I am one of those who believe that stations banking on getting rich this election cycle are going to be disappointed.

There is no doubt that TV stations in battleground states will be printing money.

But I think those stations in either red or blue states are not going to get the big bang for the buck.

I think political campaigns are going to spend record amounts of ad dollars on streaming services and other digital outlets.

The Atlantic writes that the decline of the legacy news media has been playing out for decades, exacerbated most recently by the advent of the internet and the explosion of digital platforms, especially the ad-revenue-gobbling tech giants Google and Meta. Even when when the ad-supported model of journalism still worked, the history of American media was punctuated by periods of dramatic expansion and contraction, often coinciding with the arrival of new technologies. The latest round of cuts, however, represents a grim new milestone. The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, NPR, Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed, among others, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past year.

I think local TV news is also headed in the wrong direction.

Companies such as Tegna, Nexstar, Sinclair, and others have been relying on retransmission money to keep the profits rolling in.

Despite people cutting the cord at a fast clip, these media companies continue to ask cable and satellite companies for more money per subscriber each time the contract comes up. This means the customers’ bills go up, and they cut the cord.

This cycle is nearing the end, and the media companies’ greed will help kill them off.

Few media companies care about journalism. They want to cover the news as cheaply as possible, and the local news has become nearly unwatchable in so many markets.

The way to save local television is to invest more in news and more in local programming.

Companies like Scripps are just trying to put on a “newscast” as cheaply as possible and think that will help save the company.

But CEOs like Adam Symson (Scripps), Perry Sook (Nexstar), and Dave Lougee (Tegna) know that by the time local television is dead, they likely will be as well.

They aren’t looking long-term because if they were, they would not be asking cable companies to pay them more money each time the contract comes up.

This is not a business plan that can survive.

I don’t think we’re very far away from sports leagues, like the NFL, NBA, and the NHL to move all their games to streaming platforms. How much leverage do you think a media company will have if there are no NFL games on their station?

Very little.

TV news can be a profit driver for local TV stations, but not with the product they are offering now. You can put on a cheaply done newscast produced and reported by people with little experience and expect people to watch.

Journalism is not dying; cheaply done journalism is dying, and the people running your company can’t figure that out.

All they see is dollar signs, and it is all they care about.

I predict that right after the election and in 2025, you will see large layoffs in local news, and the worst part is that it never needed to happen.