In 2005 the Project for Excellence in Journalism decided to conduct a small follow-up study of local TV news to determine whether the basic findings about local news content gained over the course of the five-year study still held true.

Methodology

The 2005 follow-up study used newscast rundowns from Video Monitoring Services (VMS) (available from Lexis-Nexis) to gather data about newscast content. The rundowns included: start and end times of each story (used to determine story length), descriptions of the story topic matter, and indication of the names and/or identities of additional sources used in reporting the story.

The basis of the study was a sample of 50 newscasts from 10 different markets. Markets were randomly chosen from a list of the 40 largest TV markets (i.e., markets for which VMS rundowns were available). This produced the following list of markets: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, Houston, Phoenix, St. Louis, San Diego, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, and Grand Rapids. Network affiliations were then assigned at random to determine a specific station to study in each market, which resulted in the inclusion of three ABC stations, three CBS stations, and four NBC stations. Newscast dates were selected at random to produce a full work-week of newscasts (i.e., Monday through Friday) scattered over the period January to May 2005. The exact dates were: January 14 (Friday), February 10 (Thursday), March 21 (Monday), April 27 (Wednesday), and May 17 (Tuesday). Rundowns were then pulled from Lexis-Nexis for the corresponding dates.