Commentary
Local TV Station Future Prognosis: Headed To Rehab?
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 24, 2025
Here's an ongoing news story -- perhaps one you will see on your big living room screen: Where will local TV stations be five years from now?
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.
Local TV stations started up their own digital advertising businesses -- website activity in particular. But that hasn’t moved the needle too much -- just around $2.4 billion in ad sales in 2024, according to BIA Advisory Services.
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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 anytime of the time or 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?
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, in ancient times and well up into the 1980s, TV stations offered more balanced program menues than they do today. Most ABC/CBS/NBC affiliates had early and late evening bews blocks but aside from this they relied mostly on syndicated talk, game, nature and celebrity magazine shows to fill out the time not occupied by network shows. For their part, indies went in for syndicated fare like kid shows, action-adventure dramas, sitcoms etc. --usually off-network entries---and movies or sports.
But all of that changed and now most stations---indies or otherwise--are loaded with local news snd it's becoming injcreasingly clear that too much of a good thing is killing the golden goose.
Many small market TV stations have always been money losers and now, this is spreading up into the larger markets. In many cities, it's time for station management to be thinking of a "Plan B" where their local programming is concerned. If every station in a market is offering an early AM, Noon, early evening and 10PM or 11PM news ---that's about 6 hours a day of news, mostly repeating what an earlier installment has already told viewers. That's a recipie for appealing mostly to 65+ viewers. And even so, there aren't enough of them available---and interested--- to make it worthwhile for every station to try to hook with news.
So start talking to the syndicators about what might be availabkle---or developed--and at what cost--and start experimenting by dropping your least valuable news block and trying a new approach.
WXMI FOX17 was the first to air a 4PM newscast in fall of 2014 WOODTV started a 4PM newscast once Ellen's talker ended in 2022 and only airs 4 shows in syndication Sherri 2PM to 3PM, TMZ Live 3PM to 4PM, Inside Edition 7:30PM to 8PM, TMZ 3RD run 1:30AM to 2AM.
I thought that WZZM was going to put a 4PM newscast once Judge Judy ended but didn't and has kept Judy in the 4PM to 5PM this year the 3RD repeat took over 7:30PM to 8PM which replaced TEGNA's DBL which was always a flop like most TV station groups creating their own shows to fill timeslots that would go to syndication. Which most fall since they hardly ever go anywhere other than the TV stations that the groups own. I agree with Ed that the TV station groups should talk to the syndicators.