Take The Breakfast Club or Fast Times at Ridgemont High or High School Musical, or any other Hollywoodized version of high school. Now map this on as a metaphor for local news ecologies.

Local TV journalists are the beautiful, popular people in this hierarchy — with local newspapers and local nonprofits some version of the freaks and geeks in the hallway. And this year, if American civic life is going to remain robust and vibrant through the 2024 election season, the future of journalism crowd will need to engineer a Mean Girls-style plot twist and team up with local TV news.

For whatever reason, those beautiful, stylish people in high school captured our admiration and envy, even if many of us dismissed them as vapid and uninformed. But even if local news is the journalism equivalent of the Plastics, well, they have the admiration and, at the very least, monopolize the attention of everyone else.

The future-of-journalism community can no longer afford to ignore this reality: Many people still depend on local TV as their main source of local news. While it’s unclear how much to trust a Morning Consult poll paid for by Spectrum News, the finding that 83% of Americans say they find local TV and radio the most trustworthy source of local news should give us great hope.

Many future-of-journalism stakeholders worry about the lack of trust in journalism among historically marginalized communities, and they’ve rightfully sought to redress the racist pasts and presents of newspapers. But the reality is that people of color in the U.S. are more likely to turn to TV news for local information than they are newspapers or digital-first local news. The historically marginalized audience doesn’t need to be cultivated and found via engagement research — it’s already there for local TV.

Here’s the Hollywood narrative arc: The popular kids stole your lunch (a.k.a. stealing stories right out of the newspaper without credit), gave you a wedgie (a.k.a. pivoted attention to their own power and influence), and never thought twice about your existence (many hard-working local TV journalists don’t have much personal off-the-clock connections with other news publishers).

But the plot turns upon some sort of realization of interdependency and mutual affirmation — that the popular kids can be nicer and better. We need the Plastics and the Plastics need us. Together, broadcast journalism can be more comprehensive and local information ecosystems can be stronger. This might take some unexpected partnerships and a little bit of moral suasion from the dorks who’ve long finished last in audience attention metrics.

Local TV news makes boatloads of money during election years, and their audiences have remained stable. But given the general substance of much of its content — fires, break-ins, crooked businesses, puppies — we tend not to think about local TV news as a source of critical civic information.

But this may be an unfair stereotype of the Mean Girls that merits a little introspection. Newspaper journalists in cities like Denver, Seattle, and San Diego will point to the high quality of local political coverage by their local television peers. Among a certain cut of New Yorkers, NY1 has cult-like status. Local newspapers still provide more original news coverage than local TV, but 2015 research suggested the ratios have shifted.

Concerningly, TV commercials are increasingly the way that people find out about important local issues — or at least twisted and distorted takes on them — as the local political news hole declines. This points to the importance of having broadcast news step it up in their own coverage of these local issues and candidates.

And here’s the most “as-if” Hollywood high-school takeaway: The most obvious entry point for media policy agitation is broadcast television. Nope, it’s not tax breaks or Google fees or subsidies for news publishers. The federal government already serves as a steward of the airwaves; the spirit behind broadcast television regulation is the closest we get to public media in the U.S..

The birth of television news is often talked about in media history as a way for station owners to respect the public interest of American viewers. Station licensing fights served as important correctives to problematic coverage, bringing Black leaders fighting for civil rights and gay activists demanding action against AIDS into people’s living rooms. Ironically, old-school media policy fights over broadcast television and the untapped potential of Wayne’s World-style public, educational, and governmental cable television (see Antoine Haywood’s work) could be the most efficient and the most effective way forward to improve local information ecologies.

We can demand better from those on our public airwaves. Keep the puppy-first coverage, the spray tans, and the attractive people talking about the weather who bring joy to so many each morning over coffee. But we can agitate, demand, and expect television journalists to do better civic coverage. And, in fairness, we can let the Plastics know when they’ve done well and bring them into our Freaks and Geeks conversation — so journalism can save the day and score one for the American republic.