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Bert Medina—the president of WPLG, a TV station in Miami—has a policy of meeting every new employee that comes into the building. Recently, that’s meant a lot of handshakes. Amid mass media-job losses over the past year and increases in network television licensing fees that have been mounting for a while longer, WPLG has, since last spring, made sixty new hires.

The growth has come as a direct result of WPLG’s decision, in August, to cut ties with ABC, with which it’s been affiliated since going on the air, sixty-nine years ago. Since the nineties, local TV stations such as WPLG have paid network fees for the rights to air national programming like Shark Tank and Good Morning America. This time around, after negotiating a new contract for months, WPLG concluded that ABC was demanding too much. “If we had taken the package that was given to us, we would have to do what many stations across the country have done,” Medina said. “Layoffs and cutbacks.” Instead, WPLG, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, made a rare choice to operate as an unaffiliated station, freeing up a significant portion of its budget for local programming. 

When announcing the decision, Medina was bullish: “Instead of sending our money to New York, we will keep it in our community and use that money to finance a massive expansion in local news,” he said in a press release. “Just watch us.” Since then, WPLG has gone from fifty-six hours a week of local shows to ninety-three. It has launched new programs—SoFlo Health and SoFlo Taste—and produced in-depth investigations, including a special about “Alligator Alcatraz,” a controversial Florida immigration detention facility. There were thirteen major candidates running for mayor of Miami in the most recent; WPLG had enough time to give every one of them a substantive live interview. This fall, during Hurricane Melissa, in order to best serve the large local Jamaican expat community in Broward County, where the station is based, WPLG reported live from Jamaica.

Over the past few decades, a handful of stations have gone unaffiliated. They include Jacksonville’s WJXT, which has been independent since 2002, and six stations whose owner gave up their affiliation with the CW in 2023. “We are excited to be in this unique position that allows us to reimagine our local brands and programming lineups,” an executive overseeing the six networks said at the time. “These are the first brush strokes on a fresh canvas.” Chicago’s WCIU—the station that gave the world Soul Train—started in 1964 as a stand-alone and, after various on-and-off affiliations in the decades since, returned to independence in 2024.

Atlanta News First, which dropped a thirty-one-year affiliation with CBS over the summer, is likely the closest analogue to WPLG. Owned by Gray Media, Atlanta News First walked away from its network affiliation, then hired more people and expanded its local coverage. “It’s been really exciting,” Erik Schrader, the general manager of Atlanta News First, said. “We have a hundred sixty-eight hours a week that we’re free to program the way we want. I’m taking calls on at least three different things that we’re working on that we wouldn’t have had space for if we had been an affiliate.” 

Schrader is especially grateful that the station no longer has to preempt network programming in favor of breaking local news. Before, he said, “we had to make those decisions all the time,” and regularly decided to stick to scheduled shows. Now, he said, when it comes to Atlanta viewers, “you can rest assured we’re gonna be talking about the thing you’re talking about.” That means more coverage of the University of Georgia’s football team, the Bulldogs, once restricted by the presence of network television. “College football trumps everything in the state of Georgia,” Schrader said. Now, “the second the game’s over, when it’s the only thing anybody wants to talk about,” Atlanta News First is on air, doing the same.

Tim Hanlon, the founder of a media advisory firm called the Vertere Group, sees in WPLG and Atlanta News First a replicable blueprint. “Affiliated stations are getting pissed off with the networks,” he said. “They’re taking all their money.” In part because of the increased value and cost of their live sports content, networks have been increasing the amounts they’re demanding affiliates pay. But it’s not just those network fees: TV stations can also make more money selling ads on their local news programming than they can on the national programming they license from networks. From the point of view of stations, Hanlon reasons, the decision is either “ride this thing down to obsolescence and keep squeezing pennies—or double down on local and strategically rethink what this station thing is. That’s an existential conversation.”

Medina said that feedback from viewers has been so positive it is “overwhelming.” Now, he believes, WPLG could be the “model for broadcasters in the twenty-first century. In every market there will be an opportunity for one or two to follow this model. And the sooner you do, the better it is for your community and the better it is for the business that you run.”

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