You don’t become the top-rated TV news in every newscast out of the blue. See what factors WXIN thinks led to its success, from research to weather, from marketing to talent longevity.
The gold standard in local TV news is still linear TV, how many people, and in what demos, watch the regularly scheduled newscasts. Everything else-website traffic, Facebook followers, all things digital and social-seem to follow.
In Indianapolis, Nexstar’s WXIN, Fox59, posted the highest ratings in adults 25-54 in every one of the 12 hours of news the station has daily, Monday through Friday, in February 2022.
“We have been a strong station for a number of years, but it has really solidified as number one across the board in the last year,” says Dominic Mancuso, GM of WXIN and WTTV, the CBS affiliate in town.
Mancuso believes the payoff this February is partly due to the station’s coverage overall prior to February.
“We really outdid it in terms of how we covered the pandemic,” Mancuso says.
Mancuso says the station preempted normal programming to hold weekly COVID specials and held town hall meetings and shared them with stations across the state.
“Nobody else in town was doing anything like that, and that really helps show our commitment to the community,” Mancuso says.
A strong weather department, the biggest in the market, is also a factor for WXIN, Mancuso says. It’s hard to be the top-rated news operation in any market if you’re not strong in weather.
“We see it when there is big weather,” Mancuso says. “We see spikes in the rating because of our weather guy.”
Brian Wilkes is WXIN’s chief meteorologist and has been with the station since 1995.
“He is the voice of experience and the voice of accuracy,” Mancuso says. “He has built that up over a long time.”
That’s another reason WXIN performs well. Its talent in general has been very consistent for a number of years, Mancuso says.
“I think that helps,” he says. “People know what they are going to be getting. It’s not like oh, who is this flavor of the month here now.”
In February, WXIN focused on a topic that came straight out of their research. “The viewers are telling us they are concerned about crime,” Mancuso says. At one point the city had a higher murder rate than Chicago, he says.
“We launched a crime mapping web page last year that’s been steadily gaining speed,” says Robyn Keeney, WXIN’s creative services director.
In addition, the station did a nine-part series, The Bail Project, on how some criminals were getting out of jail on low bail.
“One of the big complaints was that Indy lets criminals out to re-offend but ended up letting some people out who allegedly committed murder.” Keeney says.
“We broke that wide open,” Mancuso says. “That has been a big story for us.”
Both Mancuso and Keeney point to the station’s research as a reason it’s performing so well with viewers.
Keeney says the ratings in February don’t just “come out of the blue.” She says the station looked at the research of what the audience wants and went in that direction.
“Now we promote it, and we will promote that heavily throughout the year,” Keeney says.
“The viewers are telling us they want,” Mancuso says. “So, as we keep generating that content, we are promoting it. People in the market are like, they are doing exactly what I said I wanted from my local news.”
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