The "Local News reconsidered" discussion examined how 'news' programming might be uniquely defined for Community Access Television. Scheduling, 'news' versus 'opinion' content, and strategies for community building with news programming were among the topics.

A list of recommendations from Professor News to Community Access Stations follow:

• Do "news" as well as personal and opinion programming. Expand the definition of news. Include profiles of interesting people and features about local organizations. With your medium, relevance and depth are more important than timeliness.
• Clearly label programs as news, opinion and any other categories. A line at the bottom of the screen would suffice.
• Recognize the value of reruns. They can produce a much higher cumulative audience than just one showing.
• Have a predictable schedule of your offerings, even for the reruns.
• Promote the schedule on your own channel and the other channels on the cable system. Also use bill-stuffers, flyers, Web sites, etc.
• Develop alliances with a professional news organization, such as a daily or weekly newspaper or a local radio station. Put their reporters on your channel. Cross promote with your alliance partner.
• Train a cadre of local, volunteer news reporters who know the basics of straight-news journalism -- factual, fair, unbiased, interesting and timely (as much as possible). Journalism faculty at a local college or high school could be the instructors.
• Develop junior news hounds at the middle-school and high-school level. Teach them the technology and the journalism basics and let them do news and feature stories.

And most important:

• Never go dark. Always have something on the channel -- a rerun or even a bulletin board.

Professor News
Paul Janensch

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