Utah Valley Television to tune in local news

PROVO — The four Salt Lake television stations that produce local news broadcasts will have new competition for Utah Valley viewers this week.

Utah Valley Television will start humbly, with a taped, 30-minute news show to air six days a week at 5:30 p.m. on a small Salt Lake station, but the founders hope the launch leads to a full-fledged commercial station aimed at viewers hungry for news coverage focused completely on their area instead of dominated by Salt Lake Valley events.

UVTV has a chance to fill an emerging niche in the market, said Robert Walz, who was KSL-TV's Utah County reporter for 15 years and now teaches broadcast journalism at Brigham Young University.

"People here are tired of hearing about (Salt Lake Mayor) Rocky Anderson," Walz said. "The news that means the most to them gets ignored."

The Salt Lake-based stations — KSL-TV Ch. 5, KUTV Ch. 2, KTVX Ch. 4 and KSTU Ch. 13 — have begun to react to the demand for increased Utah County coverage. KSL and KUTV each have a reporter based in Utah County, and last year KSL moved reporter Sam Penrod into a new Utah County Bureau in Orem, a facility shared with the Deseret Morning News' Utah County team and a radio reporter from KSL Newsradio 1160. The office doubles as a studio for Penrod as well as BYU football and basketball coaches who tape their weekly shows there.

But Walz said Salt Lake assignment editors still naturally focus on news closer to home.

"If something happens in downtown Salt Lake, all four stations cover it," he said. "If the same thing happened in downtown Provo, no one would want to cover it."

The other problem Utah Valley viewers have with Salt Lake news coverage is the way many stories about Utah County are covered.

"Sometimes Salt Lake portrays Utah County residents as odd religious fanatics," said Walz, who still does free-lance stories for KTVX. "There certainly is a feeling among many Salt Lake reporters and newsroom managers that Provo and BYU are full of odd religious fanatics."

UVTV station manager Peter Hansen said Utah Valley's 100,000 television households are enough to support an independent television market with multiple stations. The Salt Lake market, including Utah and Davis counties, ranks 36th out of 210 television markets in the United States. On its own, Utah Valley would rank 167th, Hansen said.

"In most parts of the country you'd have two markets," Walz said.