The consolidation in local TV news that’s remaking news ecosystems across the country is on stark display in Indianapolis. Not that long ago, Indiana’s capital city was a dense hub for news. From newspapers to TV to radio, there was no shortage of ways to find out what was happening around town.
“When I was at the Star, I always thought we had plenty of healthy competition,” said Karen Ferguson Fuson, who was publisher of the Indianapolis Star in the early 2010s. “I never thought we could rest on our laurels, that we had the [market] share that we wanted.”
Terry Heifetz, a senior lecturer at Ball State University in nearby Muncie, Indiana, echoed that sentiment, having spent years as a producer for WISH-TV and WRTV in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“There were four viable [TV] newsrooms, [two] print newsrooms … and also a couple of good radio stations covering news,” he said. “So, a very healthy market. And competitive.”
Consolidation, downsizing and massive disruption of local news business models have changed that in just a few years.
When it comes to local TV news, Indianapolis symbolizes the consolidation of newsrooms nationally that has been underway for decades but has vastly accelerated in recent years. Across the country, much as print newspapers have shrunk and shuttered as digital competitors siphoned both advertising and subscription revenue, consolidation in local TV has become more common as stations face ever-growing competition from social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram and new digital challengers like individual content creators. For consumers, this means fewer broadcast journalists covering their communities, fewer original stories and fewer choices of stations.
Indeed, the number of stations producing local news and staff sizes have dropped this year and are part of a multiyear falloff, according to the Annual News Survey published by the Radio Television Digital News Association and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. The decline in news hours started 25 years ago.
Those drops coincided with a flurry of consolidation in the industry. The 10 largest TV owners control 75% of newsrooms, according to data from the newly released Medill State of Local News Report at Northwestern University. By comparison, the 10 largest newspaper owners control less than a quarter of all papers, the report said.
In the past decade, Nexstar Media Group snapped up Media General for $4.6 billion in 2017 and Tribune Media for $7.2 billion in 2019. Gray Media Inc., currently the largest local TV owner, with 124 stations, acquired Raycom Media for $3.6 billion in 2019.
Nexstar’s mega $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, which would merge the country’s second- and fourth-largest TV companies, closed in March. But that integration is being held up in court after lawsuits from state attorneys general and DirecTV.
The outcome of that case will affect the TV news landscape in Indianapolis. Since 2019, Nexstar has owned Indianapolis’ Fox affiliate, WXIN, and CBS affiliate, WTTV. But the Tegna-owned NBC affiliate, WTHR, could also come under Nexstar’s ownership depending on how the merger plays out.
If this happened, Indianapolis would be the second-largest Nielsen-designated market area in the country (it is 26th-largest overall) to have its four network affiliates controlled by just two companies.
It’s possible this ownership dynamic might exist for only a brief period. As part of its efforts to obtain Federal Communications Commission approval of the merger, Nexstar agreed to divest six TV stations, including WTHR.
Divestments and sales can lead to changes in what’s offered to news consumers. In March, Circle City Broadcasting, a local company that already owned WISH-TV, took ownership of WRTV, the ABC affiliate in Indianapolis. Most of WRTV’s staff of about 60 was immediately laid off.
Whether consolidation in TV ownership is ultimately good or bad for local journalism as an industry won’t be known for some time. But as this evolution in local news plays out in Indianapolis, some issues are already clear.
Today, the USA Today Co.-owned Indianapolis Star lives on, as do the city’s five TV stations — including four network affiliates. But healthy competition is no longer the norm.
“I’m not saying this would happen, but my concern would be that the newsrooms would consolidate, and instead of having two large newsrooms [Fox/CBS and NBC] which we have right now … we’d have one big newsroom, which means fewer stories will get covered, potentially, and maybe there would not be as much depth to what is covered,” Heifetz said. “These are two really good news operations right now, two independent news operations. And I would hate to lose one of them.”
Fewer and Fewer Local Competitors
Since mid-February, Tracey Compton has worked as Indianapolis’ public editor, a liaison between the public and the city’s news organizations. Employed through the Poynter Institute, the media think tank and international school for journalists, she writes columns analyzing the area’s media landscape and profiles some media outlets. She also talks to city residents to get a pulse on how changes such as closures or cutbacks have affected people’s ability to stay on top of what’s happening around them.
In July, Compton profiled the Fox and CBS Nexstar stations whose leaders argued that consolidation has helped them more than it’s hurt. CJ Hoyt, Fox59’s news director, told Compton that the merger has allowed the outlet to cover more content than anyone else in the market. Consumers, though, haven’t necessarily agreed.
“What I hear from news consumers when I’m out in the public, doing outreach events, is that the news still is very repetitive from night to morning,” Compton said in an interview with Medill. “The fresh news doesn’t change much from weekends to Mondays.”
“I’ve talked to local researchers about Indy’s TV news station consolidation, and they noted that consumers used to be able to vote with their eyes,” she added. “And if you didn’t like the coverage that you were getting on one network, you could go onto another network and expect to see different stories. But now since they’re owned by the same company, you don’t see that variety as much. And so, the choices for consumers have dwindled.”
It’s a trend that worries Emily Barr, a former president and CEO of Graham Media Group, which runs seven TV stations around the country (none in Indianapolis).
Consolidation, Barr said, is about a company looking for ways to develop efficiencies. That often leads to a more homogenized newscast, not just in one market but across markets with stations that have the same owner. Should this trend accelerate, that could mean less truly local news reaching consumers through these stations.
“There’s no question that the competition is no longer the guy across the street. The competition is for your time and your eyeballs, and you’re competing with YouTube, you’re competing with Instagram, you’re competing with Substack and everybody else who’s out there trying to deliver all this information,” said Barr, who’s now the board president of The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit newsroom. “But there’s very little competition anymore for who’s covering what’s going on locally.”
She zeroed in on the fallout from that lack of competition: “If I don’t know what’s going on with my local school board or my town council, I can’t properly participate in democracy; I’m voting in an uninformed way. And then my taxes might go up, or the dam upstream might be sold off to somebody, and I didn’t even know about it and then that ruins my land. These kinds of things are going on all the time now in local communities that have no news coverage.”
As they have for decades, though, local TV stations still enjoy high levels of trust. A Medill poll conducted in April on behalf of Free Press Indiana — a nonprofit organization that runs the online newsroom Mirror Indy — confirmed this popularity among Indianapolis news consumers. Local TV stations ranked as the most useful sources for quality, reliable information about Indianapolis, well ahead of local online groups, online-only news sources, local radio stations, content creators and local newspapers.
But that trust hasn’t translated into enough revenue to overcome the industry’s economic challenges. That’s why some, including Nexstar founder and CEO Perry Sook, have argued that consolidation is necessary for local TV stations to survive, Barr noted.
“I kind of understand that, from a business standpoint,” she said. “But I worry about, in the effort to get bigger and have more heft when it comes to dealing with these other forces, they’re also degrading the very thing that makes them unique, which is their local connection.”
From Competition to Collaboration
The evolution of Indianapolis’ media market in recent years involves more than cutbacks in coverage. Several newsrooms have emerged, and existing outlets have developed digital presences in efforts to become comprehensive news sources.
The nonprofit digital-only outlet Mirror Indy, for example, prides itself on providing granular neighborhood-level coverage across the city that can’t be found anywhere else. The newsroom also partners with local TV stations to broaden the reach of its work.
“I think we can continue to help support that effort to provide them that local community content that [TV stations] may not always be staffed to cover,” said Ferguson Fuson, the former Indy Star publisher who now chairs the board of Free Press Indiana. “That’s a reality; it’s not a judgment on anybody. I think TV stations, just like newspapers, are doing everything they can to figure out how to make their models last for as long as possible.”
And outlets such as Indiana Citizen have sprouted up to focus specifically on civic engagement as well as news. Ann and Bill Moreau co-founded the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation in 2018 to promote greater voter participation.
Bill Moreau had previously practiced law and spent almost 40 years in the Indiana statehouse in various roles. He worked closely with Evan Bayh while Bayh was secretary of state and, later, governor of Indiana; he also worked with Bayh’s father, the late U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh. Moreau has lived in Indianapolis for 45 years.
“It would be difficult to measure the impact of the disinvestment in local newsgathering over this 45-year period,” he wrote in an email. “We’re in a ‘We don’t know what we don’t know’ period, which brings a smile to the faces of those in power in Indianapolis.”
“Indianapolis — which includes the state Capitol — may not qualify as a ‘news desert,’ he wrote, “but it’s a tiny oasis that needs help resisting the encroaching sands.”
Such help includes philanthropic contributions. The Lumina Foundation, which is based in Indianapolis, has invested more than $3 million in sustaining local news efforts, including in Free Press Indiana, Indiana Citizen and to support Indianapolis’ public editor role — Compton’s position — in conjunction with the Poynter Institute.
Lumina has also recently played a key role in the launch of Press Forward Indiana, a statewide arm of Press Forward, the national philanthropic coalition that’s invested millions to help strengthen local news across the country.
Stephanie Wang, Lumina’s senior editor, said that helping Hoosiers be informed citizens and engage with their communities is key to Lumina’s mission.
“We are not a news desert, and certainly in recent years, we’ve actually had more news organizations start up. But there are people throughout the city who don’t know where to go to get information when they have questions about what’s happening,” Wang said.
“[There] is a need to address those needs a little bit more specifically and to be strategic and innovative in thinking about what local news is providing and what people still need and how to make sure in a really fast-changing information ecosystem that the news is connected to people.”
Wang is quite familiar with how the city’s media landscape has changed in recent years. She previously worked as the Indiana bureau chief for Chalkbeat, a nonprofit newsroom focused on education, and as a higher education reporter for the Indianapolis Star.
“When I first got into journalism, collaboration was not a thing; it was competition,” Wang said. “And these days, I think collaboration is part of the future of journalism.”
What’s Next
Regardless of how many TV station owners are left in Indianapolis once the Nexstar-Tegna merger is settled, the future of local news there won’t solely hinge on local TV.
Former Indy Star publisher Ferguson Fuson is thinking about the big picture.
“I may be the odd woman out on this, but I don’t have huge worries about the consolidation of the TV market,” she said. “I look at the local news that TV covers, and I think there are plenty of other options that are developing for local consumers.”
Barr, the former media group president and current board president of the nonprofit Maine Monitor newsroom, also noted that local TV stations already struggle to cover hyperlocal information at a neighborhood level. So while a merger might accelerate that trend, she said, the outcome wouldn’t produce a massive shift from where things currently stand.
Indianapolis is one of the few major cities with a local operator, in Circle City Broadcasting, Ferguson Fuson also added.
“I’m an optimist, and so I want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt that they care about our community, and we’re going to find the ways to do the right things,” she said. “Sometimes the first move companies make are not the last move. So, I’d be curious to look at those two stations a year from now and determine, are consumers getting less news from that?”
We don’t know the answer just yet, she said.
But for those like Heifetz, the Ball State lecturer who spent a career in local TV news, it’s hard not to feel concern about what the future holds.
“I think Indianapolis is still a really good TV market,” he said. “We don’t know yet what’s going to happen through the courts, if the consolidation will happen. If it does, I’m just a little bit nervous about what might happen.”
There is more than one way forward, he realizes. “It’s possible that Nexstar will see it as a tremendous opportunity and will not shrink the newsrooms and will take advantage of the standing that its stations have in the market already and build on it. I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”
