How Local News Can Save Itself

Local stations enjoy unique advantages as they confront their challenges:

• A strong brand awareness in the market, years in the making
• An active presence in the community, which digital (and especially social) media can significantly enhance
• A trusted reputation for news. In fact, local TV news consistently comes in first in Pew's annual "believability" survey -- which positions the local station to be a credible curator of crowd-sourced information
• A valuable role as provider of news and vital information when a crisis hits -- one of the few times that younger users turn to familiar sources for help
• A well-established relationship with key advertisers, which opens the door to station-driven marketing services aimed not just at current advertisers but smaller businesses that can only afford digital advertising
• Proficiency in video, increasingly the lingua franca of digital media, giving stations an edge in creating unique video experiences tailored to on-the-go consumption
• Multiple platforms to drive a social-media strategy built around local news personalities, whose involvement with viewers and users in a true "conversation" (rather than mere promotion) can help build a station's unique value to its audience and advertisers

And most of all, there's still nothing like TV to engage the emotions and confer instant celebrity. Even those media-saturated millennials aren't immune to the magic.