The biggest stories often come out of the smallest newsrooms.
In 2025, a time where digital town squares (X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram) allow everyone instant access to each other and the ability to share live updates from any location, where do the best assigners look to get ahead on the most competitive stories?
Getting to a story in its earliest stages is a key factor in competitive journalism. We can’t listen to every police scanner or read every community board post in the country. However, we can look at what our colleagues, journalists covering the areas they live in with mics in their hands at the election parties, crime scenes, and council meetings, are doing.
And when we join in on the coverage, we credit and hyperlink them up high. The newsrooms that make up Pleroma Media are doing just that.
Here’s my advice to newer assigners and editors working in digital news; build your local news list. Follow the on-air reporters, the do-it-all stations that cover the communities they live in. They know what’s up.
I scroll through dozens of local news stations and papers every day, looking for the next story that could captivate a national audience, because so often, that’s where those stories are reported first.
The case of Kansas moms Veronica Butler and Jillian Kelley, who were kidnapped and murdered by members of “God’s Misfits,” originated from a missing persons report, published first by local Oklahoma and Kansas news outlets.
The story of Xavier Jones, the young teenager who walked six miles to attend his own graduation and was later gifted a bike, car, and full college scholarship by his community, was a small local news piece well before CBS Evening News got wind of it.
Before she was a household name, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s shocking primary win over 10-term Democrat Congressman Joe Crowley, and her viral reaction to winning, was first shown on live television by NY1 News and Ruschell Boone (Shoutout to my fellow Chelsea Market alums!)
Here’s a small sample of the list I check out nearly every day. What station is at the top of your news list?
- KRQE Albuquerque
- Spectrum News NY1 New York
- AZ Family Phoenix
- WIVB News 4 Buffalo
- KTUL Oklahoma
- KCTV Kansas City
- KBOI Idaho
- WTHR Indiana