Featured, the AI co-pilot for PR, has added U.S. local TV stations to its platform, enabling PR teams to find stations covering a client's market and draft pitches to news desks while a story is still moving. The new capability, Find TV Stations, runs inside the same Featured chat used for Newsjacking, so users can set up Newsjacking with a client's beats and city markets, open a story card, and ask for the TV stations in that market, for example "Find TV stations in New York."
The company said the tool is available on every Featured plan, including Free, and is live now at Featured. The announcement lands as local news desks increasingly look for a local angle on national stories, and as PR teams face pressure to make pitches relevant to specific communities.
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, and only 16% say the pitches they receive usually reflect that community. That gap represents both a challenge and an opportunity for PR professionals, who can use station-level targeting to lead with the local angle and the person who can be on camera today.
Local television remains a dominant source of community news. 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. That trust makes local TV a high-value target for brands seeking credible placement.
At the same time, local TV newsrooms are operating with fewer resources. 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. Leaner newsrooms mean pitches that arrive with a ready-made local angle and an available on-camera expert are more likely to be used.
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, with contacts 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."
The move extends Featured's push into AI-assisted media relations. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively as standalone products within its portfolio. For PR teams, the addition of local TV stations could shorten the time between a breaking story and a pitch, while giving smaller brands access to the same newsroom contacts that larger agencies have long cultivated.
