WJZY’s Queen City News Hometown initiative takes the 5 p.m. news on the road every Wednesday. You can say you’re the hometown station, but being out in neighborhoods doing the news speaks volumes.
You rarely see a local TV newscast done outside the studio.
And for good reason. It’s hard.
Maybe you’ll see a one-off where a TV station might do a newscast from a city or town in their market. But the key is to do it consistently. Own it. Go big.
You can say you’re the hometown station, but being visibly out in neighborhoods doing the news speaks volumes.
WJZY, branded as Queen City News, Nexstar’s Fox affiliate in Charlotte, N.C., started taking its 5 p.m. newscasts to different cities and towns two years ago.
Casey Clark, WJZY’s news director, says the station took its weeknight sports show to different minor league ballparks every Wednesday night at 11 in June.
“At the end, we were like, hey that was pretty cool,” Clark says. “So, that was the first kind of toe in the water.”
It was so cool that last year the station decided “let’s go big,” Clark says, and began doing both the nightly sports show and the hour-long 5 p.m. newscast from the same town.
This year, the Queen City News Hometown tour is taking the entire production of the 5 p.m. news on the road every Wednesday to cities and towns in the Charlotte area, starting in mid-March and continuing until Memorial Day.
“It’s hard work,” says Lloyd Bucher, WJZY’s GM.
Clark says the “total traveling band is about 10 people because we go from three different locations.”
“What is cool is we are field anchoring from multiple locations in the same city,” Bucher says.
In April, one city was Charleston, S.C., about 200 miles from Charlotte.
“We thought it would be fun to do spring break locations,” Clark says.
On the surface, it might be enough exposure to do an hour-long newscast from a neighborhood. Your talent can shake a few hands, kiss a few babies and take selfies with the viewers.
“Most towns are just thrilled to have us there,” Clark says.
But the hard work Bucher is talking about goes beyond the bright lights and the glitz. It’s an opportunity to create news content that ordinarily might get overlooked.
Clark says when the Queen City News Hometown series comes to town, it usually does a five-minute sit-down with the mayor. “It goes a long way into getting more context into what is happening in that town,” Clark says.
In addition to news anchors and meteorologists live on set around town, reporters find stories to make the whole hour about the town, Bucher says. “That is what I am probably most proud of with this whole series, that we have found some great characters in our DMA and shared their stories with the rest of our audience.”
“We really spend time far out in the future shooting these stories and making them special,” Clark says. “It’s quality journalism.”
Bucher admits doing the newscasts remotely from small towns and cities can be a hassle, but “it gives us great content.”
All the locations are picked in advance, which not only gives the station’s reporters a chance to get their stories ready for each week’s newscast, but the list makes a nice promotional item to give away.
“We came up with Queen City News T-shirts that list all the cities on the back like a concert shirt,” Bucher says. “We bring them to the towns and hand them out.”
Clark says sometimes they get advance publicity. In one tiny town, they did some radio interviews prior to the newscasts. “When we arrived, they had the high school band out playing and there were galleries of people at all three of our locations oohing and awing,” Clark says.
Bucher says that’s been the most welcome surprise. “We didn’t expect to see the reception that our team gets when we are out in their communities,” he says.
Being out in the community isn’t just idle talk, Bucher says. “We made a decision here. We made a large commitment to everything related to this DMA and hyper localism. We are not just for the community. We are in the community literally. We are proving it from our presence.”
CLICK HERE to find more content from the Queen City News Hometown tour.
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