What's with all the "porn" stories on local news suddenly? Is it sweeps time? KXAN, I believe, is running "Generation X-Rated" features all week long. No, I'm not making that up. And last night KVUE-24 ran a story about a woman who was "terrorized" by someone who repeatedly dumped pornographic material on her lawn. I thought the story had some merit, but they couldn't have played it more cheesily if they'd tried. The suspect works at a state agency and supposedly downloaded images from the Net, then copied them using a machine at work. KVUE had speeded-up reenactments of some faceless person making copies. It was about the silliest thing I've seen in quite a while.

I bounce back and forth between KVUE, KXAN and KEYE news. They all seem to be into a race as to who can have the sexiest doppler radar on the Internet. I keep telling them that one of them needs to align with the Spring for conferencing. I was even on the line with KTBC a little while ago who is about to launch their entry into the website sweepstakes.

I think KXAN has had a site for quite a while, tho I've never been. Anyone else been there?

Yes, I was introduced to it by Larry Brill. They pretty much took the lead from their sister station in Dallas and are gradually taking over their own content production.

So what do we think about KVUE's policy on crime coverage? (i.e., their refusal to run with just any crime story; it has to meet one of six or so criteria.)

What are the criteria?

yeah, I second that...

Oooh, damn. I knew someone was going to ask that. I don't know all of them. One is "significant impact," which seems like their catch-all. Another is "take action," or something. One might be "threat to children." You can tell I'm really up on this stuff. The GM of KVUE, who is a friend of mine, tells me they're not really doing anything different from the way they used to cover crime. They've always had criteria, he says, but now they tell you what they are. Not that I remember them, obviously.

I would rank the tv stations local news coverage subjectively: 1. KEYE 7 2. KVUE 24 3. KXAN 36 4. KTBC 42 For national news: 1. ABC - KVUE 24 2. CBS - KEYE 7 3. PBS - KLRU 18 4. NBC - KXAN 36 5. FOX - KTBC 42 I hope I got all those affiliations right. How you others rank the local news? How would you rank the local news websites?

OK, according to Dec. 10 American-Statesman, the five criteria KVUE uses for reporting crimes are: Does the crime represent a threat to children? Threat to public safety? Significant impact on the community? Will people need to take action? Is there an aspect of crime prevention? And now KEYE (the Fox affiliate) is running spot "editorials" questioning why KVUE didn't immediately report on a shooting in Zilker Park last week. KVUE responds that police assured them the crime didn't represent a threat to public safety, so they didn't go with it.