KNWA Axes Nielsen, Tempers Fort Smith Storm

Nielsens At News Time
• Click here for a printable PDF version of the chart.

(Lists requires Adobe Acrobat viewer. Click here for a free copy.)

Blake Russell has decided to give Fort Smith a minute of his time.

After changing television station NBC 24/51 to KNWA on Aug. 13 and focusing the NBC affiliate’s coverage on Northwest Arkansas, Russell received a barrage of angry e-mails from viewers in the Arkansas River Valley.

Most of them were mad about the weather. Fort Smith has a history of violent tornados, with the worst on record hitting in 1898, 1927 and 1996.

So on Aug. 27, Russell, the general manager of KNWA, started providing Fort Smith with a one-minute weather forecast during each of the three evening newscasts and four 30-second weather reports during the morning news.

It may not sound like much, but at $200 for a 30-second spot, that ads up to about $700,000 per year. That’s not necessarily money out of the station’s pocket (which has an annual newsroom budget of about $1 million), but it’s TV time that could have been sold as advertising or used to provide more news coverage.

“I said all along we are not abandoning Fort Smith,” huffs Russell, who came to the station in January as part of the new regime of Nexstar Broadcasting Inc., which is in the process of buying the station from JDG Television Inc. of Muskogee, Okla.

“What price can you put upon safety?” Russell asked. “In Fort Smith, they got an expanded weather forecast for their region … You’re looking at a good $50,000 commitment in the last four months just to weather.”

The Fort Smith weathercast is just another gambit in the area’s television competition. As western Arkansas grows, the television market has vaulted from No. 119 in the nation in 1992 to 107th largest this year with 267,030 television-watching households. The area’s television news advertising market has more than doubled since 1992 from $16 million to $34 million per year.

And there’s been a demographic shift as well. Russell said 51 percent of television viewers in the 11-county dominant market area (DMA) are now in Northwest Arkansas, which is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, thanks largely to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville and its village of vendors. For the past five decades, Fort Smith has held sway over the DMA, which includes nine counties in Arkansas and two in Oklahoma. But the River Valley city just isn’t growing like Northwest Arkansas.

With a population of 80,268, Fort Smith is still the largest city in the 11-county region. The Fort Smith metropolitan statistical area had a population of 207,290 in 2000. That includes Crawford and Sebastian counties in Arkansas and Sequoyah County in Oklahoma.

But when the population of Washington and Benton counties is combined in what the U.S. Census Bureau refers to as the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers MSA, the number of residents is 311,121. (McDonald County, Mo., was added to the Northwest Arkansas MSA last year but is not included in that population figure.)

Split Market

Historically, all three western Arkansas television stations have broadcast to a large territory from Mena north 175 miles to the Missouri border and from Muskogee east 145 miles to Russellville.

The cities in that area vary considerably, and the mountains between Northwest Arkansas and the River Valley serve as a buffer between the two metropolitan regions.

Besides KNWA, western Arkansas has KFSM, Channel 5, the CBS affiliate, and KHBS/KHOG, Channels 40/29, the ABC affiliate (a two signal station that is referred to simply as KHOG throughout the rest of this story).

KFSM was founded in 1953 by local media mogul Donald W. Reynolds and sold in 1979 to the New York Times Co., which still owns it.

1953 was also the year cable television came to Fayetteville. Rogers got hooked up three years later. Rooftop antennas in the Ozarks could only pick up snowy images from one station in Tulsa. It was the golden age of television, and mountains couldn’t separate the hill folk from The Honeymooners and Howdy Doody.

Throughout its history, KFSM has lead the DMA in the quarterly ratings from Nielsen Media Research. For the last decade at least, KHOG, which is owned by Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., has lead the Nielsen ratings in Washington and Benton counties, the two counties that make up the metropolitan area of Northwest Arkansas.

Van Comer, general manager of KFSM, said one reason his station has been stronger in the River Valley is because it had an analog tower in Van Buren, and its reception wasn’t as good in Northwest Arkansas.

In 2002, however, KFSM began leasing a new digital broadcasting tower near Winslow. At 2,500 feet above sea level, the tower beams a digital signal 70 miles in each direction, blasting KFSM outside the DMA to far-flung places like Eureka Springs and McDonald County, Mo.

Although Fort Smith viewers are fuming over the perceived exodus of KNWA, Northwest Arkansas has traditionally taken a back seat to Fort Smith coverage from the area stations.

A little more than a decade ago, all three local stations still had most of their newsroom operations in Fort Smith. The River Valley dominated the newscasts while the Arkansas Razorbacks dominated sports coverage. Back then, the weather forecasters gave a five-day forecast with high and low temperatures that pertained only to Fort Smith, not Northwest Arkansas, where it’s usually slightly cooler and less tornadic.

Until Dallas-based Nexstar began the process to buy KNWA late last year, the station’s management bragged that it was the only locally owned television station in Northwest Arkansas. Muskogee is about 60 miles away.

KNWA can provide the separate weather report because it also has two signals. Although the main newsroom is in Fayetteville, the station is licensed to Fort Smith and Rogers because those cities are nearest to its two transmitting towers. The KFTA transmitter on Cartwright Mountain near Fort Smith feeds the broadcast to the KNWA transmitter on Fitzgerald Mountain near Rogers.

With the Aug. 13 announcement, KNWA changed its call letters from KPOM/KFAA to KFTA/KNWA. But for marketing purposes it’s only using the call letters affiliated with Northwest Arkansas.

Russell said he has trimmed the newsroom staff by six or seven positions since coming to Arkansas, leaving him with 27. His $1 million annual budget has to pay those salaries as well as for things like 21 vehicles, which includes a $250,000 satellite truck and four engineering trucks.

Nielsen Schmielsen

Russell has come up with another money-saving tactic. He plans to stop buying the Nielsen ratings books, which have been the TV industry’s main barometer since the 1950s. Russell said that will save the station thousands of dollars a year — possibly $100,000, he said when pressed for a number.

Russell said Nielsen has a “flawed” system of using 400 “diaries” to track trends in a viewing area that has a population of about 500,000.

“We’re going to stop any and all association with Nielsen,” he said. “What they do with their antiquated and outdated methodology is not my concern anymore.

“In the next month and a half, we’re dropping them. It saves us money that we’re going to invest in other ways of reporting. It’s a flawed system, it’s expensive and we’re just not going to take it anymore.”

Nielsen will continue to track KNWA, and those numbers will be provided to KFSM and KHOG, which plan to continue buying the Nielsen reports.

Russell said about one-third of Nexstar’s 45 television stations have stopped buying the Nielsen books, including some stations that were No. 1 in their markets.

Since canceling its newscast in 1992 and resurrecting it in 2000, the local NBC affiliate has lagged behind the other two stations in the Nielsen ratings (see charts, p. 23). KNWA’s competition can probably continue to use the weak Nielsen numbers against the NBC affiliate, telling potential advertisers the station is reaching only a smidgen of the market.

But Russell said most advertisers buy time during particular programs and aren’t concerned with the Nielsen ratings.

“It’s all about how you sell,” Russell said. “We’re going to drop them like a hot potato, and we’re going to keep on trucking.”

But Russell’s comments conflict with those of David Needham, the previous general manager at NBC 24/51.

“The lifeline of any major television station is based on that [Nielsen ratings] book,” Needham told the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal in 2002. “Your revenue is based on that book. National and regional advertisers buy based on that book.”

“Our advertisers deserve something, and the Nielsens are all we have,” said KFSM’s Comer. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, but what else can we give them? When you’re in a position where you have good ratings, it’s a good idea to use the ratings.”

Fragmentation

For the past decade (40 quarters), KFSM had lead the Nielsen ratings for households in the DMA 37 times at 5 p.m., 35 times at 6 p.m. and 26 times at 10 p.m. (See chart, p. 23).

KFSM and KHOG (referred to by Nielsen as KHBS+) were tied 11 times during that decade: twice at 5 p.m., three times for the 6 p.m. book and six times at 10 p.m. (That’s based on rounding the ratings to a whole number.)

KHOG led in the remaining quarters.

Although KFSM shows a traditional dominance in the Nielsen books, KHOG has shown considerable gains during the most important newscast — 10 p.m.

Since July 2001, KHOG has won the 10 p.m. Nielsen households rating five times (out of 13) and tied with KFSM in four other quarters.

With urbanization, one theory is that the 10 p.m. newscast becomes more important because people often aren’t home in time to watch the 6 p.m. newscast. They’re still at work, running errands on the way home or heading out for dinner.

“In the Central Time Zone, people are still available to watch it,” Jim Prestwood, president and GM of KHOG, said of the 10 p.m. newscast. “They’re not in bed yet. Our numbers are still very competitive at 6 and 10. In some cases higher.”

Prestwood said KHOG also benefits by having local anchors. Craig Cannon, Donna Bragg, Leslee Wright and Jennifer Haile are all from western Arkansas or have at least lived here for the past 20 years.

Prestwood said his station’s news budget is “well in excess of $1 million” per year.

“You do see an influx of revenue during the political years,” he said, “because that money is just not there during the odd years.”

KFSM has a reputation for being more popular with older viewers, particularly in the River Valley area. Prestwood said KHOG appeals more to younger viewers in Northwest Arkansas and Fort Smith.

“We’ve been real consistent,” he said. “We make our on-air look as crisp and as clean as it can be.

“There are more people moving into the marketplace. Typically, those people are coming from larger markets, and they’re used to newscasts that look like ours.”

Comer argues that KFSM isn’t the old-folks channel, nor is it only popular in the River Valley.

“Just because we’re so strong in the River Valley doesn’t mean we’re weak in Northwest Arkansas,” Comer said. “We opened the first news studio bureau in Fayetteville in 1972, and we never closed it. We have no intention of shutting down a studio on either side of the mountain.”

The television news industry is dealing with “fragmentation,” Comer said. With cable television offering more than 40 channels in the area, the big three networks have seen their percentage of viewers dwindle over the past few years.

Comer said KFSM has countered by offering more news at different times, 57.5 hours per week to be exact. The station added a weekend newscast, a 5:30 a.m. weekday newscast and a noon newscast. In addition, Cox Cable features KFSM news 24 hours a day on Channel 55.

“When you report the ratings, and you report we’re getting beat, I don’t like that,” Comer said. “But our strategy is to win in volume. Since 1953, we’ve never lost in total viewers.”