The best thing to ever happen to local TV is newspapers breaking stories on their websites.

In the old days, your local TV news crew would have to wait until morning to read what’s going on in town. Now they have it fed to them all day long.

TV stations have never had the resources of newspapers and always relied on them as the agenda setters for the day’s coverage. Whenever someone pointed this out, they’d say, “Maybe so — but our service is intended to offer up a condensed version of a story to suit our audience’s needs. Plus we make it our own by adding unique elements.”

And then there was this: “Besides, we have something the newspaper can never match: immediacy.”

They were right. The paper was locked into a rigid production schedule that could not accommodate breaking news.

Attention local TV: Just in case you missed the paper that morning, Erastus Corning is dead.

Then along came the internet. Newspapers gained the ability to report news immediately — and TV had a new way to get stories on the same day — even beating the print edition of the paper.

But in the long run, the newspaper will win. They will always have more people and it will remain easier to produce a print story than a video piece. And newspapers will get good at doing video long before TV station learn how to be newspapers.

Local TV, media, Newspapers