Reusing the News: Duplicating Local TV Content

Local U.S. television news provides citizens with crucial local information, particularly during periods of heightened political, social, or environmental salience. Yet local television news is under increased pressure to consolidate, which may serve to de-localize local news reporting by duplicating news content delivery across local broadcast stations. We employed automated text reuse methods to measure the extent to which local broadcast station pairs duplicated (exact text reuse) each other’s news content. Key findings include:

• Duplication occurred in 84 (39 percent) of the 210 television markets in the U.S.
• These markets accounted for almost 41 million television households (37 percent) in the country.
• There were 96 duplicating station pairs involving 182 unique stations (some stations had multiple arrangements).
• Nexstar was the most active controller of duplicating station pairs (22 percent), followed by Gray (17 percent).
• News-Press & Gazette (8 percent) and Sinclair (6 percent) were the third and fourth most prominent controllers of duplicating station pairs.