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When you talk to Dominique Fields about her local news station of choice, you start to understand why WAFB-TV is the ratings powerhouse in the local TV news market. The 21-year-old grocery cashier says she prefers Channel 9 to the other stations not so much because it’s more “interesting” than the others, which she thinks it is, but because it’s the station she has always watched.

Fields literally grew up with the CBS affiliate and is now the third generation in her family to watch its local news. Veteran on-air personalities such as Donna Britt and Paul Gates have been sitting behind the anchor desk since before she was born. She turns to them and their colleagues first thing in the morning and again after work, as do her parents.

“As soon as we get home, my daddy turns on Channel 9,” Fields says. “And my grandmother, she has to watch it before she goes to work.”

Fields is a habitual viewer—one of the many in Baton Rouge who have helped propel WAFB to its position of prominence in the 13-parish viewing area. During the latest Nielsen ratings period in May, the station drew twice as many viewers as the others combined, a lead it has held for the better part of the past two decades. In ratings periods dating back to the late 1980s, Channel 9 has continued to trounce its only real competition, WBRZ-TV, Channel 2.

It’s hard to say with certainty whether the disparity between the stations’ ratings is really warranted. Is WAFB that much better? Are its newscasts better produced, its anchors more polished and professional? That is debatable. What is clear is that something drives tens of thousands more viewers each night to WAFB over the competition.

Actually, it is several things. Consider:

• WAFB is big on crime coverage, promoting it regularly and relentlessly, which has helped establish it as the favored station by the nearly 40% of viewers in the area who are black and more likely to be affected by crime.

• The station has built a loyal base through its cable rebroadcast service, which it initiated a decade ago and has helped solidify its brand name in the market.

• Its newscasts have a folksy and somewhat unique style, with slower pacing, more in-depth stories and chatty anchors who frequently offer commentaries on the stories they’re reading.

• Above all, there is the consistency of this style and anchor talent, which over the years has helped build loyal and habitual viewers like Fields and her family. In tradition-bound southeast Louisiana, that is not something to be discounted.

“The habit of watching news that’s comfortable and familiar is a big thing,” says Andrea Miller, an assistant professor of broadcast news at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication. “Louisianans are notorious for this.”

Analyzing the numbers

The Nielsen ratings aptly illustrate that point. Since the late 1980s, WAFB has attracted the lion’s share of local viewers, far outpacing WBRZ, which was its only competition in this market until earlier this year when WVLA (Channel 33) and its sister station, WGMB (Channel 44), broke into the news business. For now, WBRZ is still the only real competition facing WAFB, though the newcomers have a smaller gap to close on WBRZ than the ABC affiliate does on Channel 9.

According to the May book, WAFB’s 10 p.m. newscast had a rating among adults ages 18 to 49 of 10.1, which means roughly one out of every 10 households in the viewing area that had the TV on at 10 p.m. was watching WAFB. That compares to a 4.0 rating for WBRZ and a .3 for WVLA, which launched its local news in January. WGMB, which began airing a 9 p.m. newscast in April, had a .9 rating, slightly better than what its sister station is doing. Those ratings and relative audience shares were roughly the same for the earlier newscasts.

So what makes WAFB so appealing to viewers? For one thing there’s the crime coverage. Granted, all the stations cover crime—a lot of crime. A side-by-side comparison of newscasts this summer showed WAFB, WBRZ and WVLA all topped their 6 p.m. newscasts with the same three stories about the accidental shooting of a teenager, the arrest of a stabbing suspect and the arrest of a shooting suspect, though the order of the stories differed slightly. The 10 p.m. newscasts that night on those stations, as well as WGMB’s 9 p.m. newscast also all led with those crime stories, as the late newscasts do most nights.

But while crime coverage gets a lot of play in this market, WAFB has set the standard. The station kicks off every 10 p.m. show with its Street Beat report. It also promotes its Crime Team on the Web and on TV. Outside experts have noticed.

“I have seen crime coverage increase here in the four years since I came,” LSU’s Miller says. “It’s not a trend nationwide necessarily, but it is here, and the place I always know I can get it is on WAFB at 10 p.m.”

That is no accident. The station’s top brass made a strategic decision several years ago to focus more heavily on the growing number of crimes in the area. It is a strategy that is working and one the station can justify in the loftiest of terms.

“Crime affects all of us, even if it happens in north Baton Rouge,” says WAFB General Manager Nick Simonette, explaining the station’s philosophy on the subject. “We can’t change what is happening in our community unless we know what is going on.”

That may be. But crime coverage also helps attract a lot of black viewers to the station. According to the Black American Market Special Report from Nielsen for May 2006—the May 2007 report is not yet available—black viewers prefer WAFB to WBRZ by more than 5-to-1. The station had a rating of 27.4 among black viewers during its 10 p.m. newscast, compared to WBRZ’s 5.3. Viewed another way, 40% of WAFB’s viewers were black, compared to 27% of WBRZ’s.

Simonette scoffs that the station covers crime to pander to its black viewers, who are often more directly affected than white viewers by the shootings and stabbings that typically top the 10 p.m. show. He also denies the station is trying to sensationalize with an “if it bleeds it leads” approach to news.

“That’s not why we do it,” he says. “What happens doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Whatever it was that led up to a crime—we have to understand what those problems are and address them to make this a better community.”

Connecting to cable

Crime coverage isn’t the only reason for the station’s success. In 1997, WAFB made another crucial strategic decision when it reached an agreement with Cox Communications to air round-the-clock rebroadcasts of its newscasts.

Initially, the repeat channel cannibalized some of WAFB’s live newscasts, taking ratings numbers from them. After all, viewers were less inclined to switch channels or rush home for the 6 p.m. news if they knew they could catch it an hour or two later at their convenience. But the station recognized it was the way of the future.

“We realized that what viewers want is to get the information when they want it,” Simonette says. “For us to serve our customers, we had to give them the news when they needed it and when they wanted it.”

In the long run, it proved to be a smart move, solidifying the station’s lead in the market by establishing its brand and making it ubiquitous and readily available, something the competition has only lately come to recognize. WBRZ recently began rebroadcasting its newscasts on EATEL and Cox (digital channel 124) as well as on its high-definition tier. But a lot of the viewers it may be hoping to reach do not yet have digital cable or high-def TVs, which means they have no way of watching a Channel 2 newscast they might have missed. WAFB’s newscasts, by comparison, are part of the basic cable package, which has a far greater reach.

Relating to viewers

Still another factor behind WAFB’s lead in the market is its unique and folksy style. Its newscasts are slower paced and more traditional than the others. On the night we compared broadcasts, for instance, WAFB aired fewer but longer reports in its newscast than its fast-paced competitors. While the subjects of the stories were the same among all stations, WAFB’s reports were more in-depth and ran slightly longer than the 90-second packages that have become standard for stations trying to appeal to the attention-deficit-disordered generation.

“You have to be able to tell the story,” Simonette says. “Sometimes that means you have to give it context and breadth and depth. We work hard to do that.”

Then there is the consistency of the on-air talent. Britt and Gates have both been at the station more than 25 years, while Britt’s co-anchor George Sells has been there nearly 20 years. Chief meteorologist Jay Grymes looks like something of a newbie with merely a decade at WAFB under his belt, a tenure that would be an impressive record in any other market.

Those anchors, particularly Sells and Britt, also have a distinctly down-home style. They banter about the stories they read, making asides in a manner that some find almost offensive. Love it or hate it, however, it works—which is no accident.

“I want my anchors to be able to relate to the viewers,” Simonette says. “I don’t want an anchor who is going to get out on Mount Olympus and talk down to the viewers.”

Channel 2 has some old-timers and well-known personalities on its airwaves as well. Pat Shingleton has been there two decades, while Andrea Clesi and John Pastorek celebrate their 30th anniversaries at the station this year. It’s impressive, and viewers like them; but for some reason, WBRZ hasn’t been able to hit upon a stable, long-running male-female anchor team to go up against Britt and Sells, which doesn’t do anything to build consistency with viewers.

“The stability of WAFB just comes from years and years of seeing the same faces and being comfortable with them,” Miller says.

That, in turn, has led to the habit factor. Viewers in Baton Rouge have grown accustomed to watching WAFB and, like the Fields family, have passed that viewing habit down from one generation to the next. People in southeast Louisiana are slow to change, and TV news is no exception.

“Habit has a lot to do with it,” Miller says. “You see that in New Orleans with WWL-TV, and you see it here in Baton Rouge with WAFB.”

Debating the subject

Whether the habit is as deeply ingrained and widespread as Nielsen’s ratings suggest is debatable, according to WAFB’s competitors. They criticize Nielsen’s methodology, suggesting the diary method it uses to measure viewing habits does not accurately reflect what the local population is actually watching.

They have a point. There is plenty of room for error in such a system because it relies heavily on participants’ memory and honesty. What’s more, the system is painfully time-consuming, which arguably keeps busy, affluent, professional types from participating. Further complicating things is WAFB’s cable-only rebroadcast, which may confuse viewers who think they’re watching a live broadcast on the more expensive CBS affiliate than a repeat on the cheaper cable station.

“If viewers watch WAFB’s news on the repeat channel at 7:30 and write down that they watched WAFB news at 6 p.m. because that’s what they think they saw then that is what gets the credit in terms of ratings,” says Phil Waterman, station manager of WVLA and WGMB. “Then that’s what the advertisers buy, and that’s what I have to compete with.”

WAFB’s competitors argue if Baton Rouge were to become a so-called metered market, in which TV viewing habits are electronically measured, their ratings would go up. Perhaps surprisingly, Nielsen doesn’t disagree.

“Typically when we switch from diary measurement to meters we see some shifts,” says Anne Elliott, vice president for communications at The Nielsen Company. “There may be some increases, especially among those channels and programs that are not as well-known and frequently viewed, and there are some decreases among the most-watched shows.”

Elliott says Nielsen is always looking for new ways to improve the accuracy of its ratings and, eventually, some form of electronic measurement will come into play. But there aren’t any plans to switch to a metered system any time soon, which means for now WAFB gets to claim the numbers it gets from the diaries.

That’s important because with such high ratings, WAFB gets to charge significantly more than the others for its commercial airtime. A 30-second spot during WAFB’s 10 p.m. newscast costs $1,200, nearly three times more than the $400-$500 it costs on WBRZ. WVLA, meanwhile, is almost giving away airtime at $150. The difference is sizable during the earlier newscasts as well. WAFB charges between $700 and $900 for a 30-second commercial at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., while WBRZ charges between $300 and $400 and WVLA charges $100.

WBRZ argues it skews to a more affluent audience, a claim it makes based on private market research it gets from a firm called Marshall Marketing. The station won’t disclose what Marshall’s data shows, but station manager Rocky Daboval says his sales team uses the numbers to show advertisers WBRZ is reaching a solid middle-class audience who will be more likely to buy their products.

“We reach a middle-income demographic in our newscast based on Marshall Marketing’s research,” Daboval says. “We spend a lot of money to get that information, so that we can put our advertisers in the programs where the viewers will end up being the consumers who buy their products.”

If this is the case, one might wonder why the station doesn’t charge more for its commercial airtime. MSNBC, for instance, has lower ratings than its competitors but charges higher rates because of its prime demo. Why isn’t WBRZ doing the same thing?

“We have to base our ad rates on what the Nielsen’s show,” Daboval says. “That’s the standard the industry uses so that’s what we have to use.”

Adjusting to competition

Those ad rates matter—perhaps now more than ever. While news represents a station’s biggest expense, it’s also one of its biggest revenue generators. But with growing competition from the Internet, satellite TV and cable, advertisers are spreading their dollars around more judiciously than in the past.

“TV is still a vital component to many advertising plans,” says Joann Habisreitinger, media director for Zehnder Communications. “But we are shifting more dollars to the Internet and other platforms because we have to.”

Statistics suggest why. Nearly 30 million American households now get satellite TV, while an additional 34 million subscribe to digital cable. Together that represents more than half the total homes in the country with television sets. As a result, the number of channels available has increased by nearly 25% since 2003.

In that time, local news audiences have declined. In May 2002, both WAFB and WBRZ had 25% more viewers ages 18 to 49 watching their 10 p.m. newscasts than they did in the recent May book. Worse still, network and affiliate audiences are getting older. Since 2002, the average age of CBS viewers has increased by two years, while NBC’s and ABC’s has increased by three years and Fox’s by seven years.

“The population in general is getting older, yes,” says Brad Adgate, an analyst at Horizon Media in New York. “But the viewers are getting older, too, because the cable networks make a concerted effort to get younger viewers, and that’s the target audience that advertisers will pay a premium to reach.”

So what’s a local station to do?

Stations are experimenting with new platforms, trying to reach viewers in as many different ways as possible. They’re responding to the industry changes as fast as they can, but the technology stays a step ahead of them, presenting challenges that even a powerhouse like WAFB concedes it isn’t quite sure how to meet.

“We’re really trying to get our arms around this,” Simonette says. “We’re in the early stages of trying to learn what this Internet thing is. In five years, I would guess, what we’ll be doing will be totally different.”