The scenario is familiar to any journalist who has worked at a newspaper in the last 15 years. The audience is moving away from the profitable old platform to a hot, new one. The outlet must adapt or at least try to.
Now the dynamic is roiling regional broadcast outlets with their bread-and-butter content: local newscasts. Revenue from a very successful business model has stalled as the viewing action moves to streaming apps.
The challenge has been brewing for a while but is picking up pace fast in 2025. Political advertising is no longer growing, and retransmission fees (what cable companies pay to carry the stations) are in peril. When and how to respond? It’s some of what you might expect if you accept the print-to-digital analogy, but also with some twists.
I spoke with Erik Schrader, vice president and general manager of WANF Atlanta. Just this month, the station dropped its longtime affiliation with CBS, largely to reclaim the prime morning news hours for itself instead of handing them over to a network show. Playing in a new time slot, WANF has made a subtle shift to a format with less of a traditional structure and more “immediacy,” Schrader said. Viewers can see in on the traditional cable and over-the-air formats but, of course, it’s also built as an app easily used on smartphones.
I asked the rude question of whether local stations have been lagging in adapting their news reports and surrounding business model, as newspapers notoriously were in the 2000s and 2010s. Yes, Schrader said, “the industry was slow out of the gate. There are still far too many running weather in a repeating loop” and otherwise bound to the fixed sequence of segments that has been around for decades.
I found much the same checking in with Tegna, one of the big chains. Just two months ago, it rolled out a streaming version for 50 markets in the 7 to 9 a.m. time slot. In Tegna’s case, it is keeping network programs for the cable and over-the-air audience, at least for now.
Adrienne Roark, senior vice president and chief content officer of the chain (and member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board), sketched a summary of local broadcast’s worsening business situation (which remains highly profitable for now).
“Local news is facing significant structural headwinds as both of its core revenue streams — TV advertising and retransmission fees — are flat or in decline due to cord-cutting, audience fragmentation and reduced negotiating power with (cable and satellite carriers). Digital advertising from our websites, apps and CTV service continues to grow, but remains a small share of revenue.”
Meanwhile, she said, “Industrywide drops in search traffic caused by AI-powered ‘answer engines’ are further eroding digital reach. We remain profitable, but the long-standing linear TV model is under sustained pressure, and forcing a shift toward digital growth strategies in a highly competitive environment.”
Roark’s one-word description of what Tegna is shooting for in the new morning shows announced June 16 is “storycentric.” That doesn’t mean anchors and reporters or their standard roles disappear. But on the morning shift, they’ll now have more time to tell stories at length and from the field.
The key to success, she continued, is “delivering journalism that is platform‑agnostic: compelling enough to capture attention in a newsfeed, informative enough to hold viewers in a livestream, and trustworthy enough to keep audiences coming back.”
The move preceded Nexstar’s current takeover agreement with Tegna, announced last week. If the deal goes through, I would bet on Nextstar keeping the initiative and melding it with whatever new streaming plans it has in the works. Complicating matters, though: Nexstar owns the NewsNation network, which has its own morning show.
Watching a few stories from Tegna stations, I wasn’t seeing obvious changes. The status quo limits the local newsrooms to five-minute news and weather breaks, while streaming allows for new and much bigger shows spanning two hours.
“It’s not the same,” Schrader told me. It’s “a less polished product. … We don’t have teleprompters, music and teases.”
Moving upstream to the biggest news and sports shows, the race against time to develop streaming adaptations is in full swing. When I spoke with CNN’s Alex MacCallum for an earlier column, she described a five-year effort of trying out experimental topics and formats, not all of which will work. ESPN unveiled its all-inclusive enhanced streaming app (at a cost of $300 yearly) last Wednesday.
I also spoke with my former Poynter colleague Scott Libin, who now teaches broadcasting at the University of Minnesota. He pointed out that the pressure is also on at the opposite end of the broadcast schedule with the 10/11 p.m. newscast.
In the old, old days, audiences watched one of the network entertainment shows, and some left the dial tuned for the late local news. Now the audience is more likely tuned to Netflix or another streaming service, and their programs don’t end on the hour. I don’t see a fix for that one.
I have written sparingly about local broadcast on the grounds that the largely stable business paled in interest to the existential crisis of newspapers and the ups and downs of digital startups. Not so going forward. The challenges for local broadcast and what, as a go-to source, it contributes to a community’s news diet will be harder and harder to ignore.
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