Whether you’re Twittering or using any of a number of available apps, there are plenty of ways to aggregate national and international news on your mobile device. But oddly, when it comes to that programming cornerstone of any television station, the local news, there’s really only one option: the LSN Mobile app Local on the Go.

Formerly called Local News, Local on the Go relaunched in the App Store in July with a spiffy new tile-based interface and a more customizable display. Users can set up the US city of their choice as a feed, and the app proceeds to populate it with news content from sources in that market, including sports, weather and horoscopes. Sporting mostly text- and image-based headlines and stories, the app welcomes newspaper providers but as of now, most of the content comes from TV stations, which can be prioritized according to preference and easily swiped between. The same goes for cities, offering quick and easy access to available news from multiple regions simultaneously.

“People like getting the local content for their city but also typically have at least three other potential use cases,” said Louis Gump, founder of LSN Mobile. “One is where they live, one is where they’re going to travel to, and the third is where people are that [the user cares] about. So we wanted to let them just swipe from left to right.”

Prior to the existence of Local on the Go, “there was a major hole around a go-to app for local media that is not branded to one local station,” said Gump. “You can get content in any number of products but nobody was really focused on local. There’s not another app that says, ‘if you want New York or LA or Miami…’ Nobody does that.”

Describing it as a “snacking app,” Gump said that Local on the Go encourages users to download participating media companies’ own apps should they wish for a “full meal.” Aiming to have content from at least one station from each of the top 100 markets in the US, Local on the Go was already featuring 14 of the top 15 at the time of this writing. The app makes money from advertisements, but a revenue sharing program is available to content providers. In building content partnerships, Gump said he didn’t find “a single head of digital at these local TV stations that said that less than 50% of their traffic was from mobile. The traffic is coming from mobile but they’re not monetizing it, so we wanted to solve that.”

The fragmentation of local markets has hurt stations in the mobile news space, said Gump. Even with massive conglomerates increasingly uniting many outlets under a few wide-reaching umbrellas, Gump said those big holding companies still only cover a portion of what’s available, and local mobile offerings have lagged behind those of the national markets.

“They don’t have to,” Gump said. “Customers deserve to have local offerings that are at least as robust as the national offerings.” Mobile, he continued, is “a perfect platform to get high-quality trusted content out to consumers in a brand-safe environment.” Naturally, Local on the Go intends to be viewers’ primary connection that platform.

Even in today’s smart phone and tablet-driven world, Gump said that “not enough local media companies are viewing mobile as way to reinvigorate their business as opposed to a rearguard holding action… TV stations have more opportunity than many newspapers do to get mobile right. Just because we had a broadcast signal that went to a TV somewhere, that doesn’t define our future. Instead, what is the future of TV on a small screen?”

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