BROOKE GLADSTONE: By week’s end, reporters in Ferguson found that where once they were most afraid of tear gas canisters hurled or bullets fired by the police, now they were also wary of people on the ground, people from outside the community who had come to join the chaos. Local station KMOV-TV has been on the ground there since the night of the shooting.

    [CLIPS]:

MALE ANNOUNCER: Every night news 4 has been on the street with police and demonstrators...

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Last night no looting, no violence, but there were 47 arrests...

MALE ANNOUNCER: Brittany Noble who's live at West Florissant and Canfield. What kind of reaction have you seen tonight Brittany?

FEMALE REPORTER: Well, Chris, the situation here continues to change...

  [END CLIPS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now the station’s news department is puzzling over how to continue covering a dramatic story with no end in sight. KMOV-TV News Director Brian Thouvenot says the most urgent issue for the station is this: Will too much live coverage lead to more violence on the ground?

BRIAN THOUVENOT: How much publicity do we give to these groups who are not from St. Louis? Because by in large most of the people who are in St. Louis having their daily protests, they go home at night. They are peaceful when things are, you know, getting a little rowdy in the evening. It's the factions that have a different agenda who are the ones who are inciting police at that point. So, we just have to make a judgement call. And this is almost a daily basis about what we carry outside of our normally scheduled newscasts.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Were you hearing from people in the community or your own reporters that the news coverage was actually effecting the events on the ground?

BRIAN THOUVENOT: Well, I would say how you perceive their issues and why they are out there. It's a very racially divided story here in St. Louis. You see it in social media, you see it in comments made back to our news department. We just can't come off as rooting-on something that's going on in our community. Meaning, nothing's happened yet - but we're here waiting for something to happen.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you don't do play-by-play, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the street.

BRIAN THOUVENOT: Well, in the early days when it was involving St. Louis residents, you would have some of our competitors carrying wall-to-wall, play-by-play coverage of a police line with maybe one, two people in front of it. Making, you know, a stand for whatever reason. Well, as that goes on for 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, you see more people show up. You see more people coming out and it's like, what is really fueling all these additional people to come forward? And you just worry, 'Is it the live television broadcast'? You just have to have that conversation. We've had a very difficult  discussion after we went on the air on Monday. We broke into the last few minutes of a CBS program and that was met with some severe public backlash. Because many people turn to other programs to kind of escape what's going on.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What was the story?

BRIAN THOUVENOT: It was about a face-off between police and protesters that was almost leading to a chaotic situation. In hindsight, we could have handled it much differently.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How?

BRIAN THOUVENOT: Well, we're within 10 minutes of a regularly scheduled newscast. We could have interrupted a commercial break that was coming up and said, "This is the scene that's going on. We're going to have a live report in seven minutes"

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And let your viewers watch the exciting conclusion of Everybody Loves Raymond, or whatever.

BRIAN THOUVENOT: [LAUGHS]  Exactly. Under the Dome. And in essence, you know, we said: 'This is far more important than your moment of escaping what's going on'

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But you've been getting some conflicting signals from the public, right?

BRIAN THOUVENOT: There are mixed signals. You know, it's like what really do you want. On one hand you have people saying enough already we want you to stop covering this story because you're only fueling the fire. But then every morning we see what the ratings were on the previous day and ratings in St. Louis for all stations are markedly higher than they typically are.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Has the huge press of national and international journalists changed the way your station can cover the riots?

BRIAN THOUVENOT: Well, you know, you would have camera crews from CNN, from MSNBC, running back and forth in front of your camera. We actually had a reporter who was in the field doing a live interview with a local alderman and somebody comes in from outside of the area, outside of the country and tries to interrupt our interview that's live on the air in St. Louis. I mean, at the end of the day, we're the St. Louis local media. We're the ones who deal with the ramifications of what's going on before Michael Brown's tragic shooting death and after. The Wednesday after Michael Brown was shot and killed by the police officer, we organized a town hall meeting of community leaders, African American and white, to have a discussion about how we got here. How we got to not only the distrust of police and also what would lead to the reaction that took place in the days following.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You're talking about having a national conversation.

BRIAN THOUVENOT: Our title was 'A Community Conversation", about how we can start the process of fixing many of these issues, but it's going to take our communities to do it. And I think that's where the local media comes in. And you'll never see the national media, for the most part back here again once the play-by-play nature of this is over with.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ok, Brian. Thank you very much.

BRIAN THOUVENOT: Thank you for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Brian Thouvenot is News Director of KMOV TV, St. Louis.