Local TV Stations Without News: What Then?

By Paul Greeley
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com

Where will local TV stations be five years from now?

That’s the question posed by Wayne Friedman, West Coast editor of MediaPost in a recent commentary.

For years, legacy local TV stations have been doing their best to expand into digital media platforms, as well as starting up new programming efforts, as well as hybrid TV-streaming/linear TV advertising sales efforts to keep moving and growing.

In recent years they have also benefited from soaring political advertising dollars — thanks partly to TV stations’ news programming content.

But competition — especially from digital-first media — continues to slowly eat into their businesses. For one, digital-first social media networks and others are continuing to make inroads on political advertising sales.

Many TV station groups then started up hybrid sales representatives for local/regional streaming platforms — where TV station groups can rep local/regional streamers that can be packaged with local TV station inventory. Tegna’s Premion has been one of the oldest businesses of this type.

Off in the distance, there is a concern that retransmission revenue might be slowing — or even declining.

Cord-cutting has not had a major impact for TV stations yet. They are a still must-have part of the bundle for consumers — legacy, virtual, streaming or otherwise.

But some analysts are concerned that one core content area for TV stations — news programming — could be an issue going forward, at least for some mid-to-heavy competitive TV markets where there are still plenty of choices for consumers.

Tim Hanlon, founder/CEO of Vertere Group, worries that what happened to WNWO-TV, the Sinclair-owned NBC affiliate, in Toledo, Ohio could get worse. It abandoned locally produced news two years ago and decided to air the station group’s Washington, D.C.-based “National News Desk” news programming in its place.

This could be a slow trend to watch, being that local TV station newscasts are expensive cost operations — though a core brand of what a local TV station is all about.

One might consider the threat that continues to show media consumers — on an upward trend — getting their news content from social media and other digital platforms, virtually any time of the day.

And wonder about all the rest of it especially as TV stations’ major TV network group partners continue to hone their skill increasingly to a new streaming TV world. Will TV stations be left behind?

Currently, local TV stations/affiliates offer up much in the way of locally focused promotion and advertising for their affiliates TV networks — and now streaming.

But with retransmission dollars ebbing lower and TV network groups demanding ever more programming fees from TV stations, the business formula will become more onerous.

Decades ago, TV stations looked to their own efforts around finding programming — through the U.S. syndication market. That market is still active — although nowhere near that of what competitive streamers bring to the table.

And that’s why all eyes might now shift to core content: If local TV stations news content goes away, what then?