How Your Local TV Station Is Cashing In on Politics

In the past three years, Tribune’s 42 stations have added 170 hours a week of local news programming, for a total of more than 80,000 hours annually. Tribune executives said in a May earnings call that they expect to increase political ad business by 20 percent this year from 2012 Local newscasts across the nation have already reaped an estimated $279 million in revenue from political ads since Jan. 1, or about 40 percent of the money spent on ads across broadcast and national cable television, according to Kantar Media, which tracks ad spending through its Campaign Media Analysis Group. “People who watch local news are more likely to vote in the same way that if I watch sports on TV I’m more likely to buy a ticket,” says Will Feltus, senior vice president at National Media, a Republican ad-buying firm. Saturation coverage has another benefit, he says: “Campaigns are never going to complain about having too many spots on the local news because they want to see themselves. All of the donors to the campaign, the candidate’s family and friends, and the people around the campaign all watch the local news.”

The increase comes as local news viewership is falling. Since 2007 the average audience for late-night local news fell 22 percent, according to a June report from the Pew Research Center. Viewership in the morning and early evening decreased by 2 percent from 2014 to 2015, while viewership of early-morning newscasts has increased by the same amount. Adding news programming is attractive to station managers because it’s usually cheaper than buying syndicated shows to run in the daytime hours. That’s a concern for stations that aren’t affiliated with ABC, CBS, or NBC. “If you’re a Big Three, you’re getting 12 to 14 hours a day from the network,” says Larry Wert, president for broadcast media at Tribune, where only about a quarter of stations are affiliated with one of those three networks. “If you’re a Fox station, you’re really getting two hours plus sports.”