Unaffiliated

Some TV news stations are breaking their national network affiliations, and leaning into local programming.

Bert Medina—the president of WPLG, a TV station in Miami—has a policy of meeting every new employee that comes into the building. Recently, that’s meant a lot of handshakes. Amid mass media-job losses over the past year and increases in network television licensing fees that have been mounting for a while longer, WPLG has, since last spring, made sixty new hires.

The growth has come as a direct result of WPLG’s decision, in August, to cut ties with ABC, with which it’s been affiliated since going on the air, sixty-nine years ago. Since the nineties, local TV stations such as WPLG have paid network fees for the rights to air national programming like Shark Tank and Good Morning America. This time around, after negotiating a new contract for months, WPLG concluded that ABC was demanding too much. “If we had taken the package that was given to us, we would have to do what many stations across the country have done,” Medina said. “Layoffs and cutbacks.” Instead, WPLG, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, made a rare choice to operate as an unaffiliated station, freeing up a significant portion of its budget for local programming.