Pick a market, any market, in which one local TV station's newscasts crush the competition. Experience that station's -- and its competitors' -- smartphone apps. You will find the winner's app more helpful and user-friendly that competitors' apps.

Nine-in-ten Americans own a smartphone, up from 35% in Pew Research Center's first such survey in 2011. So, although not mathematically in-tab to ratings, online content contributes to on-air numbers. Local TV's linear broadcast product earns your trust, and the station empowers you with on-demand convenience. It won't confine its use case to living room consumption, and radio shouldn't settle for in-car + listen-at-work.

Chunks
That TV station likely live-streams its local newscast, just as radio station apps play what's sent to the transmitter. And in my experience, radio station apps that autoplay when launched get more traffic than apps that ask you to click more than once to listen live. No need to explain portability to Baby Boomers who are lifelong AM/FM listeners, and whose first radio fit in the pocket (and whose annual USA retail spend is a demographically disproportionate $548.1 billion). And anyone younger already lives on a smartphone.

TV has a head start fitting its work into the phone, because 6 and 11PM newscasts are already stacks-of-stories, easily repurposed online as short, searchable, single-topic videos. But too often, a News/Talk radio station's on-demand content is merely hourlong airchecks, not the moment within that hour that somehow enables listeners. Got "3 ways to avoid [dilemma]" or "...to save big on___?" If you isolate those clips for easy access on apps, use your air to say it's there, and link that mp3 to your social media, it gets shared, and you earn more use.

Another opportunity to make the audience the show.
Recently, a station I monitor had a technical glitch with its text system. Normally, listeners can use that same call-in number to text OR send a voice text. But for several days, the text function malfunctioned, so hosts explained that listeners could leave voice messages, and what they got was GOLD.

"Use the QR code on your screen..."
Another TV advantage. Radio doesn't have a screen, but should put its QR code every public-facing place it can. Link it to your app install.

Think B-to-B too. Example, from my 20-year client: