Denver Local TV News on Rise.. Just Not On TV

Lots of demand for local news.. just not on TV

Local TV news used to be the canary in the coal mine for the television business.

Declining ratings, terrible demographics and greatly reduced revenue led to an endless round of cuts that only further served to weaken the product - a viscious circle spiraling toward death.

Now it seems the death notices were premature. There is, in Denver at least, an exanding demand for local video news.

It just isn't on TV.

And local TV stations in Denver are getting the message and expanding their platforms accordingly.

For those of us in the business, and those outside the business, this is good news all around.

The local Denver TV stations have discovered crowdsourcing of video as a way to 'feed the beast', and with the addition of iPads, iPods and online, the beast has gotten a lot hungrier.

Joanne Ostrow, television critic for The Denver Post has written a fairly extensive story on this.

You should read it here.

The upshot of all of this is that if local TV news can get their act together before they go belly up, they can become the locus of a new kind of local video news coverage - one that expands to all platforms and incorporates a lot more sources.

The word from Denver is encouraging.

Let's hope other local TV news ops get the message as well.