Tonight's Big Story: News Viewers Missing!

But unlike other media, the local TV news blues are in some ways self-inflicted.

To compete for ever more elusive audiences, local stations have expanded their news, weather and sports into more hours of the day, dividing each competitors' share of the market into smaller slices. Local news practically saturates the airwaves now: Each of the major stations starts its news day at 5 a.m. and finishes -- with breaks for soap operas, talk shows and other entertainment programs -- at 11:30 p.m.

WTTG, owned by Fox Broadcasting, now has news on seven hours a day; it added a 5 p.m. newscast in 2002 and a new half-hour at 11 p.m. last summer.

Local news also comes in Spanish, with the advent of newscasts on Washington affiliates of Telemundo and Univision. It's also available live for 14 hours a day on cable's NewsChannel 8. And still more is on the way. Channel 5 plans to launch a daily one-hour 11 a.m. newscast this summer (replacing its current half-hour newscast at noon). Fox5 also will expand its six-days-a-week "Fox 5 Morning News" to Saturday mornings, says Duffy Dyer, vice president and general manager of the station. Bill Lord, WJLA's vice president of news, says his station has also looked into expanding its news programming, too, though he won't say what timeslots ABC7 is considering.

More news won't translate into more viewers, especially if the news itself doesn't improve, says Del Walters, a former WJLA anchor and investigative reporter. "We started cheapening the news," says Walters, who now runs his own film production company in Northern Virginia. "How may times can you turn on the evening news or the morning news and it leads with somebody being shot? What we've done is we've gone to 'It bleeds it leads' and now the thing that's bleeding the most is the audience."

As paradoxical as it sounds, more news does make solid economic sense, even as audiences fragment, say Dyer and Lord say. Consider the alternatives, they say: Compared with buying a syndicated program such as "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or a game show, producing another newscast is a relatively inexpensive proposition. Local stations already produce more news than they can use, so expanding this type of programming doesn't require additional investment in sets, cameras or satellite trucks. In some cases, stations don't even need to hire more reporters, camera people or producers.

News, says Lord, "is pretty cost-effective, and it gets more cost-effective as you add more programs. I've already got 90 percent of what I need right now" to start another newscast.

What's more, with the networks' declining fortunes, there aren't as many hit sitcoms and dramas coming on the rerun market for local stations. "You look in the pipeline and you see a few shows here and there," Dyer says. "I've bought [rights to some rerun programs] that I thought were going to be surefire successes and they under-performed. News makes sense to us. It's our strong suit."

Local news has been the single biggest moneymaker for TV stations, accounting for as much as half of stations' revenue, says Bob Papper, a Hofstra University journalism professor who studies station economics. Although producing the news costs money -- veteran anchors such as News4's Jim Vance and WJLA's Gordon Peterson are million-dollar-a-year employees -- stations keep all of the ad revenue generated by their newscasts, he says. This is in contrast to entertainment shows, in which ad revenues are split with the network or program syndicator.

Even so, Papper says the golden goose isn't producing like it used to, due in part to intensified news competition. Not long ago, he says, stations earned profits as high as 40 to 50 percent on every ad dollar they brought in. The figure is between 20 and 35 percent now, he says.

That is hardly a formula for financial panic, and there are few signs of it at local stations. Only one, WRC, has recently announced cutbacks in its news operations; in the past five months, several of its longtime stars, including entertainment reporter Arch Campbell, anchor Susan Kidd and sportscaster George Michael, have left. But the cost-cutting was mandated by WRC's parent company, NBC Universal, which is trimming budgets in all of its operations.

Some suggest, however, that as the audience changes, local news has to change to keep up. Craig Allen, a professor of broadcast journalism at Arizona State University, says local stations have stuck with "a full menu approach" -- news, weather and sports -- at a time when the audience might be demanding something else. He points to cable networks, such as the Fox News Channel and CNN, that have found that they can keep audiences from flipping away by covering every detail of a developing story -- the kidnapped blonde, the crisis in the Mideast -- often for hours on end.