North Dakota News Sees Good, Bad Of Boom

With its wild swings in temperatures, the weather has long been the biggest story in Minot in north central North Dakota.

Farming news — from hardships to harvests — has been another mainstay on local TV news, as have community stories like, say, the opening of new park trails or flu shot season.

“We used to be like Mayberry,” says Monica Hannan, who oversees the news operations at the four Hoak Media-owned NBC affiliates — KFRY, KMOT, KQCT and KUMV — that serve Minot-Bismarck-Dickinson, a market that covers 50% of the western half of the state and rose six positions in the latest Nielsen count to become the nation’s 145^th largest TV market.

But the news today coming out of the market is not all as folksy as it was just a few years ago. That’s because the market has been undergoing dramatic and sudden changes.

An oil-and-gas boom in the western half of the state since 2008 has caused the population to spike and unemployment to plummet to the lowest level in the United States. It has created prosperity, but it has also caused the cost of living to skyrocket and put pressure on infrastructure, schools and other public services and brought an increase in crime.

“It is a totally different news market,” says Hannan, who has worked there for 25 years.

Along with stories of retail development and oil drilling on Indian reservations, she says, viewers are now seeing more crime stores such as a stabbing last week, which “would have been somewhat unusual before.”

The boom has brought “a vibrancy that’s always exciting to news,” she says, adding that in some ways her job also has become easier because “you have more news to choose from.”

David Reiten, whose Reiten Television owns the market’s four CBS affiliates  — KXMA, KXMB, KXMC and KXMD — agrees. Reiten, who has deep roots in the area, says the boom has inspired many “wonderful” stories and energized the broadcaster’s two newsrooms, one in Minot and another in Bismarck. “It’s exciting for our news people. It’s exciting for them to talk about how much growth is happening.”

“But then reality hits,” he says. “There has been an increase in crime, increase in traffic accidents, our roads are getting pounded to death and our infrastructure is really suffering because we can’t keep up. The news is going to be about how we handle this.”

Both Hoak and Reiten have invested in their newsrooms in an effort to keep up with the growth. Hoak has added news staffers, three this year in Bismarck alone, and increased news salaries 8% over the last two years, Hannan says.

Hoak offers some employees housing subsidies. Broadcasters risk losing staff to high-paying oil company jobs, says the Hoak stations’ GM Dick Heidt.

Reiten says he, too, has had to raise salaries, particularly for new hires moving to the area. Monthly rents today can easily top $2,000 “and that would take most of the salary of what we were paying a new person four or five years ago,” he says.

In ramping up his stations’ news capabilities, Reiten says he is moving cautiously.

Although Reiten’s stations have experienced an uptick in local advertising — car dealers, jewelers, insurance companies, among others — “we have not experienced the 100% increase in sales,” he says. The big chains moving into the area — stores like Walmart, Target and Lowe’s — don’t buy locally.

“We can’t walk into Best Buy and ask if they want to increase store traffic because all of that is national business,” he says. “Walmart is going to take up a lot of square footage, but it doesn’t show up in our advertising.”

Reiten has also lived through other oil booms, as well as the busts, and says he is “fully aware of what can happen.” It was only 25 or so years ago, after all, that the region was suffering from such an enormous brain drain that a Princeton professor floated a proposal to turn the region into native prairie, he says.

“If we need to buy new equipment or hire someone we will, but we are not going to hire 10 people assuming that in three years this growth will continue,” Reiten says. “There are a lot of us old timers who haven’t spent one dime that we don’t also have in the bank. “

The oil boom has also affected news in the Fargo market, which covers the eastern half of the state.

Ike Walker, news director of KVLY Fargo, also a Hoak-owned NBC affiliate, says he working to meet higher expectations of newcomers.

“When people move here they don’t want press release journalism,” he says. “They want enterprise journalism and original reporting.”

Walker says he has beefed up the station’s weather team — it now has four meteorologists and a storm chaser — and doing more investigative reports.

The station’s new “whistleblower hotline,” on which viewers can leave news tips, typically generates three to five stories a week, he says. In the last year, the station has increased its newsroom staff, bringing in people from as far away as California and Maryland.

But Jeff Nelson, the news director at WDAY Fargo, Forum Communications’ ABC affiliate, says he hasn’t really felt the influence of the oil boom to the west. “We still cover the news the way we always have.”

“Weather and agriculture are still our No. 1 stories and I don’t foresee that changing,” he says.

Which is not to say it will never happen. “We’re always looking at what we could do to capitalize on situations and plan and be prepared for when the oil and those people start moving our way,” he says.

Read other Air Check columns here. You can send suggestions for future Air Checks to Diana Marszalek at [email protected].