Reimagining Digital Engagement for Local News

At ABC Owned Television Stations I conducted an end-to-end competitive analysis of WABC/ABC7NY, FOX 5 NY, NBC New York, and CBS New York across YouTube, desktop web, news apps, weather products, and national and local news ecosystems.

The goal was not simply to identify what competitors were doing differently. I wanted to understand why those differences mattered to users, what behaviors they encouraged, and where WABC could strategically build on its existing strengths.

The research surfaced six opportunities across content packaging, video engagement, local discovery, weather utility, and monetization.

The same breaking story can now reach someone through YouTube, a news website, a livestream, an app notification, weather radar, or a national news platform. That fragmentation creates a different kind of product challenge.

WABC already had many of the right building blocks:

The question was not whether WABC needed more features. The opportunity was to understand how WABC's existing touchpoints could work harder together.

My research began expansively. I manually audited each competitor across multiple digital touchpoints, collecting screenshots, quantitative benchmarks, interaction patterns, publishing behavior, navigation structures, and qualitative observations.

Everyone published combinations of breaking news, crime, weather, interviews, livestreams, Shorts, and recurring news franchises. WABC already led the competitive set in local subscriber scale, so the opportunity was not audience acquisition from scratch. It was recognition.

WABC did not need to copy FOX's clickbait style or CBS's publishing volume. I recommended building on existing strengths through repeatable thumbnail systems around recognizable franchises and content types.

Video supported the experience rather than replacing written stories. The important differences came from how video was incorporated into the user journey.

Rather than adding more video, I proposed connecting existing touchpoints into a clearer engagement path where each step gives an already-engaged user a logical next action.

I proposed strengthening the ABC News to WABC pathway through:

People check weather when they wake up, commute, decide what to wear, make evening plans, travel, prepare for storms, and plan their weekend. That gives weather a fundamentally different product role from most news content. It can become a retention loop.

ABC7NY did not need an entirely new weather product. It already had the right foundation. The largest opportunity was not discoverability. It was interactivity: making the existing radar experience more exploratory and tool-like, borrowing the underlying utility principles from NBC without copying the experience directly.

WABC's comparatively cleaner experience created a different strategic opportunity. Instead of simply increasing ad density, monetization could be concentrated around moments where users had already demonstrated intent.

The goal was not to turn WABC into FOX, NBC, or CBS. It was to identify the mechanisms behind their strongest experiences and adapt only the pieces that strengthened WABC's own advantages. Learn from competitors without losing the identity users already trust.

The competitive difference was not what features exist. It was:

Rather than recommending that WABC simply copy competitors, I identified the principles behind their strongest experiences and translated them into opportunities that aligned with WABC's existing strengths.

The project shifted the competitive question from "what are our competitors doing?" to "what behaviors are their digital experiences creating, and how can we design stronger ones?"

This project changed the way I approach competitive research. A competitive audit becomes valuable when it moves beyond documenting features and starts explaining behavior. For every difference I found, I learned to ask why it works, what behavior it encourages, what business goal that behavior supports, what tradeoff it introduces, and whether the same principle would make sense for our product.

That intersection turned a broad competitor audit into an actionable digital strategy.