LEXINGTON, KY - "I think it's a dangerous period for our country. It's being polarized and in no small way by our media, which no longer feels any journalistic ethic to tell the truth, but to just be pawnbrokers for ideologues. Broadcasters, in my opinion, have lost their way."
That frank assessment of modern American news media offered by Insight Communications President and Chief Operating Officer Dinni Jain is at the heart of his company's decision to establish a Kentucky news and information channel, offering programming that runs entirely counter to the current trends he cites.
Insight Communications will launch the Commonwealth Network on channel 2 - "CN2" - in late April in its five Kentucky markets: Lexington, Louisville, Northern Kentucky, Bowling Green and Henderson/Evansville.
"We're not going to be chasing sirens or talking about the fire on Elm street or that kind of stuff," said Jain. "We're going to talk about more substantive issues."
And to make that happen, Insight has named one of Kentucky's most respected newspaper journalists, Lexington Herald Leader reporter Ryan Alessi, to head its new news and public affairs division.
In sketching out Insight's intent to buck today's trends in news media, Jain asserted that "we are going to be unabashedly centrist. We're not Fox News and we're not MSNBC."
His ideal?
"Tim Russert (the late NBC News interviewer) was the center, with his ability to get anybody from the right or the left and engage them at a high level of dialogue as fairly as possible. Tim Russert is a model that we have set for ourselves internally, the standard that we aspire to be at for the state of Kentucky."
Another difference between the typical commercial television newscast and the format now in the planning for CN2, said Jain, is a less-is-more approach to story count.
"Our idea is to do less, maybe have five stories in a half-hour period, but have them be real stories about things that we think matter more."
People who watch CNN and C-Span want similar types of coverage at the local level, offered Al Cross, the former Courier-Journal political columnist now with the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.
"People who have a stake in public affairs - major companies, lobbying interests, people in politics plus the political junkies - there's always going to be some of them," Cross said. "Any substantial presence like this in those markets could have a potential large influence on how things get covered in the state."
Alessi, an Ohio University journalism grad, got his start in the news business with Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. He began with the Herald Leader as a political writer in 2003. Quickly establishing himself as a straight shooter who produced balanced coverage of Kentucky's complex political milieu, Alessi became a "go-to" reporter among the many assigned to cover Frankfort. In 2008, he was reassigned to focus on higher education and accountability issues. One product of the latter was an expose of corruption among leaders of the Kentucky Association of Counties.
Alessi will report for work as Insight's new senior manager for news and public affairs on May 3, beginning a journey into multimedia journalism. Insight's plan includes online publishing and equipping reporters with mobile digital video and audio technologies to enable the presentation of stories in multiple dimensions.
"The main thing that attracted me to this job is the fact that they want a print journalism mindset, which is to dig deep and provide insightful analysis and dig into the issues in Kentucky in a way that many television news programs just don't have the time to do," he said.
The decision to hire Alessi, explained Jain, the son of University of North Carolina professors and an avid history buff, came after hours of discussion about the present state of American journalism.
"We think that he is one of a dying breed, I'm sad to say, but somebody who really believes that the truth is important. He's somebody who believes that journalism isn't dead, that there are real stories out there and that the media has a responsibility to tell those stories, because if they don't, who will?"
The Alessi hire, observed Cross, was also a smart marketing move by Insight.
"They want instant credibility, and with him, they get that," he said. As he prepared in 2004 to end his reign as Kentucky's premier political columnist, Cross recommended that the Courier-Journal hire Alessi as his successor. Alessi declined, remaining with the Herald Leader until tendering his notice on March 23.
"Ryan was the top-of-the-line political writer in the state when he left the job, and he still carries that recognition among people who follow public affairs in the state. Insight was smart to snap him up while that brand is still good," Cross said.
Begins with weather coverage
Insight, which claims to cover 64 percent of the population of Kentucky through its various franchises, plans to introduce in phases weather, in-depth news, public affairs and sports-talk programming that will be available to customer households in Kentucky and southern Indiana.
In its initial phase, CN2 will offer a 24/7 all-weather format, a response to audience research conducted for Insight by Frank N. Magid Associates, one of the nation's leading broadcast research and consulting firms. The cable company wanted to determine what unfilled or potentially competitive programming niches might exist. More than 90 percent of those surveyed, according to Insight Public Affairs Director Jason Keller, indicated a desire for more in-depth local weather, public affairs, local and regional news and sports talk.
"What really blew us away," recalled Jain, "was how high weather scored as something people were interested in, and also as something (for which) people felt their needs were not being met. I would have gone on record as saying people are 'weathered out.' What Magid told us was that they have done this kind of work for other companies in many other states. Most of the time, their recommendation was, 'There is no need for a new channel.' In a couple of occasions they've seen scores like the one that we have gotten (for Kentucky.) The only other one that reached the same caliber of passion for weather was in Florida."
WKYT News Director Robert Thomas relocated to Lexington from Seattle, bringing with him the experience of working for Northwest Cable News, which offered round-the-clock news, weather and sports. Thomas noted that Channel 27 only last year invested $1 million to install the world's most advanced Doppler radar system behind the station on Winchester Road. "There's nothing out there that you can buy (that is) better than the radar that we have. And there are other stations in our market and in Louisville that also have radars. It'll be interesting to see how they compete in the weather area, because there's a lot of technology that you have to invest in," he said.
Thomas noted, however, that an investment in technology alone does not win loyal viewers.
"We have meteorologists on our air that people have watched for years. T.G. (Shuck) has been doing weather here for more than ten years," he said. "During severe weather events, you get accustomed to turning to stations and people that have resources that you're already familiar with. So I feel confident that we're going to be fine and are going to continue to grow."
"We are prepared to compete on technology, to a point," said Insight's Jain. "But it remains for somebody to prove to me that WKYT's huge investment in Doppler radar technology is actually going to lead to more accurate weather forecasting. I will maintain that I doubt that it does."
Insight's planned programming menu, however, extends well beyond competing in the area of weather.
Magid's research, based on the feedback of 1,000 respondents to an online e-mail survey, also found strong demand for more in-depth news coverage.
To WKYT's Thomas, it sounds redundant.
"WKYT and other stations in this market have been doing news in this market for decades, and in Louisville as well, so it's interesting that they're making a push in that direction," he observed.
But to Insight's Jain, the research expresses a frustration with the content typical of today's local newscast.
"There was a feeling coming through the research that too much local news is about sirens and blood and not really news that they could really use," said Jain. "For people that we deem to be community influencers, there is an increased desire for things like community affairs, politics, the economy - the idea that there is a lot more going on here than is being covered."
"Demand from citizens for more access to Kentucky-based content is what inspired KET to launch the Kentucky Channel in 2008," noted KET spokesman Tim Bischoff in an e-mail. He pointed out that the public television network is producing more than 1,300 hours of original Kentucky programming annually, as well as gavel-to-gavel coverage of Kentucky legislative sessions and committee meetings.
"KET does a very laudable job, but their demographics, whether they're targeting them advertently or inadvertently, tend to be older," countered Jain. "The belief across all these major media groups is that younger people are not interested in news. I don't believe that is true. I think that none of them has really learned how to engage younger people."
Pat Dalbey, president and general manager of WLEX-TV, is taking a wait-and-see position on the Insight initiative.
"The idea itself isn't exactly a new one," he said. "There have been other cable companies or consortiums of cable companies that have done this previously in other markets, and some of them have been more successful than others. Some of them couldn't get enough traction in a marketplace to generate the audiences and thus the advertising needed to sustain it. I think time will tell how successful Insight can be with it."
Other cable operators that have local news networks in sections of their service areas include Time Warner (NY1 in New York City), Cablevision (Long Island 12 on Long Island, NY) and Bright House,(Bay News 9 in Tampa, Florida).
"We're lucky. We're not a ratings vehicle," said Jain. "I already have an advertising sales force. So I'm not having to create a whole bunch of new stuff to launch this channel. I already have the bandwidth to do it. In fact, doing what we're trying to do is probably going to be cheaper than what we have been doing. We were spending a lot of money to be pretty bad," he said, referring to the company's annual loss of an estimated $1 million on local access programming in its various markets.
Insight's vision, according to Keller, includes responding to major changes in viewing habits. Gone are the days of "appointment TV," when large audiences could be counted on to habitually sit down for the news at 6 p.m. Revolutionary technology, particularly the advent of the DVR or "time shifting," changed all that. Today's busy and time-challenged television audiences can view their favorite programming according to their own schedules.
"There's no denying that people's viewing habits are changing and technology is creating that change," said Dalbey. "Time-shifting of news shows is happening some, although local news, from the research that we've seen, is the least likely to be time-shifted. It is such an ingrained habit that people are used to watching it as appointment television and continue to do so. As new generations come up, that will probably change. As we sit here today, we don't see it as a huge disruption to our business. But we understand that people want news when they want it, and on various devices, and we have to be prepared to provide it to them.
"It's one of the interesting times of broadcasting or any kind of media - new opportunities and new challenges. We can't get lackadaisical about how we respond to any of that."
Insight's Jain is betting that there is new opportunity in the pent-up demand for quality journalism indicated by the Magid research.
"I don't think people have changed that much from two generations ago. I think there still are a lot of people who are concerned about the world, who can see through fluff, that are not having their needs adequately met in the media," he said.