Disaster planners in any organization must think and work in worst-case scenarios. They typically devise plans based on asking questions that start with “what would we do if …” and however they finish the question, the answer will be bad news.

Here are some examples appropriate to the local media industry:

  • What would we do if digital programmatic advertising disappeared?
  • What would we do if retransmission consent revenues for local TV broadcasters disappeared?
  • What would we do if referral traffic from social and search platforms disappeared?

I’m certain many of us have already asked questions like these with eyes toward possible disasters, or at least unpleasant contingencies. With secular headwinds hitting local media for years now, it feels as if life has become one big contingency plan.

I am one of those people who prefers to start from the worst-case scenario, then be pleasantly surprised when things turn out better — rather than expecting candy canes and rainbows and getting a smoking crater instead.

Yes, it is unwise to expect the blue-sky scenario every time. But you know what? My way is often wrong, too.

Starting with the worst case can suppress innovation and depress innovators and creators. Planning for a continuous downward spiral leaves too little mindshare to look for upside in the wake of big, maybe inevitable, changes that seem bad at face value.

For just a moment, let’s break out of that spiral. Let’s run through the exercise of taking those questions I just asked from a worst-case mindset, and turning them into questions that anticipate opportunities amid profound changes.

Let’s ask “what could we do?” instead of “what would we do?”

What could we do if programmatic advertising disappears?

How would it happen? We know the sunset of third-party cookies will make it much more difficult to do the kinds of audience segmentation and targeting that programmatic advertising software and networks are built to do. Google, the de facto leader in the space, proposes its Privacy Sandbox as an alternative, but that solution set is controversial. Others put forth ideas — including some aimed just at the news business — to make ad targeting viable, privacy-compliant and brand-safe. But no obvious standards have emerged.

Absent solutions that work as well as those dependent on third-party cookies have claimed, which again is controversial, marketers big and small may decide to move their ad spend to different venues, or curtail it.

What would we lose? A largely passive, highly profitable and somewhat dependable (though gradually declining) revenue stream from programmatically served ads that appear in our site inventories. Also, those who resell programmatic inventory beyond owned-and-operated properties would have to replace that product line offering.

Those losses would force media leaders to look for alternative opportunities.

What could we do? We could stop depending on systems to sell our stuff for us.

A media outlet could redesign its entire display and video ad stack, emphasizing:

  • Fewer, more impactful ad units across all form factors
  • Share-of-voice/share-of-impact vs. impressions
  • Local, direct-sold advertisers
  • Branded content form factors

How might this revitalize our relationships with local advertisers? The value proposition to them improves when you take out programmatic “noise” — even more if consumer audiences come to prefer the fact that ads on our sites are all locally sold, businesses they know, with less clutter and more relevant content.

We would no longer have to conform to the ad unit formats that programmatic buyers require. Your ad stack is yours; mine is mine. We can focus on meeting local clients’ needs and nurturing those relationships.

For media outlets in smaller markets, this should have been the approach all along.

Meanwhile, the demise of third-party cookies could elevate opportunities for companies that have the kinds of zero-party and first-party relationships and contact information that allow for credible, transparent segmentation of messaging — commercial or not.

Do you have lists of newspaper subscribers? Email newsletter subscribers? Contest entrants? Advertising client contacts?

(That last one is worth a callout: I have advised industry peers for years to remember, as they focus on customer data from B2C activities, that they hold customer data from B2B lines, as well. Your ad client contacts may represent some of the most influential business leaders in your community. Shouldn’t you have their email addresses and LinkedIn profile addresses? Shouldn’t you know in their contact profiles whether or not they use your consumer information services, as in “how often do you visit,” or “are you a subscriber?”)

If we have those lists and know how to nurture them, we could have opportunities more lucrative and durable to a local media outlet than any derived from the heyday of programmatic ads and third-party cookies. It won’t be as easy as getting checks for programmatic backfill, but it also won’t come with the negatives of that revenue stream.

Local media must nurture new revenue streams based on knowing their customers, because all the “easy-money” revenue sources are fading, which leads us to …

What could we do if retrans disappears?

How would it happen? Over-the-air broadcasting remains a high-barrier-to-entry business — it takes time, money and a license to set up a TV station from scratch, and the broadcast spectrum has only so much room for new entrants in any geography. Programming to fill a TV channel’s daily schedule also costs a lot of money, and advertisers traditionally have been willing to cover all those costs in exchange for reaching a station’s large over-the-air audience.

Back in the day, all that audience had to do was plug in a TV set and raise an antenna to pick up local broadcasts. In TV’s golden ages, this scenario constituted a right to win.

But the emergence of cable and satellite TV services knocked down some of the barriers to distributing video content. All kinds of nonbroadcast channels emerged as a result. Now, most households do not rely on antennas to receive TV programming — local stations are poured in with all kinds of video content as part of the programming bundle offered in cable or satellite subscriptions.

Those providers have long paid local TV broadcasters, especially those with major broadcast network affiliations, a fee per subscriber (aka retransmission consent revenue) for rights to redistribute their channels to customers. Stations, in turn, pay their affiliated networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox etc.) programming fees that sharply reduce the amount of retrans revenue that flows to the bottom line.

More recently, broadband internet and low-cost, high-quality digital production tools knocked down even more barriers to distributing and producing video content. People don’t need cable or satellite subscriptions to watch ESPN, HGTV, HBO or their local stations anymore. You don’t need a seven-figure video studio to produce excellent quality video content. And a TV antenna is certainly not anyone’s go-to when you want to watch TikTok or YouTube videos on your iPhone or Galaxy.

So people “cut the cord,” canceling cable or satellite subscriptions in increasing numbers, and paying instead for a la carte video streaming services or content bundles all delivered via the internet instead of cable, satellite or antenna.

Cord-cutting has already contributed to erosion of local stations’ viewership and, as a result, ad revenue. Other modes of access would have to grow a lot to fill the gap.

What would we lose? Without retrans revenue, many local TV stations, with or without network affiliations, would quickly swing to an operating loss. One fear is, if enough viewers cancel cable and satellite subscriptions in favor of internet-enabled video streaming, cable and satellite providers would eventually collapse. Local stations would also face the challenge of reaching households they used to reach via those services.

As if that’s not enough trouble, the major networks might see the affiliate relationships as untenable if stations no longer have retrans revenue to pay their programming fees. Without network programming, strapped cable and satellite operators would have much less reason to pay to carry a channel. And even the “cable replacement” streaming bundles (such as YouTube TV) would have less reason to invest. The broadcast network model could implode.

Even amid that nightmare, we might find some silver linings.

What could we do? Again, we could stop depending on systems to sell our stuff for us.

Broadcast groups and local stations could swing attention to the two remaining sources of audience and revenue: over-the-air broadcasting, and digital in all forms, including streaming.

Linear television could present some opportunities in a post-retrans world:

  • Absent widespread use of cable and satellite TV services, it seems likely more people would be receptive (pun intended) to raising antennas and receiving local station signals in the highest possible quality, with no subscription costs, and without the noticeable degrading of quality characteristic of cable, satellite and streaming redistribution. So the antenna audience would almost certainly grow; how much is a question to be studied.
  • The rise of digital TV broadcasting a couple of decades ago made the concept of local subchannels and multicasting (which looks to consumers like multiple TV channels but they all go out in the same signal) commonplace. Market by market, you can see all kinds of uses of these second, third and sometimes fourth digital channels — some may have their own network affiliations, some may be “wheels” of content such as local newscasts or weather, and others might be handed over mostly to paid programming. If retrans goes away, and especially if affiliations go away, station operators could focus on all these channels as new, locally focused programming opportunities. Also, most of these subchannels never showed up on cable or satellite program grids anyway, so that’s even more reason to encourage consumers to raise antennas and gain access to the full array of programming.
  • As ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGenTV) gradually rolls out, it further improves the quality of television broadcast signals for consumers. But perhaps more applicable to a discussion of post-retrans opportunities, it brings some powerful new capabilities including addressable advertising, B2B high-bandwidth datacasting and high-speed internet applications, all of which give local TV operators a unique position to compete with products and services in the broader internet environment.
  • As it stands, the cable-replacement streamers actually negotiate with the networks to carry local affiliates’ channels for their customers in each market, then the stations get a percentage of that fee. If cord-cutting drives more people to cable-replacement streaming, one of two things could happen:
    • It could encourage the networks to preserve the local-affiliate model and continue to deliver programming to local stations, or …
    • If the networks eschew the affiliate model, it could allow for direct negotiation between broadcasters and the streaming services for the internet version of retrans revenue, something the station groups have wanted anyway. 

For both over-the-air and internet applications, in a world without retrans revenue and/or network affiliations, we would need lots of new local programming. Lots. I don’t mean adding another half hour to a station’s early evening newscast stack or morning show. I mean all kinds of programming — news, talk, sports, lifestyle, entertainment — each category with its own ad and promotional availabilities.

New programming would be expensive. Insistence on high-end TV production values would drive part of that expense, so stations could explore lower-cost, more grassroots ways of producing video content to help reduce it.

A station fully loaded with digital over-the-air channels, ATSC 3.0-quality video/audio and data capabilities, positioning on streaming services and its own internet apps could build sufficient local reach and segmentation capabilities to appeal anew to local advertisers at a broad range of price points. All that inventory around programming you create is yours. You just have to drive enough audience and interest to it, which leads us to …

What could we do if platform referrals disappear?

How would it happen? We want people who scroll, browse, search for or ask questions about local news topics (and other content we provide) to find the answers, ultimately, on our websites. Some do, though not as often as we have ever wanted. 

Still, traffic referrals from social and search platforms represent a large percentage of local news sites’ overall traffic. Referrals, however, have declined in recent years and may continue to do so, for reasons including:

  • Strategic decisions by social and search platforms to deemphasize or potentially remove news content from their feeds and results pages, perhaps as a result of legislation, litigation or changes in the overall internet landscape. 
  • The potential for generative artificial intelligence to change the way people ask for and receive information on the internet, making referrals to source sites (including news sites) less common.

What would we lose? News outlets already have suffered lost traffic from reduced emphasis on news on Meta’s platforms. And we struggle mightily to master search engine optimization in today’s Google-led search-and-results environment, before any of those horror scenarios come about. 

Should the platforms completely drop news content, the threat to the business of news, let alone to democracy, would be profound. Now some experts believe AI-powered search could also devastate referral traffic to all kinds of information websites, including local news outlets. For those outlets, that would mean smaller audiences, less traffic and reduced revenue opportunities from adjacencies to local information and news content. 

What could we do? Once again, we could stop depending on systems to sell our stuff for us.

Before anyone calls me naive or cavalier about this: I know full well how hard it will be to maintain a digital information business if locked out of search and social traffic. Remember, this is an exercise in reframing to look for opportunities.

And in this case, it’s a wake-up call. We — not any combination of social, search or other internet platform — are most culpable for any lack of awareness in our communities of the news, information and commercial opportunities we provide.

We don’t eat our own cooking. We sell advertising, marketing and promotion to our clients, and we tell them that organic search and social traffic won’t be enough for their businesses. But we don’t buy enough advertising, marketing and promotion to support our own products and services, and we complain when we don’t get enough organic platform referrals. 

Since the emergence of the commercial web — the 2,400-baud modem era of the early- to mid-1990s — news organizations have applied various tactics to gin-up digital traffic numbers at low or no cost. I remember launching open-source web emulations of threaded bulletin board systems in the mid-1990s and reaping as much as two-thirds of total site traffic from the overwhelmingly low-quality interactions that occurred there.

Later, we morphed those message boards into on-site story comments, then third-party story comments, then Facebook comments, but the low quality persisted, trolls ruled and advertisers balked. Finally, plenty of news sites gave up on article comments and forum-style interactivity entirely in the last decade, realizing the extra traffic was no bargain.

So yes, it would hurt if search and social referrals disappeared entirely, and took the resulting ad availabilities with them, but perhaps not as much as we fear. Thirty years of internet work taught me this: Cheap traffic isn’t worth what you pay for it.

How can local media outlets get word out on the internet about the products and services they offer if search and social referrals go away? Good question. Here’s another: How did we do this before those platforms, or the internet itself, existed?

That answer is easy: Not all that well.

For the most part, those of us in legacy local media assumed we were a “firehose” for news, information, marketing and promotion, reaching households far and wide with our wares. By our very existence people should have known who we were and what we offered. Maybe we promoted our journalism through house ads in remnant inventory and proof-of-performance spots in our own media distribution platforms.

We can’t count on that firehose status anymore; we should not have counted on it then. We also can’t assume that, simply because what we report is useful, interesting and/or important, people in our communities will work hard to find it and act on it. That assumption doesn’t live just in legacy news organizations — nonprofit digital startups also struggle to make their work discoverable and grow sufficient audiences.

Making local news and information discoverable and actionable, whether or not search- and social-driven avenues fade, will depend on investing a larger percentage of revenues in outside marketing, promotion, community convening and other events. The opportunities begin only with a commitment to invest.

Get out there with paid search ads, paid social ads, email newsletters, billboards, digital signage, spots in other local media (if you’re in the “mainstream,” include media by and about underserved/underrepresented communities), and perhaps most important: face-to-face presence in your community. Sponsor events and community convenings. Put news team leaders out at the local farmer’s market, not to scribe or point cameras, just to talk and listen to people. It’s the best way to prove you’re real, you’re local and you care, something misinformation and pink-slime purveyors can’t do in your town.

Form partnerships and collaborate with other local news media. Collaboration is hard but can be done in ways that all boats rise.

And remember that social and search media are fluid landscapes. Explore opportunities with video in Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. Get better on LinkedIn (and gain leverage from those business connections you should already have in your advertising client database). Not getting much from Facebook followers? Fine, go where they are. Join local Facebook or Nextdoor groups where people are attempting to find out about local news and events, especially if you have had to curtail newsroom resources covering spot news, entertainment, restaurants, etc. You’ll be amazed at the things you find out about your own community that way.  

You might not replace the gross numbers you saw in the heyday of search and social referrals. Even so, every conversation you have, every bit of reach you achieve through outside marketing, will be with people in your community. One such person who engages and develops loyalty to your news organization, over time, probably beats 10,000 one-hit page views from search or social.

What could we do if we didn’t wait for the disaster scenarios?

We shouldn’t plan for disaster scenarios and then just wait for them to happen. Most of us know some form of this proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

The best time to solve for the doom-and-gloom scenarios was, likewise, 20-plus years ago. We tried, but we didn’t. Now we should not let ourselves get five more years down the road to find the bad stuff happened and our opportunity spaces became even more constrained than they are today.

I know none of my suggestions here are original. Many have been, or are being, tried. Have patience with that experimentation!

I also can’t promise any of these notions would pan out profitably or sustainably for local media. I just hope to reframe the ways we ask questions when trying to think strategically about forces affecting our businesses.

Meanwhile, who’s to say that programmatic revenue, retrans revenue or platform referral traffic disappears altogether? Changes in those environments may be much less profound, or much less damaging to local media. More silver linings and far better opportunities could appear.

We must use this “second-best time” to be prepared for the worst but also for the opportunities that pop up on the way. Be ready now, in case we run out of time for could, and the would disaster scenarios turn into already did.