Role of sports in TV newscasts shifting in Las Vegas and other markets

Can they still hammer a homer at 6 and 11 or just bunt their way into a newscast?

Or whiff entirely?

Local sports reports might be drifting toward forced retirement. Since a 2006 Penn State survey revealed that 76 percent of sports staffers saw their roles dwindling and 55 percent predicted sportscasts were heading to the bench permanently, the issue has loomed over local TV like the Sword (or Baseball Bat) of Damocles.

Last spring, the dismissal of sportscasting giant Len Berman from New York's WNBC-TV left the sportscasting community shaken, and more have been trimmed from staffs as ESPN and its regional offshoots tighten their stranglehold on the attention of sports fans, and the Internet, iPhones and the like provide instant sports-news gratification.

In Las Vegas, while weekend sports news remains robust, weeknights have seen shrinkage. KLAS-TV, Channel 8 and KTNV-TV, Channel 13 program both short and extended sports segments at 6 and 11 p.m., but KVBC-TV, Channel 3 inserts it only at 11 p.m. and sent its extended "SportsZone" to the showers by discontinuing newscasts on KVCW-TV, Channel 33. Earlier this year, KVVU-TV, Channel 5 surprised the market by removing sportscasts entirely from weeknight newscasts.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal bounced the issue off a lineup of local and national experts:

• How real is the threat to sportscasts?

Ron Futrell, ex-Channel 13 sports anchor: I hope they're not disappearing, but it's going in that direction. ... But sports guys here, Doug Kezirian at 13 and Chris Maathuis at 8, do a great job with limited resources. They knock it out of the park.

Chris Maathuis, sports anchor, KLAS-TV, Channel 8: I am kinda worried because so many sports staffs got complacent. They're cutting back in places like Philadelphia and Austin (Texas), where these guys just got comfortable doing national stuff. And (news directors) say, "If that's what you're going to do, we don't need you."

Timothy Franklin, director of the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University: Sportscasters are not an endangered species yet. ... But it's the lowest-viewed part of the newscast. News directors cut loose high-priced anchor talent, not just sports. But if you're an anchor who's got the least-watched part of the newscast making big money, that's a hazardous situation for a sports anchor to be in.

Eric Deggans, media critic, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and columnist for the National Sports Journalism Center: You can't just have a personable guy come on and give scores and show blooper video. Too many people still think that's a big part of the job.

• What's the impact if sports segments are downsized or cut?

Adam P. Bradshaw, news director, Channel 5: We've had better ratings for the fourth quarter hour at 10 (after dropping it), at least a full ratings point most nights. But it took time to educate some (Las Vegas) sports franchises so they would know we still wanted to hear from them when they were having events.

Deggans: I'm told by (news directors) that 30 percent of the audience were die-hard sports fans, 30 percent were like, "If it were there, fine, if not, that's OK," and 30 percent didn't care at all. It was always a weird love-hate relationship. ... In my market, they've found ways to keep a token sports broadcast.

Stacey Woelfel, chairman of the Radio-Television News Directors Association: A lot of stations don't want to lose that 30 percent, that's the difference for some between first and fourth place. Everybody's skittish about losing that sliver of the audience, fragmented as it is.

• Does sports get enough resources?

Deggans: Managers have to believe in that segment. In a lot of markets, they're taking away producers and camera people, make reporters shoot their own stuff, resources the viewer doesn't see while pretending to offer the same level of coverage they did five years ago.

Futrell: It's hard for them to go to the (news) desk and say, "I need a camera for this" because they're pressured by the marketing and research people who have all discounted sports.

Maathuis: I've always produced, wrote and edited my own stuff, but I'd bet there are a lot of bigger market guys or ladies who don't, some don't even know how to edit. But we do have to beg for camera support. I try to help the assignment desk figure a way to make it work. It's a battle, but if you want to make the sports department viable, you've got to really work at it.

Woelfel: The biggest impact is sports travel. If you're covering a team on the road for a championship, it becomes very expensive. On the road (lack of resources) is really noticeable.

• Is going hyper-local the solution?

Maathuis: I take pride that we try to do local before regional and national, unless it's the Dodgers or Angels in a playoff or the Lakers in the playoffs.

Franklin: It's hard to do high school sports and get to all of them but that's where you've got parents involved, students, administrators, faculty and the community. Many anchors don't want to get to that level, they're into pros or the college level.

Futrell: You develop a connection with your audience in no other way than doing grass-roots sports. But news doesn't apologize for leading with President Obama's health care speech, so sports shouldn't either, like (a recent sportscast) you couldn't have done without showing Brett Favre's touchdown pass to beat the Niners. People do like seeing their local sports guys adding local flavor.

Deggans: People present hyper-local as some silver bullet and I don't know if it is. You have to have a smart sense of what your audience wants, not cover every little thing, but take stories playing out nationally and make them local, like recruiting issues in high school football.

Ron Comings, news director, Channel 8: We just did a story on how some local football fields that are grass are in such poor condition that coaches said it was like an extra player on the field. There are always medical stories about young athletes training in the heat. Those are interesting to a lot of people.

Bob Stoldal, executive vice president of news, Channel 3: There's interest in the UNLV Rebels and the 51s, and then from the impact on our economy, it's what a big fight brings in, and the rodeo. Las Vegas is unique in that it has significant sporting events. That's where local sports coverage is going, covering local events and teams, and those big national events that come to Las Vegas.

• Is weaving sports stories into the news flow one viable alternative, and are there others?

Bradshaw: Since we discontinued sports (segments), we won an Emmy for NASCAR coverage, we've been live at every boxing match, so we haven't eliminated sports coverage. But you don't do those stories in the same time frame we did sports at 10:52, you do them in the first part of the news.

Maathuis: If (sports departments) were an integral part of the newscast, which I think we are, then they'd stay around. We do some fun things in sports, so there would be some interesting things at the top of the newscast some days. But it's that attitude of, "Oh, they're sports so there's no way they can do a fun, entertaining story." Wait a minute!

Stoldal: I want to do a nightly call-in sports program. It doesn't have to be all about sports betting, but having fun with fantasy teams and a bunch of things, people calling in or Twittering. Would it have a large enough audience to make it financially feasible and service our community? The answer is yes.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256