Could Doing Less News Equal More Viewers?

We’ve been thinking for much of this week (and we know that will come as a shock to some of you) about the idea that in this ever-accelerating age of what TED founder Richard Saul Wurman dubbed in his 1989 book as “Information Anxiety.” Splashed graphically across the cover, Wurman defined it as “the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.”

And that has led us to wonder whether one answer to the shaky fate of the local news business might actually be to do less.

As we were pondering this, we stumbled upon this growing online moment from the collective creators on Substack (which has been going through its own existential crisis in recent days). The moment revolving around the concept that model Substacker Emily Sundberg has captured in this nifty mathematical equation:

The Great Slowdown > The Endless Scroll

Sundberg posits the question this way: “Have you considered publishing fewer stories?” And to answer her here, yes, we have. In fact, it is a core part of our publishing strategy. We try to average a couple of articles each week, but we are driven more by the question of whether or not we believe we have something of value to deliver to you who choose to read our dispatches.

We’ve never really wanted to be a daily publication because there are already enough established outlets in the media trade press that do a solid job covering the ins and outs of each day in that space. We read them all and try to provide some in-depth analysis of the trends and milestones we see from our perspective, having toiled away in the local television “salt mines” for the past five decades.

But as the crush of formerly employed journalists has grown, the blizzard of daily writings on Substack (and its online newsletter publishing platform competitors) has increased to the point of reaching a near “white-out” condition. And as anyone who has lived in a place where Blizzard Warnings are a yearly feature can tell you, that’s when the proverbial “poop” is really “hitting the fan.”

The term “The Great Slowdown” was coined by Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer on their podcast, “Tasteland,” according to Emily Sundberg’s widely read “Feed Me” Substack. Sundberg goes on to link to coverage in the UK’s PressGazette about how Axios published 22% fewer articles in Q1 of 2026 vs the same quarter a year ago, but had a 30% bump in page views. (You should investigate each of those underlined links for the details.)

We immediately applied this theory to the local television news business, since that is our area of interest here, and we think there may be merit in considering creating less news content while simultaneously sharpening that content produced.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, local television stations that were affiliated with a network were happy to deliver perhaps three or so hours of local newscasts each weekday. But when local news moved from being a requirement to keep the federal license to broadcast to becoming a significant profit center for a station in the late 1970s (especially if you were leading the audience ratings race), it didn’t take long before the geniuses running stations and ownership groups had the inspiration to say, “Why don’t we do more of this?”

And the explosion of local news expansion got underway. First, in the early evenings, moving from one hour to two. Then perhaps three. Late-night half-hours became the odd 35-minute windows. Mornings became, well, basically a local news marathon, as Fox stations that had no two-hour network morning show loaded up on five-, six-, and even seven-hour news blocks that more resembled the Bataan Death March of repeated news stories every weekday morning.

Then the internet came along to liberate news consumers, if we can extend that metaphor just a little longer. And subsequently, local TV news viewership has been in an accelerating free fall ever since.

Of course, we have oversimplified all this for you, but the premise of asking “Is there too much local news on your local TV station?” is one worth considering. And not in the form of supporting the current push for station ownership consolidation as the “the last, best hope for the future of local journalism” mantra currently being used to justify lifting all limitations on such consolidation efforts.

One of the things that is always in the back of our minds is considering what “the next generation of TV news” might look like. (Listen, you don’t work on one thing for as long as we have and then just quit, all “cold turkey” style.) And we think we may have found a potential prototype in the most unlikely of places. One, it turns out, that has been around for a dozen years now:

OK, before you scoff at our suggestion, hear us out for a moment.

HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” is described by Wikipedia as “an American news satire late-night talk show.” You’ll note the word “news” is right there, leaving no doubt about the program’s use of current events as core to its existence. In much the same way that Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” skewers news “ripped from the headlines.” (Of course, that was where John Oliver cut his teeth as a correspondent and anchor before launching “Last Week Tonight” in 2014.)

But consider for a moment that “Last Week Tonight” features a half-hour of one person talking nearly non-stop about what’s in the news, and predominantly about one particular topic. And those topics are definitely weighty ones, ranging from the scourge of unregulated drugs being sold at gas stations and convenience stores to the fall of X/Twitter under Elon Musk into, in Oliver’s words, “a sewer of misinformation.” It was “Last Week Tonight” that eight years ago did a deep dive into the corporate mandated news coverage aired by Sinclair Broadcast Group stations.

We admit that there isn’t a single episode of the show we’ve viewed that hasn’t brought forth some fact that we weren’t aware of. The show is well researched, brilliantly written, and methodical in its storytelling. And even though we’d listen to John Oliver read a shopping list and find it amusing, the show’s satirical punch lines never fail to make us both laugh and think hard at the same time. We’ve also noticed in this season, there has been less reliance on ending each show with an outlandish bit like getting a sewage treatment plant named for him or offering a luxury RV to a Supreme Court Justice, but only if he will just step down from his lifetime appointment to the bench.

Viewing tip: If you aren’t an HBO Max subscriber, you can watch nearly all the episodes of “Last Week Tonight” right on YouTube a day or two after their Sunday premieres on HBO. (We find it interesting that the network doesn’t see making the show available on YouTube as cannibalizing its subscription audience.)

There are a few examples of some news production that feels distantly related to the formula working at “Last Week Tonight.” KUSA in Denver’s “Next with Kyle Clark” does a solid job of presenting longer form stories, and on occasion solo anchor Clark himself delivers some pithy commentary on the broadcast. But that’s just one of a small handful of examples that might be comparable.

And sure, we get that pulling together a once-a-week program that airs late on Sunday evenings, and has no mandate to come off as “fair and balanced,” is a whole lot easier than doing it on a daily deadline schedule. But the principles at work can be studied and implemented into a local TV newsroom far more easily than you might think.

The big idea is to consider whether quality over quantity can be a bigger audience draw. The venerable “60 Minutes” on CBS, still draws some of the largest weekly audience numbers on television. (At least it does until Bari Weiss has her way with it. Reports out today allege that Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is already not having her contract renewed after infamously calling out Weiss for censoring a story last fall.)

And “60 Minutes” typically tackles just three stories in each episode. (Granted that they often take months to produce each single story.)

But if anyone remembers Ted Koppel’s era of anchoring “Nightline” on ABC, you’ll know it is possible to do this kind of approach on a daily basis as well.

In 2026, the reality is that news headlines are available everywhere. Breaking news video is almost an equal commodity now. Easily accessible technology allows almost anyone to become familiar to an audience, and potentially authoritative. Whatever uniqueness local TV news once had has been eclipsed in almost every way one can think of.

So rather than just pushing the formula that worked in the past, maybe it is time for some brave soul in a decision making role in a local newsroom to consider trying a truly different approach to covering more of “what we think we should understand” by doing less of the standard “trying to be everything to everyone” approach.

A little sharper writing with maybe a bit of an attitude might not be a bad idea either.

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