Your State of the City Was Built for the Wrong Room

When I was CDO in Gilbert, I watched neighboring cities do this every year. A big broadcast. A live cable cut. And a digital version that was basically an afterthought. The question the team was solving for was "did we hit the 7pm slot." The question they were not solving for was "who will watch this, share this, and remember this."

Those are two completely different products.

Here is the split in the numbers. Thirty-six percent of US adults still subscribe to cable or satellite (Pew Research, July 2025). Eighty-four percent use YouTube, including ninety-five percent of adults under thirty (Pew Research, November 2025). And YouTube now accounts for nearly thirteen percent of all television viewing time in American households, more than Netflix, more than the Disney bundle (Nielsen Gauge, December 2025).

YouTube is on the TV now. On the same screen. Through the same remote. Most people calling it "streaming" are just watching television, and they are watching it on YouTube.

If your production team is still treating YouTube as the place the file goes after the "real" broadcast is done, you have the stack upside down.

In Gilbert, we did not make a state of the city broadcast. We made a documentary.

That meant a production workflow closer to something you would see on a streaming platform than a council meeting feed. B-roll shoots around the city at dawn for the light. Interviews with actual residents, not just department heads or the mayor. A narrative arc planned months ahead, built around what mattered to the people we served that year. This production was Emmy-nominated.

The view count that told me the most about whether the work was landing was not the one from inside our city limits. It was the views from outside Arizona. Prospective residents. Business scouts. Families weighing a move across the country. None of those people were ever going to sit on our cable channel on a Tuesday night. And they also don't want to come to an in-person event. You need to go them. Meet them where they are. They saw the documentary because it was built to travel past the franchise boundary.

Make a piece of content that your residents would share, could live on YouTube, travel through shares, get picked up by local media, get forwarded by realtors and that is evergreen and could be shown for weeks or months.

The equity argument for keeping cable is the one I used to make myself. Older residents, lower-income residents, residents in rural areas. They depend on cable, the line goes, so cable stays.

I had Gilbert's cable channel turned off. The residents who needed civic information figured it out. Cable was a workaround that kept us from having to ask whether anyone was watching.

The municipalities that have already shifted are not doing anything magical. They are livestreaming on YouTube and Facebook first and building clips the next morning. Municipal livestreaming has grown two hundred and seventy-one percent since March 2019 (ACM, 2023). State legislatures have started to mandate it. Indiana's livestream requirement took effect last July. California's goes into effect this July. The direction is set.

If you are still building your production around cable, you are building for the room where the chairs are already empty. The residents you need to reach are on their phones. Start there.

My first boss was Betsy Forhan at MTV. Two-time Peabody winner. She ran the True Life documentary series for close to two decades. Hundreds of episodes. I learned how to tell a story on camera working for her. On Episode 10, we got talking about why True Life worked as a format, and she said something I think about every time I plan a civic production.

"It was an umbrella that was trusted by our audience. So they would go different places with you."

That is the whole argument for a digital-first workstream. Residents will follow your city's video brand into a forty-minute state of the city, a three-minute clip about a snow storm response, a two-minute thing from the mayor on the day of a budget vote, or a ten-second moment on their phone during lunch. But only if the umbrella is trusted. And only if the production workflow was built to deliver into all those different shapes from the start.

Cable cannot carry that umbrella.

TODAY: pull the view count from your last state of the city broadcast. Live cable estimate, YouTube, Facebook, city website. Line them up. Then ask your production team which number they were working to move.

Talk soon,

Dana