Sweeps blue balls

By on February 13th, 2008 In Media

Ever watch a TV topical or hear it over and over during drivetime on the radio promoting a sweeps story or investigation and think “Holy Cow, I gotta check this out! This is interesting/important/scary.”

You stay up, tune in to the station..and after sitting through the (bad) news of the day it is finally 10:14pm. This is normally around the time when the sweeps story airs.

But wait! What happened? This is it? It only lasted  two minutes…and basically tells you what you already knew from the topical tease copy.  You feel as if you wasted two minutes of your life.

As the boys would say, its a “blue balls” situation. Got you all hot and heavy and then completely let you down. As a former TV promotion producer, I can tell you I tried so hard not to do that, but with so many people looking over your copy it wasn’t always easy to give a lot of away or make someone tune in to a story that really wasn’t as sensational as the tease. The thing is, it seemed then we had sweeps stories that were given at least 3-4 minutes of time in the newscast so more important info was offered of value to the viewer. But now there are more stories thrown into a rundown and the interesting promotable stories get tossed into the third block and are whizzed through quickly.

Do you as a viewer really need to see Team Coverage in the lead story of a police hostage situation that every other station is covering too? No! You want something different, something that will give you more…either local, exclusive or investigative in nature.

The purpose of news topicals and “sweeps stories” is to keep the viewers who are watching your primetime network show to STAY on your station for the 10pm news (9pm for FOX). Special Project producers plan for weeks on these stories. But when a viewer sees a tease for a 5-car pile up, a shooting and an election update they know its something they will see on their “favorite” station too and most likely flip over to the station as habit. Don’t ruin it for the viewer by teasing a sweeps story and then let them down when they stay on that channel. 

Comments

Eric Reid Says:
February 14th, 2008 at 10:59 am

When the news reporter says, “and we’ll have more on that story that will somehow save your entire family from certain death… after these messages,” there’s no denying it is hilarious. It’s almost as funny as when the report on a disaster somewhere, then say with ecstatic relief that, “no Americans were among the victims.”

But news programs are shooting themselves in the foot by assuming I owe them my time. It’s the main reason online news is as big as it is. Why sit through a half-hour of info-tainment that isn’t very informative OR entertaining, when I can go to a handful of online news sources and find out everything I need to know about what’s going on in the world?

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