An interesting article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gives television news viewers their chance to have their say about why they’re tired of television news.

I provide you with the top ten pet peeves viewers there give, and I throw in my perspective:

1. Self-Promotion – You tune in for your late news and you see a segment about what happened on “Survivor” that night. “This isn’t news,” you say as you reach for the remote. The trouble is, many people don’t reach for the remote. They watch. CBS, which has had trouble getting their morning news program to catch on from day one, was among the first to find ratings success by bringing on the castaway voted off “Survivor” the night before. Is it news? No. Do viewers respond to it? Unfortunately, yes.

2. News “lite” – Those extended long-form packages about the safety of playground equipment, what to do if you’re trapped in a car that goes into a river, which foods make you lose the most weight are typically done during the four sweeps months because that’s the time television stations really want to attract viewers. More viewers = more advertising revenue. Some of these stories test very well, and that’s the main reason they’re there. Some of them, of course, are ridiculous.

3. Too Little Meat – This is one of those gripes that I call at least partially-bogus. Viewers don’t necessarily want a lot of detail on everything…just those things they’re interested in. If viewers were presented with longform reports (a la “60 Minutes”) on stories in their own neighborhood, but the stories themselves were of no interest to them as individuals, the gripe would be that the newscast gets bogged down in too many details. The fact is, most people who are interested in routinely in-depth reporting turn to the newspaper. After all, they have the space for that level of detail. A thirty-minute newscast doesn’t.

4. Bragging – Of course this isn’t news. It’s branding…image advertising. Every station does it. That doesn’t make it right, but then again, each station is competing for your attention with every other station in townplus hundreds of cable and satellite channels. Stations want to set themselves apart.

5. Teases – My uncle gets upset about weather teases in particular: “Will it rain tomorrow morning? I’ll have your forecast coming up.” Those words just set him off. “Why don’t they just tell me then so that I can go to bed?” Uncle, you just answered your own question.

6. Pointless Live Shots – Television stations employ research firms and consultants to survey people in the audience. One of the things that routinely comes back is that viewers like live reports. Unfortunately, this motivates some stations to present live reports just for the sake of being live. There are two reasons for a live report: first, the live report sends a message to the viewer, subliminally, that the reporter hasn’t just been sitting around in the newsroom playing Solitaire all night: they’ve actually been out in the field where the news is. Second, a live report is supposed to show you something you couldn’t have gotten by having the reporter in the studio with the anchors. If, for example, a reporter is at the scene of an accident that had traffic blocked for hours but is now cleared, he should do what’s called a “walk-and-talk,” which basically means that he should show you the skid marks, he should show you where the car left the road, he should show you how police think it could have been avoided. That, at least, gives him a purpose in standing there. Otherwise, it is pretty pointless for him to be there. Many reporters, unfortunately, haven’t gotten this point.

7. Fake Banter – Fake banter is never good. But contrary to what some entertainment shows might like for you to believe, not every anchor team secretly hates each other. There are quite a few teams out there that are friends, and like each other’s company. I do agree, though, that you can tell when that’s the case. When it isn’t, contrived chit-chat can be quite painful.

8. Bad News – The old “if it bleeds, it leads” thing. It’s funny…people love to complain about that. One of my early “Saturday Six” questions asked whether you’d subscribe to a paper that had only good news. Most people said they wouldn’t. Local journalists have a difficult balancing act on their hands: they want to fit as much good news as they can, but at thesame time, it’s often the bad news that has a greater impact on their viewers: a robbery, for example, could affect viewers if the gunman is still believed to be in the area. The aforementioned car accident could affect local viewers if it looks like the area won’t be completely cleared by their morning commute. The local civic group’s bake sale, while sweet, doesn’t necessarily have a big impact until the new community center it raised money for actually opens for the first time.

9. Too Many Weather Warnings – So you don’t like to be told about storms that are 40 miles away. Sure. I understand that. You want to watch your “Days of Our Lives” without interruption. “CSI: Miami” was about to name the killer, now I’m looking at a weatherman standing there talking about tornadoes that may or may not touch down. Trump was about to say “You’re Fired,” and I’m suddenly missing it for a live report about hail damage. What most people fail to realize as they sit in complete tunnelvision is that the severe weather coverage is a big part of a station’s commitment to its community…something they are required to do to keep their license. Another thing most people fail to realize is that when severe weather is in the area — even forty miles away — the storm systems are usually moving, and quite often, moving in their direction.

10. Too Few Weather Warnings – This one strikes me as particularly funny, because I can imagine many of the people complaining about item #9 saying this when those storms they’ve demanded that the station stop hyping up actually do move into their neighborhood.

No one ever said that television news was perfect, certainly not I. But at the same time, television news is, in part, a reflection of what viewers tell us they want. Sometimes when those tastes change, it takes us a while to react to them. Sometimes, in the race to do the best job that we can do, we forget to stop and think about the reason they want certain things (like the example involving live shots above).

If it’s maddening for you, the viewer, that those of us in the news business can’t seem to get it right, I’d hope you would consider for a moment how maddening it is for us to try desperately to be as much as we can be to our audience, knowing it’s a losing battle, because no two people agree on everything when it comes to what makes a good newscast.