go-cup joint than a traditional news desk. The results? The station’s ratings have risen from under the cellar to, well, into the cellar, buoyed on a news-flavored froth of banter, viral videos, a nightly cocktail recipe and “guest anchors.” The Twist concept has done well enough at the station to spread to WGNO’s 5 o’clock news slot. By November 2011, WGNO remained mired behind all its
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > february 21 > 2012
The News With a Twist set features folk art by Simon Hardeveld and real liquor behind the bar, though the anchors don’t drink anything stronger than coffee. According to news director Rick Erbach, the set cost $15,000 to build and decorate. The station’s traditional news set cost $100,000.
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competitors in every time slot where it presented a newscast — but while only 1.2 percent of New Orleans homes watched its 5 p.m. newscast the year before, the numbers had doubled. WGNO’s news ratings are still far behind those of WWLTV, WDSU-TV and WVUE-TV. But the needle has moved, slightly, after years of sub-cellar-dwelling, thanks to Twist. “Longevity has worked in this market,” Erbach says. “But I think in the last two or three years we’ve seen this surge that people want it now. You see it on blogs, you see it online. “People don’t want to wait until 5 o’clock to find out what happened in New Orleans,” Erbach says. “They already know. Part of what we’re trying to do is take people to the next step.” Television news, like its print counterpart,
“This feels more natural than what I did at Channel 6 in the ’90s.”
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is struggling with new challenges and competition. TiVo and Hulu and the Internet and smartphones have untethered us from network schedules; Facebook and TMZ and YouTube and the Huffington Post are just some of the firehoses of constantly updated information that didn’t exist a few years ago. Most of it’s free, much of it’s personalized, and — face it — it’s all more fun than watching the City Council parse the budget. A Nielsen survey earlier this month found people 12 to 34 are spending less time watching TV than they were even a year ago. “Whenever I meet people under the
age of 35, I ask them, ‘Do you watch the news?” says Bill Siegel, the news director of WWL-TV. (Disclosure: Gambit and WWL-TV are content partners; several of the paper’s writers and contributors regularly appear on the station’s various news programs.) “I get a lot of ‘No, I get it all from the Internet,’” Siegel says. “I think there will always be a place for broadcast, but we look at all the platforms and say, ‘How do we serve these diverse audiences?’” It’s 3:30 p.m., and Roesgen and LBJ are taping that night’s 6 p.m. news. WGNO’s 6 p.m. news is taped two and a half hours early during the week; the Saturday night newscast is taped Friday afternoon. Nightlife correspondent Mike Theis is sipping a glass of Chardonnay on set (the bottles behind the bar contain real liquor). And we’re off. There’s no traditional reportage, just quick video clips from CNN and ABC news services narrated by LBJ and Roesgen. Among the top stories: a five-year-old in another city has stabbed three people over ownership of a juice box; an update on the captain that bailed off the sinking cruise ship (“Chicken of the Sea”); and a discussion of a “controversial” episode of the sitcom Modern Family, which happened to be airing on WGNO later that night. The hardest news on the show is a soundless clip of Gov. Bobby Jindal visiting a local school the day after announcing his new education program. Roesgen and LBJ don’t say anything about the education program, but have a short he-said she-said debate about public school teacher tenure. There are no sportscasters, no meteorologists — weather is handled with a simple graphic of the next two days’ predicted temperatures, a complete change from the five-minute, graphically heavy, bing-bangzoom weather presentations on other stations — unless, of course, Larry the PAGE 20
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