The questionnaires asked news directors about newsroom structure, staffing, management stability, budgets and more. The questionnaires reveal that money does not equate to quality or ratings in any quantifiable sense. In the study, stations in moderate-sized cities tended to score higher for quality than those in major cities, and not surprisingly, the questionnaires confirm that they had smaller budgets. A comparison of stations of the same market size finds that there still is no clear relationship between budget and quality or ratings. In part, this is because quality appears to correlate to effort, and it doesn't necessarily cost more money to make the extra phone call, think smart, and be locally relevant.
Some stations expect as many as three stories a day from their reporters.
This makes a spate of recent cutbacks in local news all the more a matter of concern. The problem is structural. Local television news is an industry with a growing supply of stations and a rising number of hours of news to produce, faced with an already shrinking audience. The only way to maintain historically high profits is to cut costs and increase productivity. This only exacerbates the problem of low quality.