How Reachable Is Local TV News?

What 1,757 U.S. television stations publish about how to reach their newsrooms, and what the 470 newsrooms that do publish a way in look like, based on 5,835 contacts compiled for Featured's Find TV Stations.

Prepared by FeaturedOctober 2026Contacts date-stamped Sept. 24–25, 2026

1,757

TV stations tracked

470

Newsrooms with published contacts

5,835

Published contacts

Most stations don't advertise a way in

Of the 1,757 stations tracked, 464 (26.4%) publish a newsroom email or phone number on their own site, and 409 (23.3%) publish an email. Among the 785 big-four affiliates — the stations most likely to run a newsroom — the share rises to 56.8%. Among the 470 newsrooms that do publish a contact, the picture flips: 88.3% list a newsroom email, 77.7% list a news or assignment desk address, and 71.1% list a newsroom phone number. 468 of the 470 publish at least one of the two.

Newsrooms by number of published contacts

n = 470

1 contact100

250

3–483

5–980

10–1936

20–49110

50+11

The 100 single-contact newsrooms are almost all (93%) a news desk inbox. The 121 newsrooms with 20+ contacts are mostly Gray Media (88) and Fox Television Stations (16), which publish full staff rosters.

Reachability and depth by network (of the 470 newsrooms with published contacts)

Network	Newsrooms	Contacts	Median contacts	Any email	Desk email
CBS	132	1,795	4	87.1%	78.0%
NBC	127	1,712	5	87.4%	78.0%
ABC	127	1,121	5	92.1%	80.3%
FOX	63	919	3	87.3%	73.0%

About the data

Station census

2,023 rows, 1,757 after excluding low-power stations and translators/repeaters. Includes network group, owner, market, facility class, newsroom status and, where captured, newsroom contact details. Base records come from Wikipedia network affiliate lists retrieved September 24, 2026 (865 stations) and a 2018 StationIndex snapshot via the yinleon/LocalNewsDataset (1,158 stations).

Newsroom contacts

5,835 rows, each one published contact at one station — a named staff member, a news or assignment desk, or a department inbox. Contacts were crawled from station websites and date-stamped September 24–25, 2026. 5,120 emails are flagged 'printed on station website (crawler) – verify,' 302 as published on the station site or bio page, and 7 come from third-party listings.

Definitions

A station is a broadcast licence. A newsroom is a station that produces local news — 241 confirmed on the station site, 475 likely big-four affiliates. A newsroom with published contacts is a station entry in the contacts file (n = 470); 468 of those publish an email or phone.

Caveats

Crawled emails should be verified before use at scale. Staff-directory rows (4,593) carry an email but usually no title, so role-level analysis is limited to the 1,242 typed rows. Ownership and some affiliations reflect 2018 data for 1,158 stations. The 'likely newsroom' category is an inference from big-four affiliation, not a confirmation.