Can Local News Reinvent Itself For A Streaming-First World?
Local TV news has spent decades building its business around the broadcast. But as audiences increasingly turn to streaming, mobile, and social for news, does the traditional newscast make sense?
In this episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon sits down with former E.W. Scripps executive and Media Inno Managing Partner Tom Sly to unpack Scripps' efforts to rethink local news for a streaming-first world and why he believes the industry needs to embrace a much broader transformation.
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Tim Hanlon: How's it going? You are In the Vicinity. Welcome to the proceedings. My name is Tim Hanlon. I'm the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively advise and provide guidance to tons of companies in and around the media and technology spaces. Some of them large, some of them small, and as we say, some of them very much in between.
And that's where I think a lot of us feel these days, is very much in between the future and the past and what will survive from both of those as we drum our way through this local media dynamic that just seems to change each and every week. That's why we do these for you every week because we wanna keep up with those changes with you, and this week is no exception.
Our guest is Tom Sly, he of consulting firm Media Inno and former E.W. Scripps Television Group guy, and way back, former radio guy and television newsroom guy and all that kind of stuff. And as you may know, Tom is one of the wiser voices out there in what's going on and what potentially could or should happen with the evolution of television and local TV and local media in particular.
Had a very descriptive and, in some senses I wouldn't say controversial, but certainly draw a lot of heat both positive and some negative on the recounting of something that we've talked about, nibbled around the edges of in previous episodes, and that's the sort of refounding that Scripps has been going through with their news product on the local level.
As we've said before, the Scripps folks were toying with this idea in their Tallahassee station in that market for a bit of time, and trying to reinvent, rethink ground, if you will, what a local television newscast could and should look like in a more modern kind of dynamic where streaming tends to be more the first kind of go-to for most people when they're lighting up their quote-unquote TV sets.
And frankly, a world where news breaks a lot quicker elsewhere, either on phones or online or in other sorts of realms that maybe a local television newscast would be a few hours delayed in bringing. And maybe how you re-sort or center the delivery and the breaking of news accordingly.
And we're gonna kinda get into sort of the pros and the cons perhaps of that approach, the radical nature of it, depending on your perspective, the about time nature of it, depending on your perspective, with Tom in this conversation. I think you'll learn a lot, as I often do with these chats. Tom's a smart guy. Listen up.
Here's me and Tom from a couple of days back talking about local media, the Scripps News adventure, and what it portends for local TV news and other things. Here it is. Please, as always, enjoy.
For our audience, it would help to give a little bit of background about you, what your former life was, what your current life is professionally, and then we can use that as the background for a column that you wrote earlier this week, which frankly I think crystallizes a bunch of thoughts that we've talked about over the last couple of weeks here.
But you're closer to the source from your previous experiences. So how about a little background first?
Tom Sly: Sure. I started out of college selling advertising, so I really am a sales guy, monetization person, revenue person at heart. Went on to run a group of radio stations, which is how I got to Utah. Got transferred out there, Clear Channel, which became the iHeart cluster.
Over time, I got disenchanted really by what was going on in the radio industry, because I saw the consolidation, and it was literally like ripping out morning shows, Ryan Seacrest doing 150 markets with no localization, no knowledge of the market, and so on. So moved on, did a couple startups in the digital space and eventually actually took a break and three years in the automobile business.
Owned some dealerships and ran some dealerships just thinking that a marketing person could probably do a better job than some of those dealers. That's not an easy business. But anyway... And then joined Scripps about, it was probably about 15 years ago now, and I was there for about 13 years.
In January of last year, I had the opportunity to take an early retirement incentive plan, which I did, and along with a handful of peers. And at that point I said, "What am I gonna do?" I knew I had a number of months to think about it, and I said, "I don't wanna retire," and I said, "I wanna help local media."
And really that's what my career has been, is helping local businesses and helping local media. And I just thought that perhaps I can bring value there, and that's what I'm doing today. So I have a consultancy called Media Inno. I was at a conference this week, and somebody said, "How'd you get that name?"
I said, “when I went to look for URLs, mediainnovation.com was $85,000 and Media Inno was $55 bucks." And I said, "So it became Media Inno." So anyway, that's what I do today. I focus on media innovation and transformation with my goal of hoping to enable people inside the industry to think differently about how they're operating today because the landscape is evolving and changing quite quickly.
Tim Hanlon: So I think that's a really excellent background. First of all, I didn't know you were a radio guy at heart, and I kinda am too from an interest perspective. That's the first medium that kind of hit my radar when I was a kid and stuff and fell in love with the theater of the mind thing and the distant radio stations and all that stuff.
But your background from certainly sales, ad sales and radio, and then frankly being on the other side of one of the three tiers of automotive, still one of the biggest chunks of dollars that get thrown into both national but certainly local media and stuff, that gives you some very interesting 360 view of stuff, right?
Just from an advertising perspective, I mean we've been thinking about local television revenue streams and that kind of stuff and advertising really has diminished in some respects in terms of being the first revenue line item for most station groups, right?
Tom Sly: Yeah. Retrans obviously is huge today, and it's still gonna be around for a while.
Looks like actually the cord-cutting is slowing. Some of the companies like Charter are getting more creative with how they're bundling and what they're putting together. But let's make no mistake that those companies are becoming broadband companies, probably more so than video companies today, and at some point that will likely go away.
And I think that's why companies like Nexstar, Scripps, Sinclair, and Gray have invested in Edgebeam, hoping that data casting and using their spectrum in a different way to generate an entirely new revenue line is an opportunity for them.
Tim Hanlon: It sounds like, though, your career at Scripps was dare I say more from an outside looking in kind of perspective, meaning you weren't dozens of years as a broadcaster per se or a TV station person where you learn certain things and you evolve and grow with the industry, and sometimes you retain them, maybe perhaps a little too long, these kinds of notions of how to operate and stuff, right?
Would it be fair to say that you had some challenge/innovation kind of focus to your work when you were at the bowels?
Tom Sly: Okay. Yeah, I started on really to build the local digital sales organization, and that's how I came in. But at the same time, when I posted my column on Monday, I got some comments and one called me a suit that had never been in a newsroom and never run a newsroom, and I was, obviously, a CRO sales kind of guy. There's a lot of truth to that, but even back in my radio days, they had 25 to 30 people in my newsroom in Salt Lake City.
I was responsible for AM stations as well as FM stations and getting the news out. And then I would say my tenure at Scripps, it's a very unique culture there, at least certainly during my time it was, because it is a very mission-focused company. They do care immensely about journalism. So when I saw a lot of the notes and the comments from LinkedIn and also on that TVNewsCheck site, mostly disgruntled journalists that are unhappy that change is necessary and change is coming.
And I think necessary is the thing we have to be realistic about. And for us to think that we can continue to do what TV has done for the last 50 years, nothing's gonna change and the business is gonna get better, it's just completely unrealistic thinking. And so I don't know that what Adam [Symson] and Scripps has done is perfect.
I don't know that it's the ultimate solution. It's a bold step, I believe, in the right direction when you think about what they put behind it, how they structured it. They're attempting to change the way that they're producing and distributing news with how consumers are consuming today. And, we always have to put the customer first.
We have to think about what's the end product and who's gonna be consuming this, and are we gonna be reaching them when and where they want it, right?
Tim Hanlon: And you have to give them a whole boatload of credit. This has been an experiment that's been kinda going on in, I think, the Tallahassee market for a little while.
And I think frankly it's probably a little misunderstood as well. And I'm not trying to apologize for any of it, but I'm saying I think there was a sort of a lot of people just glance at the headlines and think, oh, what this is, but maybe you can describe sort of the dynamic behind this.
In essence, it became, at least in my mind, more of a stream first kind of mentality, which is almost an upside down approach. And he, Adam even said this, I think, in some of his posts and stuff where the television linear thing may not necessarily be the first and foremost anchor, if you will, of how the news gets produced and delivered, and assuming how consumers are changing their behaviors, even the first place that they go for this local news.
Tom Sly: Yeah. I think the simplest way to think about this, Tim, is to think about yourself, think about your day, and think about how you receive news. And you may watch a little in the morning, and then you may watch a little in the evening. Most people don't watch the noon news much anymore these days.
But all throughout the day, you're consuming on your mobile device, and you've got updates coming to you throughout the entire day, from industry, from lifestyle, both from world news and local news and so on. And so the idea is, Adam referenced it as reverse broadcasting, and I wanna start by saying I did not have a conversation with Adam.
Actually, I can say he texted me after I published it and said, "Hey, thanks for taking a few barbs for me." But while I'm a former Scripps team member and Adam remains a friend, I was looking at this objectively. And I just wanted to say as I think about this from my own mind, the way I consume news and the way I know that audiences are consuming news today, that this makes sense.
So reverse broadcasting means the broadcast is no longer the kingpin. It's no longer what you center everything around. Today, it's around creating content and streams throughout the day, news updates on all platforms and devices. And what occurs at the 5:00 or 6:00, at the 11:00, at noon, and at the morning news is what's there in the stream or what's there in the pipeline at that time.
And it's distributed across all devices to all audiences, no matter where they choose to consume content. Does that make sense?
Tim Hanlon: Yeah. It's like a news wheel kinda thing. In some respects it hearkens back a little to the old headline news, although that was a prepackaged 30-minute thing. But you knew that you were getting whatever was essentially most recent, if you will, in the, quote-unquote, "feed," right? And absolutely that's a different dynamic to then producing for a broadcast a few hours from now that will be consumed only in one way.
Tom Sly: Yeah, and it sounds like, again, just based on Adam's couple interviews I've read and then, his announcement, that technology is doing a lot of the updating along the way.
And it used to be, you put a package together and it's clean and neat, and it's put together at 3:00 in the afternoon, and it's tucked in. And yet there may be something that happens between now and then, but the producer doesn't have time to re-edit and do all that.
And perhaps the anchor would do a small update or something like that. I think this sounds like it's much more on the go, much more on the fly. It's produced, it's released. And in my column, I mentioned that I can tell you during my time at Scripps, I remember getting into discussions about news directors and GMs that did not want to release news updates on a big breaking story that was occurring locally, other than to say, “Big story. Tune in tonight at 6:00." And they didn't want it to be broken on the website or a mobile app or whatever else, on a push alert. And I think that was a failure, honestly, of broadcast television to stay relevant. And we've all lived through that evolution of going into the digital era, so to speak, and I think it always takes a traditional media, the newsrooms, and the program directors and so on longer to evolve.
Tim Hanlon: Isn't that, though, the tyranny of the traditional television business model, which is historically focused, especially in the local front, on quote-unquote ratings, whatever those are anymore, right? Yeah. We'll put that to the side. But in essence, it's no different than, say, a New York Times journalist or two saving some juicy quotes from the Trump Administration that would be front-page news for their book coming out a few months later, right?
So yeah I guess the issue really is there are incentives, right? The incentives of at least the legacy television business on the local level is ratings, and ratings usually pop when local news can outpace the other station's local news. And breaking a story perhaps before another station can ensure not only immediate ratings, but also maybe longer term because you could trust that station more for all the breaking news.
Isn't that kind of really the issue there is it's the incentive structure of the business to do so?
Tom Sly: Yeah, I think it's incentives, but I also think it's traditional mindset. I think it's honestly a little bit of arrogance. I think the industry thinks that it's indestructible and we're not gonna be newspaper, we're not gonna be radio.
I remember, again, running a cluster of 11 stations in Salt Lake City, and we started asking our news team, our journalists, to start creating content for the web. And as they wrote their stories, which were typically in a fashion that, in the way that they would read it, it wasn't really structured for print.
We asked them if they could also repurpose it in print and put it online. And my news director resigned, and this was at a time when you could go get a job at AOL and as a receptionist, and they'd give you a brand-new Porsche or something. Remember the 1999, 2000 days of the internet bubble.
And so I understood a little bit, and I helped him. I helped him and the team understand this is an evolution, helping us all prepare for the evolution, and I think that's what traditional media has failed to do along the way. He resigned and came begging back two years later for his job, and it was already filled.
And he said, "I finally understand." And so I think that is what we have to see is there's a huge evolutionary and transitional moment going on. And quite frankly, it's been going on for a long time. We in the industry have failed to acknowledge it, and it's time to get our proverbial shit together.
Tim Hanlon: And I think that's a fair statement on a number of different levels. But I think it's also, again, the dynamic of that is also, I think you said the word inertia, or at least I'll paraphrase. There's also sort of the institutional dynamic of how stations have been run over the years, right?
And I think from a cynical perspective which I'm sure is the majority of the negative comments that you've gotten from this, but this is a cut first strategy, where all we're doing is cutting down resources that should be theoretically invested in more to cover local news.
And that's a fair statement, especially when you're in the midst of it and maybe you're a few years into your career. But I think it's also a dynamic of this, and tell me if I'm misguided on this. Some of this is how people have been trained, say in college or as a career, to be in the news gathering business, a lot of which is still predicated on very separate skill sets and a business model of television for per se, that is on anchors, and local markets, and working your way up, and all get to the network and all that kind of stuff. All that stuff when, I think once these kids get out of this, out of school and recognize not only can they not make a whole lot of money in their early days, but that kind of model doesn't exist anymore for them in terms of opportunities.
Tom Sly: Yeah. I think you're so right there.
Ironically, I had a niece at Northwestern probably 15 years ago, and she called me and said, "I wanna be a news anchor. I wanna be a major market news anchor or a national network news anchor." And I told her, "Focus on your own personal brand." I said, "I would not focus that way." And she actually left journalism school because of that.
So I hated that, and she's doing fantastic, actually, in a totally different industry now. But I do think that creators have proven to us that you don't need a tower, you don't need a signal. You need to have content that resonates with an audience. It can be very niche but still be huge, like Johnny Harris or some of these other news creators out there.
Aaron Parnas, a young guy, has an interesting following on Instagram, TikTok, X, and whatever else. Today, the antenna, and I said in my column, it's gonna be probably less in the future about television and more about local news. And so who is gonna deliver it with the trust and credibility, and also with the speed, the accuracy, and in the right place in the future?
And I think that's really what Scripps is attempting to do.
Tim Hanlon: And we can round the corner on this one, right? So if that indeed is the case, and the evolution, and the future, and where talent needs to come from with that dynamic in mind, wouldn't then the solve for this or the nourishment for making that local news better, stronger, faster, and the monetization catch up, if you will, right?
Because local stations, and local station groups, and the networks know and rely on the traditional models of selling advertising and obviously retrans, okay? So put retrans on the side for a second, but when it comes to advertising or further financing, if you will, all these other forms of delivery that those news directors of yore would chafe at, breaking something on a feed or a newsletter or this kind of stuff, it sounds to me like it requires a new approach to, shall we call it multifaceted revenue generation that doesn’t replace local broadcasting, but just supplements it and becomes a different business versus just the ad sales for linear television, which dominates today still.
Tom Sly: Yeah. Think about it. More dollars are moving towards streaming, right? Streaming content, streaming video content today. That's where the growth is. It's not in broadcast TV. And so when you think about it, if I'm creating more content on those platforms, that's another opportunity to monetize.
And at Scripps, I can't remember when we started launching. It was with Newsy, which is now Scripps News, that we recognized the opportunity to take that, which was a mobile and tablet-based news service, if you will, news brand, and transition it into CTV in the early days of CTV. Through that, we learned that we could make some money, and we were also attracting audiences, and shifted the local news brands there, too.
So Scripps was an early adopter of CTV for the news brands. And still I would guess monetizes probably better than most of their peers because they've been at it longer and have a great programmatic team. So with that, if you listen to the Scripps earnings call, and I listen to all the publicly traded companies' earninga calls, probably like you do, at the end of each quarter.
They talk about 24% growth, 40% growth in their CTV business. And so I know a lot of that, the networks do quite well there, too, but the locals do as well. So that's what they're doing. They're putting it in different places, and they're figuring out how to monetize it either programmatically or also with direct sales.
Tim Hanlon: Final big question here. What do you think it'll take for local broadcasters, local broadcast television groups, and the television industry in total to kind of truly reform, reboot, reconstruct, reconfigure what a local, I wouldn't even say a television station, and you say this more elegantly in your column, a television news organization is, a local media company, right? A redefinition of that. Yeah. What do you think it's gonna take versus all the sort of onesie, twosie things that are going now with an M&A here and a regulatory thing there, and a cut here, and layoffs over there. Those are all just little deaths by cuts, right?
Yeah. What do you think it's gonna take to, if anything, is there a, I don't wanna call it a black swan, but some kind of major big bangs that sort of happens here that will ultimately make everybody understand where it's gonna go? Or, how do you envision this happening? Is it ever gonna evolve, or is it too late to evolve, and maybe an outsider kinda needs to show the way?
Tom Sly: I don't know. You know what? I know personally, I still see a need for local news in my life. I enjoy it, and I love to be informed. I love to know what's going on. I love to be curious, and I love to have my curiosity answered. So to me, and I think there's enough people out there that do care about local. I also think local sports, that's where passion, loyalties come through, and so on. I think when a station aligns themself with that. So I really think that anchors are gonna be news and sports. And I think we have to figure out, though, as an industry, what resonates. And I'm not sure that it always has to be the three-alarm fire, the officer-involved shooting, the city council meeting.
Can a story on maybe just a new restaurant that opened in town that's doing something that's really unique and different. Feel-good stories typically, I watch David Muir, my wife and I do a lot of nights in ABC News, and David typically ends with a positive story. And I think we can all use more positivity in our lives.
And so if the news becomes a place that lifts us instead of depresses us or worries us and puts us in fear, is maybe that a better approach? And so I think the appetite for storytelling is different today than it was in the Walter Cronkite days, right? And so I think that news organizations need to look at that.
And I know they use Magid and lots of other research. I just don't think it's quite there yet. But I do think there's opportunity. These local people that are telling stories in our markets are connected to the community, and if they can help connect us to them, then they win.
Tim Hanlon: And one final spin that I'll throw out there, and maybe you can respond to this.
So that all feels like it's not this evolution or revolution or change or whatever is not probably gonna come from a top-down kind of mindset, and templatized and downstream, but the reverse, right? Where it comes from the ground up. And arguably, you mentioned it before, the barrier to entry to do hyperlocal anything is very low now with streaming and mobile devices and phones, and all that kinda stuff. And I guess my point is number one, there's a harnessing there of that energy. Some, by the way, people used to be employed in these very places. But that almost feels like for now there's a friction there between, "Oh, that's not local news per se," versus the traditional gatekeepers that I don't know, in some cases maybe wanna delay that inevitability?
Tom Sly: Yeah. I think that's an interesting comment, and you're right. But does news and information, does a brand on all platforms that informs me about what's happening in my community, always just have to tell me about the police stories? And so I don't think so. I think it's important for us to understand some of those things, especially those that do put some risk in our lives, but I think it's also about the people that are really making a difference in the community, that are helping us change and evolve the community.
Concerns and risks and all that are great, but let's not just focus on all the dark side. And I think people, especially with the news fatigue that's going on with the administration and everything right now, the Straits of Hormuz, all that around the war, I think people are looking for something more uplifting and different.
Yeah, that's all.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah, and maybe a role for, quote-unquote, local media to expertly curate that with an editorial expertise, right? But it basically looks to smaller reporter kinda scenarios to find those more uplifting stories, and frankly, relevant, right? Yeah. And maybe increases the relevance of it's not just all crime out there.
There's a whole lot of good stuff. Oh, and by the way, here's something that you might encounter during the course of your day today. Yeah. That kind of stuff.
Tom Sly: Absolutely. And it's gonna be on all platforms. They gotta figure out how to monetize that. They gotta figure out how to bring advertisers to that and sponsors in a way that probably looks different than what we've done in the past.
One of the things I've said in my column several times is I look at these creators, and they're doing AG1 and BetterHelp and all that, and can't we do that in the news? We can. If the statement is there, this is an advertiser, this is a sponsor I think we have to figure that out because, quite frankly, that's where a lot of dollars are going today.
And journalists are creators, too, right? And I've actually reached out to a couple of creator sponsors and tried to say, "Hey, I'd love to talk to you about using perhaps local news as a creator," and they all shun me because it's not some person standing on the street somewhere with an iPhone or a, whatever, cheap camera, but doing a great story that looks a lot different, a lot less produced.
Tim Hanlon: It seems like there's some very quality dialogue that could happen to maybe make some of this future stuff happen without maybe the traditional business models breathing down the neck. The time is short to do this, but you wonder if those two sort of the classic versus the today can maybe coexist and co-create, if you will, in a model that maybe is helpful for both.
Tom Sly: Yeah. And you mentioned the consolidation, deregulation, and my hope is I'm the eternal optimist with the glass always being three-quarters full, my hope is that broadcast TV doesn't go down the same path that radio did. And we can look back at newspapers, which had that arrogance and didn't believe that the online was gonna take their bread away, and radio went just the wrong way, and there were a couple things that happened in 2008, 2009 that didn't help much either.
But broadcast TV, we have to look back and say the product's gotta stay local and relevant, and we have to continue to invest in it. And then we have to think differently about how we're gonna monetize it. And doing the same way we've done it in the past isn't gonna work. And there's so many other examples out there today, like I mentioned, creator is one example.
There's so many other examples of ways that people are monetizing content and bringing value to audiences and advertisers. We gotta get there.
Tim Hanlon: My thanks to Tom, and let's see. You can check out his column that we were nibbling around in this conversation on tvnewscheck.com, and it is called “In Scripps' Refounding: A Paradigm Shift to Consumer Centricity.” Again, that's on tvnewscheck.com, and Tom usually has a column out on that esteemed website every Monday or so.
So make sure that you check him out there. You can also find Tom Sly, S-L-Y, that's his last name and how it's spelled, on LinkedIn, or you can send him an email directly for conjecture and potentially, he says, some consultative goodness, perhaps as you might be thinking. And that email address is tom@mediainno.com. Media as M-E-D-I-A, of course. Inno as I-N-N-O. Tom@mediainno.com. All right, our thanks, of course, to the great folks at TVREV. Mel Hourigan, of course. Jessika Walsten and Jason Damata. Mike Gasbara too, in that brain trust. We appreciate all of their help and support through this show. We thank our friends at Madhive for their sponsorship and continued support of this show, as well as our pal Jerry Payne whoss audio excellence we rely upon each and every week as we do this week too.
So thank you, kind sir. And thanks for listening. Tell your friends, please. And thanks for all the comments and the attaboys and attagirls. We appreciate it. More to come next week. Take care, and we'll see you soon here In the Vicinity.
