Featured, the AI co-pilot for PR, has integrated U.S. local TV stations into its platform, allowing PR teams to identify and pitch to local news desks while stories are still developing. The new capability, Find TV Stations, operates within the same Featured chat used for Newsjacking, streamlining the workflow for PR professionals.
The addition matters because local television remains a dominant source of news for Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, 65% of Americans get local news from local TV stations at least sometimes. Moreover, in the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report, 56% of U.S. respondents rated local TV news trustworthy, ahead of every national brand in the survey. This trust makes local TV a critical channel for PR pitches that resonate with communities.
Muck Rack's State of Journalism 2026 survey highlights a gap: 78% of journalists say a pitch is relevant when it directly affects the community their audience belongs to, but only 16% say the pitches they receive usually reflect that community. Featured's new feature aims to close that gap by helping PR teams quickly find stations in a client's market and draft pitches with a local angle.
The workflow is straightforward: users set up Newsjacking with the client's beats and city markets. When a story card arrives, they can open it in chat and ask for TV stations in the client's market, for example, "Find TV stations in New York." Then they can draft a pitch to the news desk from a station card, leading with the local angle and the person who can be on camera today.
Featured's TV station database covers 1,757 U.S. TV stations and includes newsroom contacts for 470 of them across 195 TV markets, with news desk emails for 365 stations and phone numbers for 332. It also holds 269 department desk addresses for weather, sports, consumer, and investigative teams. Contacts were collected from station websites in September 2026. Users can search by state, TV market, city, or call sign, and Featured indicates which stations it can draft a pitch to.
The feature is available on every Featured plan, including Free, making it accessible to PR teams of all sizes. "Every national story has a local version, and the local news desk usually wants it the same day," said Brett Farmiloe, Founder and CEO of Featured. "Newsjacking finds the story and the angle. Now the stations in your client's market are one more question in the same chat."
The announcement comes amid a challenging landscape for local TV news. The RTDNA/Newhouse survey published in September 2026 counted 26,458 full-time local TV news employees in 2025, down 2.2% in a year, with nearly two-thirds of stations relying on multimedia journalists who shoot, write, and edit their own stories. This resource constraint means news desks are often stretched thin, making efficient, targeted pitches more valuable than ever.
By integrating local TV station data into its Newsjacking tool, Featured provides PR teams with a way to quickly respond to breaking news with relevant, localized pitches. The feature is live now at featured.com.
