1998 Batten Symposium Panel Presentation:
Framing the Story in New Ways

Heroin: On Assignment

John Miller
Executive News Director
WFAA-TV, Dallas

I’ll give you a little story lead . . . go back to your home markets and after the May sweeps are over, in another week and a half, call your stations and ask them how the ratings were. If their market is like our market in Dallas/ Fort Worth, the network ratings are down on the order of 30 percent, which is a huge decline in a year. It’s par for the course that the networks lose a little every year, but to lose 30 percent, year to year, that’s astounding. I fear that we’re on the cusp of a turn off.

We like to think at Channel 8 in Dallas that we do things for the right reasons, instead of the short-term competitive reasons, so one of our sweeps-month projects was a week-long effort that we put together on heroin. The set-up for [my tape] is that in the last 24 months, more than two dozen teenagers in our suburbs have dropped dead of heroin overdoses . . . There’s a new form of heroin out there being marketed by the cartels and kids don’t know what it is. They don’t know it’s heroin.

So we launched, for even a big station like ours, a major effort. We assigned about 10 people to this project. They worked for about six weeks . . . we ended up with about six days of coverage. We had stories on every newscast. Our major push was at 10 o’clock. We did a town meeting, we did phone banks, the whole nine yards.

Now, the flip side of this is . . . this didn’t do great in the ratings. I was feeling really down about that — particularly the Wednesday night program, which had the Bland family, which I think is one of the strongest stories we’ve ever done. It got for us what is an average rating on a Wednesday night.

So I went to the town meeting, which was on Thursday, and just stood in the audience and listened. I came away from that convinced we’d done exactly the right thing because people came up to us –well, you saw the emotion that was displayed on the tape.

So long term, the best thing that broadcasters like us, or any journalists, can do is to take a problem, take an issue like heroin, and go full force at it with all the tricks, all the promotion, all the marketing you can do, try to draw as much attention to it as you can and try to make a difference.

The problem is, in our business the competitive pressures are such that nobody thinks like that. We’re all thinking overnight, next morning [ratings]. And that’s why people aren’t watching.