Local News

Local News is a PBS series documenting the challenges and pressures facing a local news team and their potential for both positive and negative community impact.

Director
Producers: Calvin Skaggs, David Van Taylor

Production Company
Lumiere Productions

Release Date
June 23, 2005

Local News is a cinéma vérité chronicle of the managers, producers, reporters, and film crews at WCNC-TV, a local station in Charlotte, North Carolina. The series begins at a turning point for the station, which, in 1999, is in third place in the ratings and has just been acquired by a media conglomerate that says it wants to achieve success by providing quality news that addresses important local issues. But in a larger sense, the series is about the problematic nature of local news across America -- a ratings-driven system of TV journalism built on crime, disaster, scandal, and cutesy human interest, all reported in ever-shrinking bite-size chunks.