Full disclosure, I’m only an observer of local TV news, I work for a small weekly in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

I will point out that since the digital conversion in 2009, the four commercial TV stations that service Northwestern Lower Michigan and the Eastern part of the Upper Peninsula have partnered into two teams: a CBS/Fox affiliate, and an NBC/ABC affiliate.

The CBS/Fox affiliates now share reporter resources, and at the end of the broadcast on one station, they remind viewers that the news continues on their partner station, they don’t serve as a balance to one another in terms of editorial viewpoints.

The other partnership has a silver lining to it. Originally, the ABC station did not have resources local content, but since the DTV standards, I’ve seen unique shows talking about local people and events. I don’t know if it’s because of the partnership that this happened, but it has provided some new content, which is good to see.

The association of health journalists just weighed in with a powerful comment supporting the FCC requirement that TV stations disclose online when the’ve done marketing segments that look like news bits:

“As the largest organization of health care journalists, we have long been troubled by “pay for play” arrangements and other practices in which marketing masquerades as news. Such practices are especially pernicious when applied to matters of health and health care – as they often are — because people make decisions affecting their well-being based on such reports. The result is harm to individuals who make the wrong choice based on biased information and increased costs in the health care system that we all pay for. Such deceptiveness also threatens the credibility of all journalism. A bright line must be drawn between those who say what they’re paid to say and those who make an independent effort to find out what’s true.”
http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7021753323

Steven Waldman is calling TV journalists to action before a Jan 17 deadline — seeking comments re: FCC policy on ad transparency – political and pay-for-play. These are huge issues for local stations. Waldman is lead author of last summer’s major FCC media report and was part of the JA conversation on the value of local TV news. Here are his recent writings on the FCC proposals to put political ad info online and reign in pay-for-play. His plea: comment! As of Jan 1, Waldman says, “not a single journalist or journalism professional group has weighed in.”

Your choice to invest energy into an online conversation on the JA is something we value deeply. A core part of our contribution back to you is to share what we learn from each forum with the JA and broader community. We have now completed a series of reports looking back on this conversation that outline performance, our engagement methodology, and distilling down potential opportunities for the future. You can find them all on our blog.

If you participated in the forum, thank you for making it the resource it’s become! Please tell us what you think of our conclusions on the blog. If you’re visiting for the first time, free to add your thoughts here, comment on our conclusions or both!

Greetings all – this forum opened a week ago with a fast and furious conversation, covering perhaps too much ground for an instant take-away, but with great back and forth on values and visions. Thank you for the diverse insight everyone brought to this experiment in cross-community conversation.

Today we wrap up active outreach, but please know that the forum remains open for posts and responses. We can do this because because of the JA login system; since you connect using Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or Twitter, it is far more difficult for spammers or anonymous trolls to interfere with effective conversation here. 

I’ve put a few initial takeaways here: http://www.journalismaccelerator.com/blog/forum-first-takes-local-tv-news/
 
Keep a look out next week for more analysis that should be useful to the journalism community broadly. And remember – JA forums are driven by questions from people like you. Ideas welcome! http://www.journalismaccelerator.com/about/ask-a-question