The good news for Boston viewers is that things can only get better, and the good news for Boston's newscasts is that improvements will likely only augment their Nielsen showings, which of late have not been particularly rosy for WCVB and WBZ. The question is exactly how the stations ought to go about making improvements.

For each of Boston's stations, the PEJ study pinpoints a few specific areas of weakness which can certainly be used as starting points for change. But the most telling of PEJ's criticisms and the one that would yield the best results if acted upon is the one about poor enterprise. Boston's stations devote so much coverage to topics like local crime not only because they think that doing so attracts viewers, but also because they are lazy.

It is much easier for a station's news directors to listen to police dispatchers and send out a reporter when something juicy is happening than it is for them to create substantive story assignments about the effect of for-profit hospitals in the region or political patronage at the State House. WHDH does broadcast what it terms "investigative reports," but these reports very infrequently involve anything more than WHDH's reporter taking credit for someone else's research or placing a few calls in response to a viewer's complaint about being cheated by a business.

Local news directors and reporters need to overcome their inertia rather quickly if they want their newscasts to survive. In this age of the Internet, local television stations have to compete as fiercely as ever for an audience, and Boston's visually stimulating, melodramatic newscasts are not drawing viewers in but instead are leading even the most loyal ones away.

Elizabeth G. Frieze is a first-year living in Wigglesworth Hall.