6 o'clock rock | WCSH has topped the Portland TV news market for 20 years. But in an industry where you're only as good as the last ratings, can it continue?

A few minutes before six o'clock, Pat Callaghan strolls into the News Center set at Portland's WCSH, dropping a stack of papers and a copy of the Boston Herald on the anchors' desk as he takes a seat. Callaghan talks Red Sox with a camera operator, and says hello to Steve Thaxton, WCSH's president and general manager, who's sitting in the back of the set, well behind the camera. The room's chatter stops abruptly when a camera operator's arm raises and, a few moments later, the camera's red light flickers on. The anchors on the five-thirty news program, broadcast from the station's newsroom studio a few floors above, are checking in with Callaghan on the top stories for the six o'clock News Center show. Callaghan delivers the tease in about 20 seconds, and the camera's red light flips off.

The production and master control rooms down the hall from the station's main studio are frenetic, as production team members rush from room to room delivering tapes and cueing up interview segments for stories slated to air in just a few minutes. But in the main studio, the mood is relaxed. For Callaghan and Cindy Williams, who will soon come downstairs from the station's newsroom set, it's one more broadcast, one more 30-minute news report to add to the thousands of newscasts the pair have delivered together from behind the station's anchor desk. And for WCSH, it's just another night as the top-rated six o'clock newscast in town.

In the local television news game, becoming number one is a tough business ˆ— something Thaxton knows from experience. As vice president of creative services at KARE, the local NBC affiliate in Minneapolis, Thaxton in the 1990s helped guide the station from what he remembers as "fourth or fifth" in the local evening news ratings to number one in a span of five years. "It was one of the great moves in the history of broadcasting," he says, laughing.

If that was indeed one of broadcasting's great moves, then a similar reshuffling of Portland's broadcast deck would be a 10 on the Richter Scale. Among local television stations in the Portland area, WCSH has spent nearly 20 years above the rest. The NBC affiliate's six o'clock newscast has been ranked as the most-watched local news program in the Portland-Auburn market for every rating period since May 1986, according to Nielsen Media Research, the New York-based arbiter of television ratings. And during that span, the station has boasted an outsized group of on-air personalities that, in many cases, have spent nearly their entire professional careers at WCSH. As a result, WCSH's Callaghan and Williams ˆ— as well as anchor Rob Caldwell, meteorologist Joe Cupo and reporter Susan Kimball ˆ— have become almost synonymous with the station's news broadcasts.

And if the other stations in Portland's broadcast market are taking aim at WCSH's position, they better get to work. If WCSH tops the charts during the current February sweeps, it will cap 80 straight quarters of ratings dominance. What's more, WCSH's six o'clock newscast during the November sweeps drew 17.2% of the area's households ˆ— more than twice the viewers as its nearest competitor, Portland-based CBS affiliate WGME. "It's such a huge chasm between number one and number two," says Thaxton. "I'm from markets where a margin of one or two points is huge."

Being number one may put a certain swagger in an anchorman's step, but there's plenty more to ratings than bragging rights. Behind every anchor at a top-rated station, there's a team of ad salesmen with dollar signs dancing in their heads. For WCSH, the trick has been to stay on top of the market's ratings, and it's one the station has performed deftly for two decades.

But there's no guarantee that WCSH will still be the number-one ranked newscast later this year, let alone five years from now. Since 1998, when McLean, Va. -based Gannett Co. acquired WCSH as part of a deal for Maine Broadcasting System, WCSH's main competitors also have been snapped up by big media companies with deep pockets ˆ— Portland's CBS affiliate, WGME, was bought by Sinclair Broadcast Group that year, and WMTW, an ABC affiliate in Portland, was purchased by Hearst-Argyle Television in 2004.

"This is a more competitive era, not only among television stations, but for audiences. The challenge for us is to continue to produce newscasts that are compelling and break through all the clutter that's there in a world where television programs are available on your TV, your phone and everywhere else," says Jeffrey A. Marks, general manager at WAGT in Augusta, Ga., and former news director at WCSH. "The clock ain't gonna be turned back, and that's a significant challenge."

Lure of the local
Experts say perception is reality in the broadcast business. So while WCSH's competitors may have a news product that's just as good ˆ— or even better ˆ— there are plenty of intangible forces at work that make it difficult to quantify why one station's evening news program has better ratings than another station's.

To the naked eye, the news on WCSH is roughly the same as that on its competitors' newscasts. The top stories of the day are the top stories, and broadcasts feature a typical mix of hard news ˆ— a recent spate of arsons ˆ— to the kind of frilly stories that have been a staple of TV news since its inception, like a piece about deciphering text messaging shorthand.

So why do people watch one station over another? For some, it's a force of habit: They're hooked to the same station that their parents watched. Others get drawn in by a strong lead-in show like Dr. Phil or The Oprah Winfrey Show. Or, the winning station just has a more effective marketing strategy. "On any given day, the news is going to be pretty similar," says Mark Kelley, a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maine. "But if your station has much better promotion, that makes a difference. The public is influenced by that."

Whatever the reasons, being the top-rated newscast in a given market comes with some serious financial benefits, as higher ratings typically translate to a bigger bottom line on a local station's balance sheet. In fact, many stations ˆ— including WCSH ˆ— derive the bulk of their revenues from local programming like the evening news.

Local network affiliates can choose among three kinds of programming that each offer a different payout. Network programs, like The Apprentice and The Office on NBC, typically run during prime time and include just a few ad spots that local stations can sell. It's the same story for syndicated programs, which are sometimes bundled and sold by syndicators with ads already in place. An evening, pre-primetime block of The Simpsons may draw loads of viewers, but it isn't likely to draw loads of cash for local stations.

But locally produced programs are the sole property of the station. WCSH can reap every dollar of ad revenue that comes during the 20 or so commercial spots in a typical half-hour news show. "When you look at any television station, so much of it these days is following the network role, with network, daytime and syndicated [programming]," says Dave Abel, WCSH's general sales manager. "But the news is yours and yours alone."

To capitalize on the strong ratings of its news programs, WCSH has added more locally produced shows such as 207, an evening news magazine that follows the NBC Nightly News, and Bill Green's Maine, a general-interest outdoors program. Including these shows, WCSH airs 42 hours of originally produced news and information programming each week, according to Thaxton, who notes that the average local station fills between 25-30 hours a week with its own shows.

Thaxton says WCSH's highly rated news shows provide the personalities and built-in audience to develop other original programming. What's more, the shows are a good deal for the station, which can grab bits and pieces of shows like 207 or Bill Green's Maine for, say, the next morning's newscast.

Lew Colby, CEO of CSP Mobile Productions in Saco, says that during his tenure as general manager of WCSH in the 1980s (and CEO in the 90s), a local station could expect to generate 40% of its total revenues from local programming like news shows. These days, Thaxton counts on local programming to contribute "well over 50%" to the station's annual revenues. "[Adding local programming] is contrary to our major competitors, who have pulled back on their original news [programming]," he says.

Ratings game
Even with strong ratings and an array of local programs to sell, Abel says pricing ads is a tightrope act for the station. On one hand, he says, the sales staff wants to turn the station's ratings success into higher ad rates. On the other hand, Abel says a competitive Portland market means the station has to be careful not to price itself out of reach by tacking on a too-high "We're Number One" premium to its ad rates. Still, Abel acknowledges that advertisers typically are willing to pay a few dollars more per ad on WCSH, because the station can point to the ratings.

Matt Barnard, a media buyer at Briggs Advertising in Bath, says WCSH's ratings lead for its newscasts has a demonstrable effect on the ad dollars brought in by the station. Barnard notes that a ballpark price for a 30-second ad during WCSH's local evening news is around $800. That might compare, he says, to price tags in the neighborhood of $600 for WGME and $400 for WMTW. (Steve Thaxton says the range for a 30-second ad during WCSH's six o'clock news recently hovered in the $700-$1,000 range.) "The general perception out there is that WCSH is the big dog," Barnard says. "If you're an advertiser, you pay attention to that kind of stuff."

But finishing behind WCSH in the Nielsen ratings doesn't mean that WGME and WMTW, the market's number two and three players, respectively, are crying through their own six o'clock broadcasts. In fact, even the last-place news program still can help pad a station's bottom line, according to UMaine's Mark Kelley, who spent more than two decades in the news business.

Until 1999, Kelley worked as the lead anchor of WNDU, the University of Notre Dame-owned NBC affiliate in South Bend, Ind., which regularly went head-to-head for the market's top spot with another station. But advertisers still were afraid of skipping the segment of the local population ˆ— however small ˆ— that tuned into the third-ranked station's programming. "That station still made money, because anybody who wanted to reach the market had to buy with that station," he says.

That said, gaining traction in the ratings is a difficult proposition for any local station. There's no simple blueprint for building a successful news program, and consultants often are hired to re-jigger stations' news in hopes of moving up a few spots in the ratings.
For WCSH, reaching the number-one spot in the market in 1986 was a difficult task, and one that Lew Colby says was achieved through the station's own efforts and some serious market serendipity. Colby says that WCSH in the early 1980s took advantage of a ratings decline at the market leader, local CBS affiliate WGAN (the station's call letters were changed to WGME in 1984), following Walter Cronkite's exit from the network's evening news desk. That slide was cemented a few years later after the cancellation of The Merv Griffin Show, the popular syndicated talk show that led into WGME's local evening news program.

But when the market broke open in the mid 80s, Colby says WCSH was there to take advantage. Part of the station's strategy was a steady infusion of new blood, including news director Jeffrey A. Marks ˆ— whom Colby says was "the right guy at the right time" for his interest in testing new ideas that matched the station's desire to shake up its newscasts. Colby notes that some of Marks' most enduring moves in the 80s were the hiring of new on-air personalities, including long-time WCSH employees like Bill Green and Sharon Rose.

For Marks' part, he says the real change in the WCSH newsroom that began to draw viewers was the news team's enterprise coverage of big stories. Pat Callaghan, for example, says he was the only reporter from a Maine station in Florida for the 1986 launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. When the launch quickly turned into a disaster, Callaghan says he spent 35-40 minutes reporting on the shuttle's explosion live for WCSH before the station switched to NBC network news reports. "For a long time, I got feedback from people who felt a personal connection to that story," says Callaghan.

Changing the product
By the time Steve Thaxton arrived at WCSH in 1998, he found a station with a well-oiled news machine. The six o'clock program had spent 12 years at the top of the market, and the news team ˆ— both on air and behind the scenes ˆ— boasted a core of seasoned veterans.

Still, one of Thaxton's first impulses was to make some changes. For example, he wanted to rework the station's Storm Center segments. The ominous theme music and mawkish graphics struck him as too campy for a serious weather report, and he toyed with scrapping those elements and starting from square one. But he quickly found that Storm Center, while somewhat hokey, was well received by viewers. "After six days, I realized you don't want to mess with that," he says. "If it's not broken, don't fix it."

But the best-case scenario, says Thaxton, is that a few well-placed tweaks can make a big impact with viewers. When Thaxton came to WCSH, the News Center slogan was "Live, local, late breaking" ˆ— a well-trod local-news tagline that's still in heavy rotation in TV newsrooms across the country. The new slogan unveiled by the station in 2000, "People you know, news you trust," was the result of a brainstorming session between Thaxton and a group of WCSH employees. The line, he says, helps play up the station's hometown position and well-known core of news personalities.

But in addition to making content-related changes, Thaxton says Gannett has pumped more than $15 million into the station since purchasing it in 1998 from Maine Broadcasting System. That's resulted in new cameras, production equipment and sets. Those changes were necessary for WCSH to remain competitive, says Thaxton. "I think the previous owners never could have shelled out $15 million to $18 million," he says. "They never could have pulled that out of their cash flow and survived."

WCSH isn't alone in that kind of corporate backing. When New York-based Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. purchased Portland's local ABC affiliate, WMTW, in 2004, Ken Bauder and George Matz faced the challenge of remaking a family-owned local station into a contender. But Bauder says it's not enough to use money to patch up a station's problems. Instead, Bauder, the station manager, and Matz, its news director, said they had to evaluate how WMTW fit into the local market, and study what changes would be well-received by viewers. "There's no cookie-cutter formula," says Bauder. "[Hearst-Argyle] let us come in, had us understand the market, talk to people and find out what's important."

In February of last year, the station debuted a new graphics package to update the "tired" look of its news program, and Bauder and Matz worked to sharpen the focus of the station's newscasts to emphasize breaking news and "the kind of content that's topically relevant to our viewers," says Matz.

And the most topically relevant story, says Bauder, is usually the weather. As a result, the station in 2004 added two new meteorologists, Tom Chisholm and Matt Zidle, bringing its weather team to four. Bauder ˆ— and the station's marketing campaign ˆ— point out that WMTW is the only local station with four certified meteorologists on staff. The station also invested in new weather equipment and launched a live Doppler radar feed to bolster its forecasting. "In every market in the country, weather is the number one reason that people watch the local news," says Bauder.

The pair's work has begun to pay off. Bauder says the station has seen a spike in viewership for its six o'clock news program, especially among adults aged 25-54, which he says is the most requested demographic by advertisers. During the 12 months through last November's Nielsen sweeps, the ratings in that demographic for its six o'clock news program rose more than 50%, from 3.6 in 2004 to 5.4 last year. (These ratings refer to the percentage of households in the market tuning in to that station during that time slot.)
But as WMTW's ratings increased during the 12 months through last November, so did market leader WCSH's, increasing from 17 to 17.2. Only WGME's six o'clock p.m.
household ratings fell from 10.2 to 8, indicating perhaps that WMTW is successfully stealing away viewers from WGME in the Portland-Auburn market (WGME's current general manager, Alan Cartwright, who resigned as general manager of WCSH in 1998 after Gannett Co. purchased the station, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Targeting the leader
Although WMTW still lags behind both WCSH and WGME, people are noticing the station's ratings jump. Steve Thaxton calls the station's efforts "the strongest six o'clock [news] they've ever had." Briggs Advertising's Matt Barnard says: "[WMTW] has put their nose to the grindstone and decided to make a dash for first place, and I think they could do it."

With invigorated competition, Steve Thaxton says his job is to make sure WCSH doesn't get complacent. In fact, WCSH is getting ready to launch more original programming, including a weekend edition of its 207 program and an extended, two-hour Sunday morning News Center program. Meanwhile, Thaxton says the station during the past few years has worked to control production costs by automating its behind-the-scenes operations.

Remote-control cameras can be operated by a single person during a newscast, for example, and a new master control room has cut the number of production personnel from 16 to seven. Those changes have freed up cash that Thaxton says he is reinvesting in news programs, from adding new on-air staffers, photographers and producers, to allocating more resources for reporters to track down stories. "We worry about becoming complacent all the time," he says. "The way stations drift off and become number two is because of that complacency."

At some point, however, the status quo will be broken at WCSH. Pat Callaghan and Cindy Williams both say it's highly unlikely either of them will leave the fold anytime soon. But it will happen sometime, whether it's five or 15 years down the road, and the station will be forced to put new faces behind the anchor desk. Thaxton doesn't seem phased by that inevitability, and says that no general manager worth his salt would get caught flatfooted if an on-air personality decided to leave. "If you're managing things correctly, you're bringing people along," he says. "You need to be ready to gracefully move people out."

But whether viewers will identify with the station's next generation of anchors and reporters is anybody's guess. And if WCSH experiences anything more than a change or two at the anchor desk, the reshuffling could bust the market wide open, says Barnard, allowing an enterprising competitor to take advantage of the situation ˆ— just as WCSH did in the 80s.

That said, the station stands a good chance of defending its ratings title for many more years, says Colby. But he also points out that relatively new ownership at stations like WMTW and WGME will make it more difficult for WCSH to maintain its wide margin of victory in each sweeps period. "My guess is that it's theirs to lose, as it always is, rather than another station's to win," says Colby. "It's the most loyal audience to get, and they've held it for 20 years. That's a full generation of viewers."

But there's no guarantee that the next generation will be loyal WCSH viewers like many of their parents. After all, in the television business, you're only as successful as the last ratings.