Featured, an AI co-pilot for public relations, has added U.S. local TV stations to its platform, allowing PR teams to identify and pitch to stations covering a client’s market while a news story is still developing. The new capability, called Find TV Stations, operates within the same Featured chat used for Newsjacking, the company’s tool for flagging breaking stories in a client’s beats and cities.
The workflow is designed to keep pitching in one place: users set up Newsjacking with the client’s beats and city markets; when a story card arrives, they open it in chat and ask for TV stations in the client’s market, for example, “Find TV stations in New York“; then they 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. Find TV Stations and Newsjacking are available on every Featured plan, including the free tier.
The addition matters because local news desks routinely seek local angles on national stories. 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 reaches that audience: 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. 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 staffing model can make timely, locally focused pitches more valuable to news desks.
“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.”
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. The feature is live now at Featured.
