On one rather typical recent news day, an ambulance was shot at in Salt Lake City, more questions were raised about the conduct of Mayor Deedee Corradini, a verdict was rendered in the Oklahoma City bombing trial and the Jazz were still in the midst of their NBA Finals run.
All those stories, along with dozens of others, were available to local TV news teams. And somebody had to decide which would make it on the air - and when.The responsibility for those decisions lay with four men - the news directors at Salt Lake's four major TV stations: KUTV-Ch. 2's Con Psarras, KTVX-Ch. 4's John Edwards, KSL-Ch. 5's Ray Carter and KSTU-Ch 13's Geoff Roth.
So how do these decisions get made?
"By luck," quipped Edwards.
On this particular day - Monday, June 2 - luck was with the news directors. The Timothy McVeigh verdict was an obvious choice to lead all of their late newscasts. But it isn't always quite that simple.
"It's more often hard than it is easy," said KSL's Carter.
And it's a bit more problematic when no story stands out among the rest.
"There are certain days when it's just obvious," Edwards said. "And there are days when it's not obvious. So what you do is you look at what you've got."
"On nights when there isn't one big story that's out there screaming `I'm your lead story,' then there are a lot of different factors that will influence what your lead will be," said Roth. "For us, it could be that we've got a story that we know nobody else has. . . . And a lot of it has to do with what stories you decided to go after that day and which ones you did the best job of covering."
And no one has any hard-and-fast rules about what stories make the newscast and where they play within the show.
"It's case by case," said KSL's Carter. "It depends on what stories are filtering through the newsroom. What may be a lead story one day may be the third or fourth story in a newscast the next day."
Not all those decisions come out the same. For example, on the June 2 late newscasts, Ch. 5 played the ambulance shooting story second, Ch. 2 played it third, Ch. 13 played it sixth (and after the first commercial break) and Ch. 4 didn't get to the story until more than half an hour into the newscast. (KTVX did, however, play the story much higher in its 5:30 p.m. newscast.)
Why? For one thing, the decisions are made by individuals or groups of individuals. And, just like everyone else, news people often differ in their judgments.
There are sometimes other, less obvious reasons. One of the reasons the ambulance story was pushed down in Ch. 4's newscast had to do with satellite time scheduled earlier in the newscast for live Jazz reports from Chicago.
And, like many other businesses, sometimes there just isn't enough staff to go around. On June 2, Ch. 5 gave somewhat less play to - and did a more cursory report on - Corradini's problems.
"Our political reporter, Deenie Wimmer, (was) still on vacation," said Carter. "We had 18 people in Chicago, and I was so short-handed that we literally went down the list and said, `OK. In terms of priority . . . the Corradini story was about No. 4 or 5 on the list, and it didn't get the same kind of treatment that it would have, very honestly, had I had the entire Chicago crew here or if Deenie was back from va-ca-tion."
Which turned out to be yet another factor that plays into story selection.
"Probably three out of five days a week you have to choose among various contenders in terms of what receives the most play," said Ch. 2's Psarras. "And we measure it against that relevance pyramid - does it affect a large number of people a lot, a few people really a lot?"
The process is similar at Ch. 4. Edwards looks for the story "viewers are most likely to care about - and it may not necessarily be a hard-news story."
Sometimes even that doesn't work. "If you don't come up with a winner on that, you say, `OK, which is innately the most interesting story I've got?' And it can be interesting for any reason - because it's oddball, because it's funny, because it's got good video," Edwards said.
At Ch. 4, breaking news and in-depth stories are the bywords.
"We have a basic philosophy. . . . We want to be on top, as much as possible, of breaking news and news of the day," said Edwards. "But we also want to make sure that we give adequate time to our reporters to dig.
"Enterprise and breaking news/
news of the day would be our philosophical bent when we come in to work each day."
At Ch. 2, Psarras and his team try to follow a specific plan.
"We have a pyramid, and at the top of the pyramid is relevance as well as importance," he said. "The new secretary-general of the United Nations is certainly important, but will it help you get home from work when I-15 is torn up? No.
"So in terms of serving a local television news viewing audience, we try to select stories and push stories on the basis of relevance and utilitarian value to viewers."
Ch. 2's "news you can use" emphasis includes things like traffic, communities, schools and health. Psarras cited a recent example of a KUTV newscast that led with a story about allergies.
"A lot of people would say, `Well, that's pretty soft.' But on the standard of how many people may be interested and may find some value in learning about this, that's quite a few people," he said.
The emphasis is decidedly local - what Psarras calls "micro-journalism."
Ch. 13 does things rather differently. For one thing, the station has an hourlong 9 p.m. newscast instead of a 35-minute 10 p.m. show. And, unlike the ABC, CBS and NBC stations, Fox-owned KSTU has no national newscast.
"We're trying to cover a lot of ground, both local and national news," Roth said.
Because of that extra time, Ch. 13 mentioned (at least briefly) 15 stories that didn't show up on any of the other channels' late newscasts. But most of those were national or international stories, not locally generated pieces.
The station also puts more emphasis on both local and national entertainment news.
"We have more time," Roth said. "We know that a lot of people who watch us tend to be a younger demographic that are interested in that kind of stuff. And it's something that we do that the other guys in town don't do on a regular basis. So it's something that does make us stand out."
And standing out isn't easy in the local TV news market. All it takes is a remote control and a bit of flipping around to discover that there are marked similarities among the coverage on the various stations - particularly among Channels 2, 4 and 5. On June 2, for example - a day dominated by reams of Jazz reports - Ch. 2 could claim only two stories - one of those a very light feature - that didn't show up on one of the other stations. Ch. 4 had only one.
And everything Ch. 5 had (again, with the exception of some of its Jazz coverage) was on one or more of its competitors' newscasts as well.
And all that duplication, triplication and quadruplication hasn't gone unnoticed by the news directors.
"We can't be afraid to be different from the competition," Ch. 2's Psarras said. "We're in lockstep with KSL and KTVX and KSTU. Often. If you look at our newscasts at 5 and 6 o'clock sometimes, we just go right down story for story for story. And I think that is a disservice to a station in our position (trailing in the ratings) because we have to be different."
For example, on June 2 KUTV's third-story was a follow-up to an earlier story the station did on windshield replacement companies that are illegally offering to pay a customer's insurance deductible - and how that could end up costing the customer money. It was a story no other station even mentioned.
What all four stations have in common is at least one daily story meeting. It's a necessity, even for people who don't much like meetings.
"One thing we don't do a lot of around here is meet," Ch. 4's Edwards said. "But we do have a daily editorial meeting at 2:15 each day."
Ch. 13's staff meets in the morning. Some stations have more than one meeting. At Ch. 2, there's a 9 a.m. meeting and a 9:30 a.m. meeting for the management staff. Ch. 5 has story meetings in the morning and again in the afternoon.
And all four news directors say they try to encourage input from as many people as possible. Meetings may include reporters, producers, editors, anchors, photo-graphers and promotions people.
"I want us debating and arguing in this newsroom about what the lead story should be," said Ch. 5's Carter. "I think that's healthy. I've worked in too many news operations where it's pretty totalitarian . . . and there's no flexibility."
Ch. 2's Psarras said that his staff includes different people with different backgrounds - some who favor "action news, flashing light and yellow police tape." Others prefer investigative journalism. Others lean toward "long and fuzzy, sensitive, warm kinds of things."
"My job is to bring sort of a stationwide vision or standard to the story selection process," he said.
"We take input from anybody," said Ch. 13's Roth. "Sometimes a sales guy will walk in and say, `Hey, I've got an idea for a story.' "
One such suggestion - about (what turned out to be unfounded) rumors about doctors stealing organs for transplant from out-of-town businessmen - made it on the air at KSTU.
Even after the meetings, however, story selection and placement remains a fluid process.
"I would say 40 to 50 percent of the time what we decide in the morning story conferences (about what) will lead our newscasts changes by our afternoon planning session," said Ch. 5's Carter.
That fluidity is a certainty - as is the fact that, no matter how good (or bad) a job you've done today, "We know we've got to turn around and do it all over again tomorrow," Edwards said.