Local Television: Programming and Content Strategies in the Digital Age

The aim of this article is to investigate the content and programming strategies of local television in Russia, their compliance with specific features of local television. For this purpose, the author conceptualizes the peculiarity of local television and its programming, analyzes actual content strategies and scheduling techniques, as well as Internet promotion. Three TV channels of different formats and forms of ownership were investigated in Moscow Oblast: TVR 24 (Sergiev Posad), a state-owned informational TV channel, LRT (Lyubertsy city district) and Korolev TV (Korolev), general interest private TV channels. The author monitored the TV programs during the period of April 15 to April 21, 2019. She also conducted interviews with the management of TV channels and surveyed viewers in social networks (120 people). The author conceptualizes the main peculiarity of local TV as an attention being paid to local community interests. The author suggested that news, local history, and public affairs programs had to play an important part in local broadcast. However, the study of content strategies has revealed that under low-budget conditions local channels actively aired syndicated TV products, mostly movies and TV series. News, local history, and public affairs programs were largely disregarded. Only one local stated-owned channel (TVR 24) aired mostly its own TV content. The research of programming strategies has shown that local TV channels did not always adapt themselves to the rhythm of the audience’s life and made little use of the grouping of the same type of programs. While planning their programs’ schedule, only one channel (TVR 24) implemented techniques used by the main Russian TV channels and learned from international experience. The main principle of programming of all three channels was the conservation of program resources. As a result, a greater number of reruns was observed even in the daytime. All three channels used the Internet to distribute content and promote it. However, only one of them (LRT) applied interactive techniques for programming and promoting. The survey has showed that TV viewers were mostly interested in TV news, local history, and public affairs programs, but only one channel (TVR 24) focused on such content. At the same time, viewers of all the analyzed TV channels mentioned the dependence of local news on government policies. This investigation has revealed that problems of regional broadcasters are not related only to a lack of funds. Professional qualification of local producers does not allow them to properly use scheduling techniques and consider the specifics of the regional media space.

Keywords

Authors

References