While the health of local news ecosystems has suffered in recent years, most Americans still say they get their local news from sources they trust. And despite the financial turmoil of local newspaper sales and circulation declines, Americans view their local news outlets positively and see them as doing important work in their communities.
Local TV is also a common source of local news, though Americans are increasingly more likely to get this news digitally, either on local television websites or through apps and social media posts. This trend is a major part of the story of how the digital revolution has transformed the ways in which Americans access local news.
In the United States, most local TV news is produced by local affiliate stations of the nation’s major broadcast networks, such as ABC and CBS. These stations typically produce one or more local news bulletins per day from a local studio, and their content is often modeled on the look and feel of national network newscasts.
Local affiliates may be owned by a single corporation or by several companies working in partnership, such as Sinclair Broadcast Group. As these independent local TV news organizations have been bought and squeezed by national media conglomerates, the variety of opinion and perspective that drew viewers has flattened, and it’s harder to hear the local context that promotes a non-partisan sense of shared investment in community.