Featured, the AI co-pilot for PR, has added U.S. local TV stations to its platform, allowing PR teams to identify and pitch local news desks while a story is still breaking. The new capability, Find TV Stations, runs inside the same Featured chat used for Newsjacking, so the workflow stays in one place: set up Newsjacking with the client's beats and city markets, open a story card in chat and ask for TV stations in the client's market (for example, "Find TV stations in New York"), and draft the pitch from a station card, leading with the local angle and the person who can be on camera today. Find TV Stations and Newsjacking are available on every Featured plan, including Free, at Featured.
The announcement matters because local news desks are constantly looking for a local angle on national stories, and most pitches fail to provide one. Muck Rack's State of Journalism 2026 survey found that 78% of journalists say a pitch is relevant when it directly affects the community their audience belongs to, yet only 16% say the pitches they receive usually reflect that community. Local television is where that audience is: the Pew Research Center reports that 65% of Americans get local news from local TV stations at least sometimes, and 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.
At the same time, local TV newsrooms are stretched thin. 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. That means fewer people are handling more work, and pitches that arrive with a ready-made local angle and a willing on-camera expert are more likely to get attention.
Featured's TV station database covers 1,757 U.S. TV stations and carries newsroom contacts for 470 of them across 195 TV markets, including news desk emails for 365 stations and news desk 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 shows which stations it can draft a pitch to. "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."
By bringing station discovery and pitch drafting into the same interface as newsjacking, Featured aims to shorten the time between a story breaking and a relevant pitch reaching a local news desk. For PR teams, that could mean a better shot at coverage in a medium that still commands significant trust and reach, especially when national outlets are inundated with generic pitches. The feature is live now, and the company says users can start free without a credit card.
