network evening news, even though the majority of the viewers were over 50 what you found is that younger viewers were a much higher portion of the people who sometimes tuned in and sometimes tuned out. So what you would try to do is target your content to a women in her mid-30s.
What are some consequences of this kind of market-driven news?
What I found was that the networks did more stories and spent more time on topics of interest to women in their 30s, and those viewers were more likely to be interested in issues like families with children, poverty, and gun control.
That is one reason why their content could be viewed as biased—because of the gender gap in party alignment. Those issues that were of interest to women in their 30s were more likely seen as, quote, Democratic issues, unquote. This economic targeting based on marginal viewership and advertiser value gets you to women in their 30s, which gets you to discussion of issues of interest to the Democratic Party.
Your research was on national networks. Do you think it tracks with local TV news?
What I thought was interesting about that second cardboard post shared is that the woman was listed as politically conservative. So I think the same analysis of targeting younger women applies. The thing that was interesting is that because political preferences vary across local areas, there might be also a tendency to focus on issues of interest to particular political parties.
Well, I lived in South Carolina for a dozen years and I don’t know how jazzed Michelle in Spartanburg or Marci would be about gun control or the Democratic Party.
Right. That research was based on national targeting. The interesting thing, though, is that one of the survey groups that provided information to local television news, even at the start of the Iraq war, sometimes they would test different topics with a sample. I remember at one point it was reported that the story people were least interested in hearing about were local protests about the war.
What’s your view on putting cardboard cutouts in newsrooms for reporters to shape their coverage based on the target demo?
What I’m most concerned about is what economists would call a market failure: that there are certain stories that people need to know as citizens, but they don’t want to know as consumers. And so to the degree that you have market-driven news, individually people may be happier—more sports, less school board—but collectively as a community you may end up having officials who are less accountable because there’s less scrutiny.
You wrote a book about the economic market for violence on TV. It seems like local TV news has become a caricature of itself when it comes to mugshots and crime scenes. Does that have to do with the demo?
I had a whole chapter on local television news, and what I found is that there’s a spatial model in television news. That means within each market there’s a high-crime station and low-crime station. They’re dealing with the same reality. But what you find is that the high-crime station is more likely to show you bodies. And if there is no murder in that market on that day, then they would bring in another one via satellite coverage.
I also found that there’s a correlation between style and substance. The high-crime stations were more likely to use a lot of video and have quicker stories, and to me the most interesting finding was that the best predictor of the amount of crime coverage in a broadcast were not crime statistics but rather the ratings for [the TV show] Cops in that market.
Good lord. Last question, kind of a joke: Do you think using a one-dimensional object is a good metaphor to explain the news coverage philosophy at local TV news stations?
You know, it’s tough because I think there is variation within a market. I did find within a market that the station that covers lots of crime also covers accidents and weather and some public affairs coverage, but only if it’s military intervention. So I think probably a better understanding would be five different cutouts representing the targets in that market because not everybody’s going after the same viewer.
So, a newsroom full of cardboard cutouts.
That’s right.
Corey Hutchins is CJR’s correspondent based in Colorado, where he teaches journalism at Colorado College. A former alt-weekly reporter in South Carolina, he was twice named journalist of the year in the weekly division by the SC Press Association. Hutchins writes about politics and media for the Colorado Independent and worked on the State Integrity Investigation at the Center for Public Integrity; he has contributed to Slate, The Nation, the Washington Post, and others. Follow him on Twitter @coreyhutchins or email him at coreyhutchins@gmail.com.