For anyone who has ever lived in the Southern portion of these United States, the understanding of the significance of a “secret recipe” is almost a given. For those of you who haven’t lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line, you may not entirely grasp the importance of what might also be called a “family recipe” or something that is “prepared in a very particular way.” That last phrasing is what true southerners, always being a bit overly gracious, might say—instead of casting even the slightest impression of being rude.

When it comes to cooking, though, recipes can have the implied value of state secrets. Take, for instance, Coca-Cola's legendary formula. Only a handful of the company’s employees know the exact formula for the beverage that is bottled and sold worldwide. The original recipe is stored in a high-security vault at the company’s Atlanta headquarters. In the 1930s, Colonel Harlan Sanders created the secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices he used to make fried chicken in his roadside shop in Corbin, Kentucky, which led to the global restaurant empire we know today as KFC.

From recipes for global brands to those for family dishes as simple as cornbread stuffing, the exact list of ingredients, how they are assembled, and how they are prepared is the holy grail of creation. If someone can bestow upon you the ability to replicate their success in making something that people will enjoy, that indeed is a meaningful gift.

We were considering all this, wondering if there could be some formula to make local TV news more relevant in 2026. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but if successful enough, such a “recipe” could even save the ever-shrinking business.

Local news is in something of a slow-motion crisis. While the media landscape continues to explode and evolve, the business of gathering, editing, presenting, and yes, selling local news content has never been more challenging. Yes, we know that the rise of “independent journalism” is having a moment, particularly with the focus on coverage of the events happening on the ground in Minneapolis, including the federal arrests of four journalists covering the protest inside a St. Paul Church on January 18th.

All working journalists on the ground have contributed significantly to our understanding of what has been happening during the federal government’s “Operation Metro Surge” in the Twin Cities.

At the same time, the local news operations of the established outlets in the market, including two excellent daily newspapers and four major market network-affiliated television stations, have been producing noteworthy coverage of all the local news events unfolding each day, many of which have nothing to do with the federal government’s sweeping immigration enforcement activities.

This scenario isn’t unique to Minnesota’s largest cities. In metropolitan areas all across the country, local news outlets are trying to navigate the uncertain waters of covering the day’s news while balancing the economics of remaining profitable enough to keep the doors open. The audience and the advertising dollars that chase them have never been more scattered or elusive.

A December 2025 Pew Research study found that younger adults are following the news less closely at both the national and local levels. The study also found that 18-29-year-olds were more reliant on social media as their primary news source.

We’ve detailed how local news outlets, particularly local television stations, have been adapting to this shift by increasing their daily output of content in formats that are more at home on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. These efforts have ranged from traditional “on scene” reporting in vertical video packages to the never-ending stream of “behind the scenes” videos featuring the synchronized dance moves of anchors when they aren’t delivering the actual news.

All of this effort is notable in the industry’s ongoing pursuit of viewers of any age, at a time when there are far too many choices for news and information about what is happening around the corner and around the globe.

What we think is getting lost in this pursuit is the why behind the choices younger news consumers are making. It is a rationale that isn’t exclusive to the under-30 demographic. Journalism has never been more ill-defined. It no longer conforms to a single set of standards, just like journalists are no longer a single, monolithic group, all working for established institutions.

Journalism has become more personal in both its practice and its consumption. As such, it has moved away from a single accepted and, dare we say, trusted standard. And as the transition to a more personal kind of journalism has taken place, the audience has moved to accepting, and in many cases, expecting the reporting to come with opinion to come along with it.

We don’t believe there is any other way to explain the rise and success of journalism on outlets ranging from Fox News to podcaster Joe Rogan. Or the emergence of countless Substack offerings, ranging from Heather Cox Richardson's political coverage to Emily Sundberg's documentation of lifestyle trends. If journalists aren’t writing on Substack, they are on camera on YouTube, which has placed anyone with a smartphone right alongside the videos produced by major television networks and their local affiliates.

Of course, we can debate whether it’s all journalism. Still, you can’t deny that the shift is underway, even if you consider the example of Bari Weiss, a successful Substack publisher who is now the leader of one of the most storied journalism institutions, CBS News.

Here’s the thing that we believe is undeniable: all of this reportage comes with something that has shaped journalism since its earliest days, when it was produced only on printing presses. It has an attitude.

Despite the idea that journalism, practiced in its purest form, should be unbiased, the reality is that audiences, especially younger ones, are looking for journalism that brings them news and information that aligns more closely with their views. And if that view comes through a particular political lens, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing—assuming that the politics are aligned, at least to some degree, with the viewer’s own.

But there is another ingredient in this recipe, and it is critical to consider at this juncture. The authenticity of the journalist matters.

Journalism no longer requires the level of professional polish that the intended audience might have once expected. The tools needed to practice journalism and publish it at scale have never been more commonplace. The rise of “citizen journalists” speaks volumes about the idea that anyone can be empowered to perform the role of the journalist, even without any formal training or experience.

And for those of us who have spent our professional lives working in the field, it can be difficult to accept that these changes to what we once believed were foundational truths about the nature and practice of journalism. But many of those truths still exist.

It is the style that is changing more than the substance. In some cases, the substance has given way to polarization, allowing half the nation to see raw video of an incident one way and the other half to see it differently, especially when a particular political narrative shapes their viewing.

Let’s stop here for a moment and emphatically restate the one constant: Facts still matter.

Even when the obvious is denied, obscured, or misrepresented, facts remain important. The audience will seek them out from any available source. But the audience seeks trusted sources they can rely on continually. They want the news from people they can trust to tell them “the real story.” Again, that authenticity factor comes into play.

Why is it that a single person appearing on camera from their basement or spare bedroom has the credibility of an audience numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands? Probably because they present their content authentically. The audience determines whether the person they are watching is sincere and honest about what they're saying, and they don’t particularly care if it isn’t a flawless presentation. Human qualities like emotion, sincerity, and empathy matter more than appearing emotionless or unfazed in the face of tragedy.

Most people who entered journalism as a career did so because they were passionate about the craft's ideals. It is worth noting that the Oxford Dictionary defines the noun “passion” with two entries: the first states that passion is “a strong and barely controllable emotion.” The second describes the word as “an intense desire or enthusiasm for something.” We would submit that all journalists have an intense desire to discover and present the truth to their audience.

We’ve always been told that the presentation of the truth must be devoid of any bias. While a commendable goal, the commandment has been rewritten to require that the presentation be free of passion. We see only small flashes of passion when the journalist is in a situation that undermines their composure, if only for a moment. We have recently seen examples of this when local journalists were hit with chemical agents in crowd dispersal actions by federal agents or state police during anti-ICE protests. From firsthand experience of years ago, we know it is damn near impossible to retain your composure when your eyes, nose, and lungs are on fire and breathing seems impossible.

But we didn’t trust the journalists who were experiencing this any less. In fact, the human emotion of the moment made the reporting all the more compelling.

For those of us of a certain age, the words spoken by the legendary ABC sportscaster Jim McKay at the beginning of each episode of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” may help describe what we are suggesting here. “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition... This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”

Deny it as much as we might try, the news is as much human drama as any sporting competition. The difference is that the news isn’t scheduled and doesn’t occur at a fixed time. But the same approach used in sports coverage applies to daily news coverage. As proven on many occasions, perhaps most notably when Jim McKay pivoted from sportscaster to news anchor during the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 members of the Israeli Olympic Team were taken hostage. Geoff Mason was the producer in the control room, working under the legendary Roone Arledge. The two oversaw some 16 hours of continuing coverage until the fateful ending of the drama, which left all of the Israeli team hostages, along with their five terrorist captors, dead.

Mason, who just recently passed away on January 25th at age 85, recounted his 1972 experience in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “I cannot begin to tell you how fast events were unfolding in that room.”

Anyone who has ever been in a television control room during breaking news coverage can understand what he was talking about. The Hollywood Reporter headlined the article “This is the man who basically invented livestreaming in 1972.”

Our point is that all news comes with a certain tension in the story, a level of drama, if you will, that deserves to be captured and presented to the audience. That isn’t accomplished by simply reciting the facts at hand. Storytelling is the art of including the relevant facts and weaving them into a narrative. Capturing “the human drama” of what is happening and ultimately explaining why it matters.

We admit that this recipe isn’t really a secret. But like so many recipes, it has been changed and perhaps forgotten over time. The reality is that anyone can follow a recipe and make something. But understanding why certain ingredients, when combined in a specific way, and knowing when to change the recipe, makes the difference to the final taste—that is what distinguishes chefs from cooks.

Even for a dish as basic as fried chicken.

And so it is with journalists. To extend the food analogy just a bit further, we need to stop making bland, boring local news on television and focus on adding some seasoning to the recipe if we hope to retain, and maybe even grow, the audience.

Especially in the unprecedented times that we are now living in.

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