If Not More Local News, Then What?

One of our regular readers and long time industry colleagues (yes, that would be you Wayne) asked the pertinent question following our item here last week suggesting that local TV stations might consider the idea of doing less local news (Could Doing Less News Equal More Viewers?) While our premise was focused more on doing a fewer number of stories in a given newscast, but expanding the scope and depth of such coverage.

Wayne took from our item that we were primarily endorsing the idea of local stations producing fewer hours of news on their programming schedules, which, to be fair, we did cover as part of our original premise. He emailed to ask the obvious and intriguing follow-up question:

“What would replace all of this local news content if some of it went away?”

The reality is that there aren’t a lot of viable options to fill out the daily programming schedule in 2026. The syndication market, as in the roster of programs produced by third parties to purchase for airing on local stations during hours that the “big four” networks don’t program, is a mere shadow of itself from decades past. Daytime talk shows are an endangered species, with Kelly Clarkson, Sherri Shepherd and even Steve Wilkos (one time security sidekick of the late Jerry Springer) all ending their daily programs, in a broader pull back by NBCUniversal from the syndication market which included ending the venerable “Access Hollywood” after 30 years in production.

Local stations know, on albeit a smaller financial scale, what the networks are admitting out loud: the economics of producing original programming don’t add up to making a profit these days. Even CBS admitted as much as the reason for giving Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” its walking papers this month. Even if you doubt with reasonable skepticism the loss figures that Paramount/Skydance threw out in July of 2025 (and count us among those who do) to cancel Colbert and later, their decision to put Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” in the 11:35 Eastern late night slot is way too familiar to local TV station schedulers who played earlier seasons of the show in their overnight hours since 2006.

Apparently the CBS pick up of Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” along with the “Funny You Should Ask” show from his Entertainment Studios, gave him the confidence to drop $120 million on what’s left of the once high-flying BuzzFeed digital media company. This would be the same Byron Allen, whose group of local TV stations were recently reported to be selling off everything they could — just to stay afloat.

But back to our main story here, what killed off the marketplace where local TV stations could find high-quality programming to put on their schedule?

Hard as it may be to believe, it has been 15 years this month that Oprah Winfrey ended her daily talk show that had been a huge success for some 25 years prior, pretty much running all competitors off the air during its run. Oprah wanted to find her next fortune in owning her own cable network. OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network is still around, but underwent a major restructuring back in 2020, moving from a 50/50 joint venture of Oprah’s “Harpo Productions” with Discovery Networks to successor WarnerBros Discovery now owning 95% and Harpo controlling on 5% of shares in the joint venture. And of course, if and when Paramount/Skydance closes on its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, then OWN would become part of the David Ellison-controlled media empire.

These days, there are only four remaining shows in the syndicated space that Oprah once dominated: The Jennifer Hudson Show (WarnerBros TV), The Drew Barrymore Show (Paramount/CBS), “Tamron Hall” (Disney/ABC), and “Live with Kelly and Mark” (Disney/ABC). We’d argue that none of them are even close to being in the same league with Ms. Winfrey’s show in terms of influence and audience. The best performer is probably “Live with Kelly and Mark” which benefits from its lead out from “Good Morning America” status on many ABC affiliates across the country for the last 38 years, since it debuted as “Live with Regis (Philbin) and Kathie Lee (Gifford)”.

Of historical note, “Live with…” didn’t air on all of the ABC Owned stations at 9am until 2013, when it would replace “The Oprah Winfrey Show” at Chicago’s WLS-TV, which had been Oprah’s original station since she debuted on “AM Chicago” in 1984. Industry legend Dennis Swanson, who was then running WLS, put “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on the air a year later.

“Live with…” originated as “The Morning Show” some five years earlier on WABC-TV. It represented the pinnacle of what was once a staple of television stations in many markets, the local morning talk show. One of the giants in that space was “The Morning Exchange” which came to dominate the ratings on Cleveland, Ohio’s WEWS-TV. Starting in 1972, the show would be seen as the inspiration for ABC’s “Good Morning America” some three years later. The Morning Exchange was created by Don Perris and William F. “Win” Baker who worked at WEWS. Baker would go on to lead WJZ-TV in Baltimore, then owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting, where he would give a promising young talent her first shot as a host of a new talk show that would be called “People are Talking.”

Her name was Oprah Winfrey.

So what has nearly killed the syndicated programming business over the last twenty years? Obviously, a dearth of cultural phenomenons like Oprah, along with the end of reruns of old movies being viable for local stations (given the plethora of outlets carrying movies across the cable and streaming universe) to have the long lost two or three hour programming block, fondly remembered as “The Million Dollar Movie.” Or its late night cousins, “The Late Show” or “The Late, Late Show” long before those two productions were fronted by David Letterman and a line of hosts from the late Tom Snyder to Craig Kilborn to Craig Ferguson and finally to James Corden.

But perhaps the biggest blow to the TV program syndication model came when local TV stations began producing more hours of local news. When stations saw the formula of lower costs and more ad revenue (which they would completely control, rather than sharing a substantial portion of with syndicators) achievable by adding hours of local newscasts, the hours available for other programming inevitably began shrinking.

A few stations still produce local programming outside of news, with their own daily talk and variety shows. One such example is Hubbard Broadcasting’s KSTP-TV here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, which has produced a 90-minute program each weekday called “Twin Cities Live” for the past 18 years. (The station had produced another weekday local talk show known as “Good Company” for a dozen years prior.) In 2021, the station added “Minnesota Live” an hour-long local morning show at 9am, when the syndicated “Live with Kelly and Ryan” (Seacrest, who co-hosted before Kelly Ripa’s husband Mark Consuelos joining her on the show) moved over to Tegna’s KARE.

Both “Twin Cities Live” and “Minnesota Live” are well done television programs that are said to be profitable. They are definitely elevated from the so-called “pay to play” programs found on many local TV stations. Those shows are usually vehicles that feature a host mainly interviewing the proprietors of local businesses, who appear because they are buying advertising on the local station. They are not on the same level as local productions like “The Morning Exchange” were back in their heyday, a standard that fewer shows, such as a “Twin Cities Live” actually attain.

In other words, it certainly is possible to produce decent local TV programming other than local news, but it takes an investment of both effort and money. The ratio between those two is variable, but both are definitely needed — and are often in short supply in the leaner business models most local stations now operate under.

Which brings us back to having to answer Wayne’s original question: What would local TV stations put on the air instead of more hours of local newscasts, often repeating the same stories, ad nauseam?

Damned if we know, sir. Unless Oprah is planning on getting back in the game, maybe Byron Allen has a “BuzzFeed Unleashed” in his future plans.

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