Awash in ads in Roanoke

What will stations do with campaign largesse? How will they invest in their community, and how will they bolster news coverage? And considering where that money came from, how much time, effort, and money are they investing now in covering the elections and in checking out the ads themselves?

Those concerns are especially apropos in the Roanoke-Lynchburg market, located in southwest Virginia. Though it’s only the 68th-largest broadcast area in the nation, the market has at times ranked at the top of the list in terms of the volume of political advertising on its airwaves. And the center of the TV ad war in Roanoke is the market leader, WDBJ (Channel 7). Jeff Marks, the general manager of WDBJ, said the “cushion” provided by campaign ads helped support equipment upgrades, plus the reopening of a local bureau and other staff additions. He pointed to added staff for the digital newsroom; an increase to six-figure levels in the station’s charitable donations to arts and human services groups; a boost in employee benefits; and investments in equipment, such as $65,000 for a touch screen device that will allow anchors to manipulate images.