In the world we live in, you could be seated in your home in California while keeping up with news updates from Johannesburg. No matter where you are, as long as you have good internet access, then you can be in the know of what is going on anywhere in the world, just as much as the locals in those regions.
But a few decades ago, this was not our reality. While people had access to both local and national news through their papers, network broadcasts, and evening news, they often found that most news stories focused on what was around them. So, why was localization so important back then, and what does this mean for us now that we live in such a hyper-connected world?
Why Were News Stories So Local?
To understand why many news stations focused on what was happening within their borders, we have to look into their underlying motivations. And these came in three tiers – social, economic, and political.
From an economic standpoint, news stations had to deliver news within a given radius as they were relying on local delivery trucks, broadcast towers, and so on. So, the narrower their radius, the better their profit margins would be. At the same time, this localization allowed them to partner with local businesses for ads, which provided them with much-needed revenue to cover their operating costs.
Socially, locals heavily relied on news stations to cover local matters that were important to them. Whether they were following local sports, weather emergencies, or even community events, they wanted coverage of the things that brought them closer as a community. And politically, news stations served as an information hub for things such as local taxation laws, local crimes, zoning changes, school board regulations, and so on. All in all, local news stations served as a pivotal infrastructure in the running of local communities.
The Impact of Global News Distribution
The internet has changed a lot, from how we do business to how we stay connected to each other. Naturally, these effects spilled over to local news stations, which found themselves grappling with changes that threatened the traditional news models. First, news consumers no longer had to buy local news bundles as they could now consume individual stories online. Secondly, with digital advertising bearing fruit, many local businesses started turning to tech giants to market their products. And since many local stations heavily relied on local ads for revenue, they felt the financial hit of this. Additionally, private firms started stepping in to buy the struggling local news stations. But while some of them kept the stations as they were, a good majority slashed the newsroom crews so as to keep their operating costs low. They also pushed their crews to cover news beyond their borders so as to increase their reach.
All these changes slowly led to the creation of several news deserts where locals had little to no access to independent reports on local events, thus limiting social cohesion and marginalizing vulnerable communities.
How Local News Stations Embraced the New Age
While some local news stations chose to shut down due to the constraints they were facing, a good number embraced the digital age and used it to their advantage, thus enabling them to position themselves within bigger digital networks. And they did this through various approaches.
Some of them took to the hub-and-spoke syndication models. In these setups, large media houses created or partnered with centralized media stations, which produced local content that could be published on hundreds of local affiliate media stations and websites. Others went for custom sections within larger news platforms that focused on local news. For instance, newspapers would often have national news sections, then carve out sections for local news reports. And some media houses went for Geo-targeting where they would swap out news sections for local stories that would target the reader, ensuring that everyone had a personalized experience.
For example, Dallas is home to media houses such as The Dallas Morning News alongside other TV powerhouses, all of which sit within global cloud distribution networks. As such, when a local reporter covers something as local as a city council vote, this post becomes available in national news platforms as well as on social media, thus ensuring that both locals and other people can benefit from it.
Another good example is Seattle. As the home to publications like The Seattle Times, this region is known for its high coverage of local news, be they environmental policies or housing crises. But rather than keeping these pieces only on local platforms, Seattle news stations publish this content on global content delivery networks. In this way, readers all over the world can access these same stories just as easily as the locals.
These and other regional media markets highlight just how local news stations have been able to find their place in the global news distribution without losing their importance to the local communities that they serve.