The Death Of The Monoculture — And What Comes Next For Local Media

What happens when the shared media experiences that once connected entire communities disappear?

On the latest episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon sits down with TVREV Co-Founder and Senior Analyst Alan Wolk to discuss his theory of "feudal media"—a world where audiences no longer gather around a handful of dominant platforms, but instead live inside thousands of personalized content bubbles.

The conversation explores what that fragmentation means for local broadcasters, why YouTube may be becoming the new gateway to local information, how AI could transform content discovery and curation, and whether traditional local media companies are moving fast enough to remain relevant in a streaming-first world.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tim Hanlon: Welcome again, everybody. How are you? My name is Tim Hanlon, and yes, you are In the Vicinity once again this week. We appreciate you stopping by and joining the conversation as we try to delve, as we do on a weekly basis, into what's going on in the realms of media in relation to local. And there's so many changes and opportunities extant in that space.

We just thought that a podcast devoted to what's going on in local media is a worthwhile pursuit, and we are tickled that you have chosen to spend some time with us once again this week as we go deeper into said topic. This week, we're excited to be joined by the inimitable Alan Wolk. He is the co-founder and senior analyst at TVREV.

You will probably have seen him at a conference nearby throughout the world. Alan, I like to call him sort of the Pied Piper of streaming, television and video, and all things. He's the guy who coined the term FAST channel, free ad-supported television, and has a wealth of knowledge and opinion about what the heck is happening in television/video and all things related.

And honored to have him for the conversation this week as we try to tap his expertise and drag him into the specific world of local as it pertains to such. And here's our chat. Please, as always, enjoy.

Over the place, all over the world, jetting here and there, talking about how streaming and all kinds of other media forms are changing to the point where it's almost indistinguishable. What's some of the most current stuff that you're out there getting the most interest in your speaking engagements and conversational environments?

Alan Wolk: Yeah, so it's actually the thing which is actually gonna become a book in the fall, I've been in the process of writing it, is this notion of the death of the monoculture and the rise of feudal media. Now, what is feudal media? It is the sort of fracturing of all of our various media into these tiny, disconnected bubbles of different interests which really don't have much interaction with each other.

Even in this week's Week in Review, I was talking about how you can see with 60 Minutes, what you can see with YouTube and the movies, is that institutions that once had broad cultural reach just don't anymore, that they're limited to this small group of people who are fans.

It's not like they're nothing, but they're not these big things that they used to be. And the genesis of this is that if you look at the monoculture, and Tim, of all people that I know, you will appreciate this probably more than anyone. The monoculture was a lot like ancient Rome. If you think of it, everybody spoke Latin, there's a standard system of weights and measures, the cities all look the same.

There were a number of historians and scientists that everybody agreed were the real deal. And then it all just broke apart, and suddenly people were in these little feudal kingdoms. There were a couple of monasteries here and there where knowledge was kept, but by and large, it fell into superstition.

People were not very aware of what was going on in the next little kingdom over, let alone one, hundreds of miles away. And it really feels that's where we are now, that people live in these little bubbles on TikTok and Instagram and Substack and streaming and linear TV too, but we've lost that single source of anything. Single source of truth. People, whether it's a brand or a politician, people say "why don't you just run a commercial about it?" Where are you gonna run it so that it will hit everybody? You can't, that doesn't exist anymore, and it's changed the world in so many ways from, really can't have new mega brands, mega stars.

I always use the example that your grandmother might not have been able to name a song Madonna sang, but she knew who Madonna was, "Oh, that singer." You don't have anyone like that anymore. People are just like, "Who? Who? Who is that?" Even Zoomers are like, "Oh, there's someone in another bubble and I have no idea who they are."

Tim Hanlon: The breakup of the Roman Empire. I thought you were gonna go further back. I thought you were gonna go to the Tower of Babel in Genesis. But that's maybe also the true origins of the splitting of languages and stuff. That's exceedingly relevant.

Because it almost seems like a lot of media seems to have, how can I put this, retroactively or maybe defensively gone to a curation kind of model where those bits and pieces, those little unshared stories and throughputs are almost now being stitched back together by a new generation, a new cadre of intermediary that is listening for those signals and trying to maybe thread them together again where they used to be aggregated just because of the nature of the distribution model. 

Alan Wolk: 100%. You've got things winding up on streaming platforms because people are aggregating different things.

And yeah, it would be because there is that time element that's been taken out. It's not oh, we're all sitting down at 7:00 to watch TV for the night. It's people catch things as they can, and if somebody can get a bunch of stuff together that they're interested in, that's all the better.

Tim Hanlon: So let's move that over to another one of your sort of current passion stories is around YouTube and how it's essentially not only eating television, but probably maybe already has. And in television, quote unquote, I think there's no better example of what you just described than what YouTube offers, and it even does the job of trying to curate stuff based on things it thinks it knows about you and probably pretty scarily good at it, too.

Alan Wolk: Yeah, 100%. YouTube, and YouTube has the equivalent of linear channels. If you just let the algorithm feed you the next video, then how is that different really than a linear channel? But it does curate everything. One of the interesting questions that, and I don't know the answer and I don't think anybody does, is with podcasts on YouTube, it has become a big thing.

More people are watching/listening to podcasts on YouTube than on Spotify or Apple Music. And the question is are they doing that because they're watching them? Or is it just that the YouTube interface is easier and that's where all their other media is, so they just put it on there and then listen to it?

Or a little bit of both, and we don't know. But that's the sort of thing where they're able to get everything on there in a way that the other media, especially as we moved into streaming, everybody kinda went like that. They put their arm over their paper so you couldn't see what their data was, and it just became really hard to aggregate things. 

Tim Hanlon: Let's translate that a bit though to the world of local media, which is the want around here on this little silly show.

Some of this also has to do with the methods of distribution and the, if you will, the containers of media. Some of which you alluded to before. I think in the television realm until the 1970s when cable came along, and certainly now in the firmly post-cable, mostly streaming kind of first world we live in now, the idea of a local, limited, scarce box that delivers all things local in a handful of channels is so completely blown apart now that it's only more magnified perhaps from when you look at it through the lens of local media, right?

Alan Wolk: Oh, very much. And the thing about YouTube is because YouTube is a sort of repository of everything, that you can get everything local in there. In other words, if you want to, and you can set up and the algorithm will start to recognize it, you get your local sports feeds. And it may not be from a linear TV source.

It may be even the high school's own recording of their game, is on there. And your weather, and the local news stories, and, there's all different types of people reporting on that now. And suddenly it's all, because you're not watching it, time has been taken out of the equation.

You're not watching it in any sort of linear fashion in the way that everyone else in the world is. You are watching it on your own linear schedule. 

Tim Hanlon: The scarcity of distribution, the scarcity of delivery, the timing of it is gone. But also frankly, the curator used to be the editorial voice of God, so to speak when it comes to news and information.

Yeah. Was two, three or four, depending on the market, maybe five, voices, if you will, that were delivering those things. Now, either those aren't viewed as much anymore because linear television has gone essentially by the wayside, especially with younger audiences. And even if they are, they're so splintered and delivered in streaming-first kind of environments that it’s very hard to find cohesive groups of people who have heard the same piece of information, news narratively delivered, and can even agree upon maybe what the facts are of these stories.

Alan Wolk: That's a huge thing. That's another thing that I've been focusing on, is the blurring of news and opinion, which starts with all of the major newspapers. If you think about it, before the internet, the op-ed and the editorial was at the back of the first section of the newspaper, and you had to go search it out.

You had to be somebody who was interested in that kind of thing to actually find... to stumble upon it. But then when they went online, they started putting their opinion stories right next to the news stories on the home page. It was pretty hard to distinguish which was which. At the same time, cable news, whether it was CNN, Fox, MSNBC, their big shows were talk shows, which, again, were opinion shows.

And where even more intelligent people get their news is from Substacks now, which are also opinion. They're not held to the news standards. So all of that is just blurred. And there is stuff in local news that is opinion, and there's also stuff that is a fact.

The Memorial Day Parade is starting at 3:00 PM at Main and Elm Street, and somebody needs to know that. And to your point there's often so many different POVs on things, beyond the purely factual, and it's really hard to know, and you wind up triangulating, which is the other beautiful thing about YouTube, is that you can say, "Okay these guys say this, the other guys say that, the third one says this," and somewhere in between that is what's really happening.

Tim Hanlon: Thinking about how traditional local media entities, especially those in the television realm here in the United States, it seems like they're kinda just continuing to try to clap with, now with one hand. They do put their newscasts, or at least clips from their newscasts, onto YouTube for further viewing to the extent that there's an audience after the fact that will be searching them out on YouTube.

Maybe not. They're going through the motions, I would say in doing linear fast channels, which ostensibly is their station's brand and simulcast newscast with the linear TV, certainly rebroadcasts of those newscasts. And depending on the station group you talk to, who knows what else fills the rest of that day on the stream.

It just feels half-hearted, this approach to streaming from local broadcasters who frankly have seen all their audience kind of, especially younger ones, go in the streaming-first direction. 

Alan Wolk: Yeah. It's a tough play for them. They're trying not to cannibalize their existing base, because there are still plenty of people who do watch local, local TV live and linear, while still doing something that the younger audiences are going to want to see at a time when that style of delivery, when pure news is seemingly out of favor, when an unbiased fair source is not what people are looking for.

They're looking for strong opinions, and a lot of them don't realize why it's even different, why news is better. 

Tim Hanlon: And to your point earlier, you mentioned Substack and Ghost and a few others. Beehiiv. These platforms are not now only just newsletters or, hyper blogs so to speak, but they're also now incorporating or trying to incorporate audio via podcast kind of environments, live streaming, and all these kinds of things where it's almost like there's a rewiring of perhaps how local news can get put together.

You don't necessarily need the department store model of a local TV station. It almost feels to me like the independent pieces of those or sections, like you mentioned with the newspaper, are now almost out there in their own ways and could be arguably stitched back together anew and not necessarily from the top down with a brand necessarily that gets in the way.

Alan Wolk: Yeah. I think there's definitely the possibility for people who want to understand that somebody could come in and say, "Hey, we're gonna be the source of all of this local news," all stuff, sports, weather, news, all politics any of this, "and we're gonna give it to you in a way that is useful to you," and it will find an audience.

And again, it will be this, like a lot of this sort of what we've been calling feudal media, like a bubble of people who are really into this, and this is their thing, and they're passionate about it, and it can be a very good thing for advertisers. If you're the person who advertises into this bubble, then you're their guy, and then they'll be very loyal. 

Tim Hanlon: To me, it's interesting, especially on the local news front.

The barriers to entry of communication generally are so low. And the ability for anybody to be their own printing press or TV studio or radio station in digital means it doesn't take much effort to kinda get that going. Now, the bad news, of course, is that anybody can do it, right?

The good news, though, is that the quality hopefully will rise to the top. But I guess the question in there is, how do local audiences ... it seems like a lot of work to replicate what used to be a relatively easy solution, i.e., watching a half-hour local news broadcast, assuming that they were the curators and the editorial integrity quality deliverers of such information, and have to now piece all that stuff together, and really have to put a fine magnifying glass on all these different sources to individually assess whether these are legit or you can trust these sources.

How do we fix that potential problem of it just seems like a lot of work now to get the same news that we used to get relatively easily 10, 20 years ago, just through the linear format? 

Alan Wolk: Oh, that's a huge problem for everybody, in terms of how to cobble all this together and find the sources that you trust.

I think there's an opportunity for somebody to come in and be the curator of this, of say, "Hey, we've actually done the work, and here's a bunch of sources, and we've cobbled it all together for you. Here's a one-stop shop where you can see all the stuff that makes sense."

Because it is otherwise, I think people just give up, and they're like, "Yeah, it's just not worth me trying to find it," or if some of it's word of mouth, then they find something. But we've made it really difficult for consumers. We see that you and I have talked about this with sports, where I was doing something with TiVo the other day, and they were saying that they're finding people are actually resubscribing to cable.

Not a ton of people, but sports fans, especially during the season, are just like, "It's way too difficult for me to find all the games. I'll just get a cable package, and then I know where everything is." 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah it feels like there's a role for a newly intelligent aggregation and curation layer that does some of that sifting, sorting, that sourcing for you.

Perhaps AI has a role to play in some of this, based on your interests as well as potentially learning language models that look for various levels of quality, quote-unquote, as defined by the viewer. 

Alan Wolk: Oh, I definitely think AI is factoring in a big way into discovery and discoverability too.

In other words, if I'm looking for something to watch, it's an interactive medium. I can say, "Okay, you showed me these three movies. Why? Why did you think I would like them?" And it'll give you an answer, which sort of bridges that trust gap? When a friend tells you something, you're like, "Okay, I kinda get why they're telling me that I might like this."

I can ask them. But when a recommendation engine would just throw it in front of you, you're like “There's not enough information here for me to know why you think I would like this." And I think that AI can have that interactivity to say, "Hey, what what type of news do you want? What sports do you like? Did you know we went through this one? What did you think of it?" And it does it in a way that it's not on you to go through, because that was the problem with a lot of the older ones. It was like you had to go in and rate everything, and it was just, who had time for that?

So now that it can actually be proactive, is the word I was actually trying to think of, and that could be a huge thing. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, look, and I think the irony is that the diaspora of journalists and videographers and people who are now feeling unencumbered now that they've been, disposed of by their media employers in the past and that kind of stuff. Yeah. Now it's in many respects it's not only trying to own their own story and their own narrative and their own publishing and getting that out there but maybe frankly trying to do so with AI in mind so that they do get, if you will, picked up and resourced. 

Alan Wolk: You probably get these, too. These sort of pitches for companies that are basically, they have different letters for it, but it's basically like SEO for AI, right? How do you optimize websites and content so that the AI engines will pick it up, and clearly someone will figure that out soon enough, and some of them probably have, and then it just becomes, in the same way, like “How do you optimize your news, your sports, even your ads, for something that an AI engine will pick up first? 

Tim Hanlon: All right. You're all over the world, and you're the Pied Piper of streaming TV and all things related to it.

What would you do, what could you do, what have you done with conversations in and around the television industry, in particular local TV stations and the like? I don't wanna put you on the spot per se, but if you had the opportunity to meet with some of them to help them understand where their current product is and perhaps where their products, plural perhaps, need to go in the face of what is clearly a stream-first kind of world today, what would you advise them to do or consider or to think about doing to evolve what they have or is it too late?

Alan Wolk: It's not ... In much of the world, the local stations are not commercial? They're not competitive. I was recently in Spain, and they have very strong local TV, especially in the local languages, whether it's Galician or Catalano, but there's one station, right? It's the government station that was the public broadcast, that's for that region, and they still have some relevance.

In other words, they've made strides into getting their stuff on streaming, but it's very much "Okay, here, this is our station," as opposed to one of five stations as we have in the U.S. and in plenty of other markets. I think local TV was slow getting onto the streaming bandwagon, and I think everybody in the media industry has been slow figuring out just this fragmentation, like how quickly it happened.

The way I always describe it to people, is 30 years ago, when the president gave the State of the Union Address, you might not have cared about politics in the least, but you went to turn on Friends, and they're like, "Oh, it's preempted tonight because of the State of the Union Address."

You had some idea that it was happening even if you had no interest in watching it or caring what happened.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, you’d maybe need to mention because it was interrupted. 

Alan Wolk: So you knew you had this. But now if you're getting your entertainment from TikTok and Instagram, you'd have no idea that this happened.

And so it's like how do you get in front of people who don't even know that the things that you are talking about are happening? And a lot of that is, it's more work. It's promoting it on social platforms. It's getting the right influencers in there.

It's creating local influencers. It's working with, whether it's governments overseas, and just making people aware you can find this. And then, which is a much tougher challenge, how do you get people to be aware that people who do this for a living are more trustworthy than somebody who just decided that, hey, I'm gonna be a news influencer? And that's a tough thing.

Tim Hanlon: I guess my last question on this, and then I wanna let you promote the book et cetera, is how much creative destruction are we in for. How much do you think local TV stations, their news brands, their affiliated relationships with broadcast networks, that traditional model, how much do you think of that can and will survive, and how much do you think is replaced by more independent journalistic entrepreneurial types that literally create their own little worlds and somehow get re-aggregated, either by technology or acquisition or both?

Alan Wolk: Yeah, I think it's a slow process. The thing I always say about TV, it's like a slow-leaking balloon, right? If you look at even, like AOL, which was synonymous with the early aughts it's still a viable business. It's slowly losing people every year, but it hasn't gone belly up.

And I think local TV is on that path, where it will slowly lose viewers every year. It's not growing. It may stay stable for a couple of years. And then that creates the opportunity, like you said, for someone new to come in and start aggregating stuff, for somebody to look at it in a different way.

I think AI is very relevant in that, because a lot of the sort of basics, what I was saying before, the parade starts at 3:00 stuff, you can have an AI pull all that together and maybe even read it. Create a virtual news anchor, and then that creates a whole other thing.

In 10 years, is it the sort of thing where you will have your own virtual news anchor who will pull from sources and read it to you? And that's how it all lives on? I just think we're in a time of incredible flux right now, and it's really hard to know for sure where everything's going.

I think you just need to constantly, I always call it riding the wave, just be aware that the ground is moving under you, and just always be looking around and “Hey, what's going on? What's next?" And don't get too comfortable with anything. 

Tim Hanlon: And also trying to figure out more aggressively what those potential business models might look like.

I think that the biggest knock on traditional media, local media in particular, is they know the current model, slowly dissipating as it might be but they know how to monetize that at least and manage that decline. What they don't know necessarily is how do we go to market with all of these new ideas?

That almost feels to me like there's an abandonment or a fear of doing that, and that arguably requires some different kind of thinking in order to make that happen. 

Alan Wolk: Oh, very much. Something you're very well aware of too is that there's all these companies now that are doing sort of AI video production.

If you're a small, medium business, the idea is to steal business away from Facebook, and a mom-and-pop shop can go and use one of these programs and make their own TV commercial. And I've been surprised that the local broadcasters haven't just grabbed that and run with it, because you know the people.

You can get them on TV and have them do things and get their friends, and it's that sort of thing where I think people are just afraid. People are afraid of shaking things up, afraid to recognize just how much things have shifted until it's too late.

Tim Hanlon: It's too late, sadly. And that's where the mergers and acquisitions stuff, and the private equity thing, and all that kind of stuff even clouds that. Because there's business to be gently brought down, if you will line management, and you worry about the issues that are more existential later, or maybe you just don't care after you've sold.

Yeah. And that's, I believe that's where we see local television TV stations in the linear television business right now, that somehow it may be too late for certain players, and that's what I fear. 

Alan Wolk: No, I agree. And then also, to the point I was making about Europe and just the one broadcaster, is there room outside of say a major market like Chicago or Los Angeles, is there room for three or four different flavors, or is it just gonna be one?

Or maybe a couple. And, and can they say what's the business model for that? How do you make money if you're one of three players, in Des Moines, Iowa? 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Shared services and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I'd love to have you back at some point, but until then I want you to give us more info on the book, when you think that's coming out. And, besides that, what other issues are burning right now in your head that people should be paying attention to that are taking up a lot of your time? 

Alan Wolk: Yeah, so the book is due out in September, probably mid-September, around or after IBC. Working towards that date. So that's, I'm pretty excited about that, and there'll be updates on TVREV about that as we go. 

I'm gonna be at the StreamTV Show next week. June 16 we're doing the TVREV Summit out there, so that's pretty exciting. It's gonna be a great show overall so I'll promote that on the air.

And our sponsors, Madhive, will be there too, so look for them. And in terms of the other things that are keeping me up is how does, this is more existential, is how does Hollywood keep the best people when the system that they had was based around linear TV where you almost had a full-time job if you were working on a network TV series that ran for 25 episodes?

And people were able to lead not easy lives necessarily, but they were able to go away for Thanksgiving and know that they had Christmas off and all that. And now yes, streaming shows pay more, but there's fewer opportunities.

It's not very steady. And how do you prevent the best people from leaving, or does that matter? In other words are they gonna be going and doing AI production and all that and, having grown up in this sense of the creator economy and, make yourself famous via YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and then go on.

And how does all that play out? Because I think that's fascinating in terms of what we're actually putting on these TV sets, networks and streamers and all that. So we'll see.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, they’ve been held a little bit hostage to their traditional methods of distribution and have been lagging in terms of embracing more innovation and/or opportunities to fail. So conservative in the process, right? Whereas some of these other places. And frankly, I think maybe some of these people are also getting shaken loose involuntarily with job cuts. And who all of a sudden now have to if you will, hustle their way, but then also find that for a number of people of certain ages find that to be scary and perhaps depressing.

Once they get over that fact, it's almost like a liberation feeling, right? Because everything's possible, and there are so many others out there organically or in the same boat, right? They recognize that there are so many tools that can do so many of those things, maybe less expensively, more dynamically, and more creatively than they ever thought possible because they were blinded by the boxes that they were stuck in big corporate.

Alan Wolk: Yeah. No, 100%. And the other piece I wondered too is, the kids who are very good at Instagram and TikTok and are able to amass millions of followers. Are those people who 20 years ago would've been advertising copywriters? Would they have been TV writers, movie writers?

Where do they fit in? I think it's a little bit of the above, but how do we get back to that place where the people who have creative impulses go? Because there will always be people with creative impulses, and how do you just enable them?

Tim Hanlon: Let's hope so. Yes, we both have college-age children looking for their first jobs and their career paths and stuff, and it's tough. Yeah, because creatively oriented in that and historically where those places might be to go. As people are leaving those places, again, most of, many of them, involuntarily, I think that's the biggest job that parents like us and others generally in the business have to do, is to help convince kids that there are places for those creative things to be taken advantage of. I just hope that they find themselves a little bit more quickly, I think, for our kids' sake.

Alan Wolk: Yes. I agree.

Tim Hanlon: We'll put a little push pin into the conversation right there. Thank you to Alan, and you can look for him on the conference circuit most immediately next week at the StreamTV Summit out there in suburban Denver. It is an event that has really become a must-attend and must-participate in if you are in the streaming television and video spaces.

And lots of stuff there. We also wanna thank our friends at TVREV generally including of course Melissa Hourigan, Jessika Walsten Jason Damata, Mike Gasbara, as well as the folks at Madhive, whose sponsorship of this conversation each week, we could not do these without them, in particular Stephanie Nerby in the marketing department there, and of course Jim Wilson, the CEO of said Madhive company.

And our friend and our pal and our chief confidant, his name is Jerry Payne. We thank him for his audio excellence once again this week in putting our collected pieces together to make it sound nice and smooth here In the Vicinity. We'll see you next week.