Some three months and and seventeen days ago we asked the question in one of our first posts here on The Topline, “Can One Hire Save Tegna.” That hire was Adrienne Roark, who was decamping from the mess at CBS to take the helm as Chief Content Officer at television group owner Tegna—where a mess of a different sort awaited.

We’ve waited since then to see what course she would chart to start dealing with problems that have been years in the making. Yesterday, we learned of one of them. Well, three of them actually, with the announcement of three new Vice Presidents of Content at Tegna.

Carol Fowler from the company’s WXIA-TV in Atlatna, Julie Wolfe from KING-TV in Seattle, and Chris Peña, who has been with the consulting firm Blue Engine, will step into the new VP roles with regional responsibilities for stations in the Mid-South, West and Midwest regions, respectively. Given that the announcement of their new positions detailed them covering only 23 of the company’s 51 current markets, we’d expect there are more Vice Presidents yet to be named, assuming each market will be overseen by someone at a VP level.

Tegna recently made annother announcement that it is adding over 100 hours of local news programming across its portfolio of stations. That would seem like a major expansion, except that the bulk of those hours are said to be expanding morning local news programming into the 7 to 9am hours, via each station’s “plus” branded streaming outlet. So this appears more of an extension of existing local news programming to an online-only audience, while network programming is being carried and where local competitors are likely to be already in place—both with over the air and over the top coverage.

The larger challenge that still awaits the content C-Suite in the Tyson HQ is turning “the ship” around after the recent years that it has been a bit adrift. Ever since the Joel Cheatwood-led attempt to install a news template across the stations that was built on following social media trends. The audience didn’t follow, but then there was the extended period of uncertainty from Standard General’s 8-billion dollar bid to take over Tegna, which ultimately failed, but not before depositing $136 million into Tegna’s treasury. Hopefully that helped cover the exit packages for the corporate leadership under previous CEO Dave Lougee, who all began disembarking “down the gangway” as it were.

And we almost forgot about the recent decimation of all creative services & promotion types at the stations, in favor of a handful of regionalized CSD’s, which the company seemed to have to reverse course on in record time.

All of this has left many of the company’s strongest stations far less than their former selves, while weaker properties have been working hard just to tread water. We wouldn’t presume to sort which stations fall into each of these groups, though we are relatively certain that is just what Adrienne Roark has been working to figure out for the past three months…and say, sixteen days. Now it appears that she has recruited three trusted lieutenants to help the cause. And perhaps there are a few more yet to join the team.

Or perhaps there are a few markets that might be sold or traded when the FCC starts its promised deregulation effort and breaks the dam on station trading that we forecast last Wednesday. (Get your own cool metaphor, TV NewsCheck.)

One interesting aspect of Tegna’s Monday announcement for the three new VPs of Content is a description that along with overseeing news content for a regional group of stations, each will also oversee an area of “content priority” such as weather coverage, morning news strategy, sales and sponsorships, solutions-based journalism and so forth. Given the press release’s language that states “each will be well-positioned to help identify trends and when appropriate, foster cross-station collaboration that enables journalists to produce more in-depth stories from local perspectives.”

We sure hope that isn’t some lofty-sounding corporate speak that translates into more centralizing or “hubbing” of content into so-called “centers for innovation.” The business has seen enough of that hidden iceberg in the past decade, which others have run into at full speed—all while thinking they were on course to reach a destination of success.

Call us hopeless optimists, but we are pulling for the team at Tegna to succeed on their transformational voyage. The broadcasting industry needs more healthy local stations that are doing more real innovating than focusing on collecting a huge pile of industry awards that the audience doesn’t see as treasure of any kind.

Don’t even get us started on that rant.