I think KTLA is on to something, actually. Linear television was 100% live when it first began and will be 100% live again in the end. Because to modern audiences spoiled by ubiquitous VOD streaming, continuing to watch prerecorded programming "on the broadcaster's schedule" -- and subject to those broadcasters' onslaughts of unskippable commercials -- is unthinkable. The simple fact is, non-live linear television is doomed. It's an anachronism that only still exists in 2024 because of the incredible inertia TV is still coasting on from its powerhouse days. By 2030, I suspect that not only most cable networks, but most local terrestrial stations will have gone dark, the latter's news operations spun off into stand-alone, 24/7 live OTT newscasting operations reminiscent of jettisoned lifeboats destined to outlive their sunken motherships.
And even those jettisoned lifeboats won't all survive. Many will probably be forced to merge as most markets will only support two or three profitable 24/7 live operations concurrently. The heavy headline repetition in today's multi-hour newscasts would also be insufferable once those newscasts went 24/7, so another inevitable change would be their re-formatting themselves to include hyper-locally focused "All Things Considered"-style live interviews, analyses, commentaries, and featurettes. For the traditional headlines portions of each hour, "no deja vu" policies would need to be put in place, where every story was continuously re-produced many times throughout the day, constantly being re-cut with up-to-the-minute narration and footage to make sure that no two consecutive hours' headlines ever looked or sounded the same.
I believe this is the only way live local TV news will survive once the linear stations now hosting it go bust. In fact, with so many local newspapers teetering thanks to the boomer generation's slow replacement by video-oriented, MTV-weaned gen X'ers, I also suspect that many of these future, 24/7 live local news lifeboats will hire away their towns' collapsing local papers' writing and editorial staffs. They will install them into their own newsrooms as the engines that power all the aforementioned hourly headline [re-]production and "All Things Considered" content making busywork. The past decade's cost-cutting in local TV news has rendered today's newsrooms too understaffed (and too underwhelming in the "heavyweight journalism" department) to produce 24 hours of frequently-refreshed, high quality content. Once everyone is in 24/7 stand-alone lifeboat mode, salvaging the journalism staffs from their towns' failing papers -- or just giving them side-hustles -- would probably represent the quickest, most turnkey method of bolstering their product quality back up "local news glory days" levels, where you had dedicated investigative journalists, human interest storyseekers, researchers, people hitting the streets and scouring all the local scenes for undiscovered material, etc.
Maybe I'm completely wrong here. But my gut says, by the next decade, Los Angeles will officially see the birth of something like "The KTLA Times" -- a video newspaper formed from the remnants of KTLA-TV and The Los Angeles Times, doing 24 paperless video editions per day to a primarily over-the-top, IPTV audience watching on mobile devices and smart TVs. Hopefully, they will still publish written stories on the web, for those of us whose preference will always be reading.
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