Work · Case study
Dynamic geolocation on the NewsNation CTV app
Making a national news app feel local. How NewsNation CTV adapts its content, navigation, and discovery experience based on where a viewer actually is.
Overview
NewsNation is a national news brand. Nexstar also owns and operates the most local broadcast TV stations in the United States. The CTV app is a chance to connect those two: serve national programming as the default, and use the viewer's location to surface the local station, local news, and the rest of the Nexstar portfolio relevant to their market.
The problem
An app that's the same for everyone everywhere leaves the local connection on the table. An app that asks every viewer to pick their market gets a worse first session because of the friction. The right answer is to make the app behave locally by default, while still letting viewers change it.
My role
- Defined how the app determines a viewer's region, with explicit fallbacks for the cases when geolocation is unavailable or wrong
- Specified what content adapts by region: featured local station, local news rows, regional event programming
- Defined the override flow so viewers can manually pick their market and have that stick
- Worked with engineering and the CMS team on the data model for region-keyed content
- Defined the support and analytics paths so we could see how the regional logic was actually performing
Product decisions and trade-offs
- Server-side first, then refine. Initial region detection happens server-side from IP. That's "good enough" 80 percent of the time and avoids a client-side permission prompt.
- Manual override is a feature, not an admission of failure. Some viewers travel. Some live near a market boundary. The "change market" option had to be obvious and persistent.
- Default to national if regional resolution is uncertain. Don't guess wrong. A national experience is a fine default; a confidently wrong local one is worse.
- Region-keyed content in the CMS. Editorial can tag content by market without needing engineering involvement.
Outcomes
The NewsNation CTV experience now feels local in the markets that matter, while still serving national news as the core product. The override flow handles edge cases without getting in front of the typical viewer. The CMS model supports the editorial team adding new region-specific content without code changes.
What I learned
Geolocation is a probabilistic input, not a fact. Treat it that way and the product handles edge cases gracefully.
The override matters more than the default. Most viewers won't override. The ones who do are usually right about what they want, so the override has to work cleanly.