As someone who produced a local tv newscast for five years, I largely agree, though not completely. You do need enough larger scope news for people to feel informed and educated, but it's clearly a secondary concern, you're right.
If I had my way, we would have had subdomains on our site for both geographical and categorical reading. Local tv news will always have SOME appeal, but not because we're doing our job better than national networks, but because we're local. It's amazing how many don't get that. Yes, Fox and CNN are our competitors, but if local news wants a chance, we have to fight them on our strengths. And it's the exact same with our websites and the websites of any other news outlets.
I find it really troubling that in a time when people want to be connected and informed like never before (and have the technology to be so) so many in smaller news organizations try to be every thing to all people, and end up failing spectacularly trying to out perform larger operations at games the larger operations are finely tuned for. Smaller outfits, especially those limited in geographic area, should play to their strong suits. In this case, they should do as much as possible about having LOCAL news.
Watch your local evening news, and if your station does the 5-6:30 model, it's almost certain that the 5:30-6 section will focus on national news, occasionally different anchors, and will have the lowest ratings. The three 30 minute sections' ratings usually follow this model: ¬_/
And news stations will tell themselves "Oh, we put national news in the middle because it has low ratings." I get that if you're forced to play the short view and juts have to fill time. But I do honestly think that if you put more effort into that, over time, you could cultivate a worthwhile news show there. Possibly even just make the 5-6 one hour, and use the expanded time to help flesh out the rest of your stories and make them all run an extra minute longer.
It's just as someone who's worked nearly all of my post-high school life (being 31) in local news, it's always frustrated me how only a few hours a day of local content are produced locally in most places. I think it's a vast misuse (unuse?) of available resources.
If I had my way, we would have had subdomains on our site for both geographical and categorical reading. Local tv news will always have SOME appeal, but not because we're doing our job better than national networks, but because we're local. It's amazing how many don't get that. Yes, Fox and CNN are our competitors, but if local news wants a chance, we have to fight them on our strengths. And it's the exact same with our websites and the websites of any other news outlets.
... What a revolting development.