In January, A.H. Belo will introduce a statewide service for Texas. It may face a showdown with Time Warner, which recently announced plans to create a regional news channel at the company's cable systems in Austin. And cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. is considering a possible service for Denver. The low-budget channels eschew helicopters, fancy weather radars, and expensive remote trucks, and usually lay off the happy talk and celebrity gossip. They devote plenty of time instead to breaking news, weather, traffic, and sports, and leisurely reports about local politics, education, transportation, and the environment.
Different agendas are at work here.
Some cable news channels, such as Time Warner's New York 1, go after local newspaper and TV ad dollars. Others, like A.H. Belo's Seattle-based NorthWest Cable News Channel, supplement and promote the company's newspapers and TV stations, generating additional revenues and burnishing the companies' images as specialists in community news. The old-line news outlets can no longer blithely assume they'll be the first to report what's happening in their hometowns. Viewership runs highest on weekdays before 9 a.m., in prime time, and on weekends before noon. Ratings predictably rise dramatically when there's eventful local news.