Scrolling through the E.W. Scripps Company’s announcement of a round of layoffs that killed jobs for nearly 30 people at Tulsa’s KJRH this week, this description of their new strategy caught my eye:
The company will launch 24/7 local news streams, starting in approximately one dozen smaller markets. This rollout will eventually expand to all local stations.
The new model prioritizes publishing stories as they are ready rather than waiting for specific time slots. This approach puts more reporters in communities to deliver information throughout the day. While linear broadcast schedules will remain for traditional viewers, the company is prioritizing social and streaming platforms where audiences are migrating, the memo said.
Setting aside the horror of the phrase “24/7 local news streams,” I have to ask: Who determines when a story is ready? As local media continues hollowing itself in both print and on TV, its remaining practitioners are looking more and more like the solo creator who makes decisions on the fly, out in the field. In other words, the new product for TV news looks more and more like what my colleague Alicia Chesser observed earlier this spring: the live storm streamer.
This would be beneficial or good or ultimately net out to a societal positive if you accept that more information helps people understand the world around them better. But it does not. In fact giving people more information makes them understand things less.
In the book The Black Swan, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes a 1960s experiment where two focus groups are shown unclear images that are brought into focus at different times:
Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognize the hydrant much faster …. The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be.
What does help people understand the world around them is well-vetted information, delivered to them clearly, in a manner they understand and share experientially with others. That’s very difficult to do as a one-person show.
It’s hard for me to see this news about KJRH as anything other than another step in the enshittification of local media, a process that began in the late 2000s when Craigslist and big tech platforms started taking a slice of newspaper and TV’s ad revenues, and has steadily continued ever since. It’s probably not going to stop until the local TV news looks like Ryan Hall, Y’all.
I’ll give the last word on this to Al Swearengen, who saw surprisingly far into the future— and with remarkable clarity—for a saloon owner in pre-statehood South Dakota:
anyway, this is the best scene in all of television pic.twitter.com/1VAOyvPbug
— Brian Haley (@brianchaley) August 7, 2026
