KFTY-TV Fires News Staff. Plans to Let Locals Provide Programming

Posted on February 20, 2007

SFGate.com is reporting that KFTY-TV, a tiny tv station in Santa Rosa, California has laid off most its news reporters and journalists and hopes to replace with them with news programming from local Santa Rosa residents.

Steve Spendlove realizes that after last month's layoffs of most of the news-gathering staff at tiny KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa there will be less local coverage. The Clear Channel executive overseeing the station knows there won't be reporters to investigate local scandals, let alone do those fluffy woman-turns-100 features that make TV anchors cock their heads and smile at the end of a newscast.
But Spendlove said that the station's "business model" hadn't been working for years, and that "covering one-eighth of the Bay Area" is neither a moneymaker nor even an operation large enough to be measured by Nielsen ratings.
So the next step in Channel 50's evolution will be a nationally watched experiment in local television coverage. Over the next few months, the station's management plans to ask people in the community -- its independent filmmakers, its college students and professors, its civic leaders and others -- to provide programming for the station.
Will they be paid? That's being worked out. Who will cover the harder-edged stories? Some will be culled from local newspaper and TV online sites, Spendlove said, and "other sources" that are still being discussed.

It sounds like a complex project with many details yet to be worked out. The SFGate is right that this could be a "nationally watched experiment." There are probably some great stories that can be covered by local residents. However, if KFTY-TV is relying too much on the public to produce the news they could also find out that they took the idea of citizen journalism a little too seriously.