This week in Los Angeles, NATPE holds its annual LATV Festival, bringing together around a thousand content creators with agents, studio and network executives and new media experts.

Because of its origins as the TV Producers Boot Camp, many of the content creators are relative newcomers — making the LATV Festival a unique opportunity for both seasoned pros and ambitious raw talent to inform and assist one another.

Like NATPE's January meetings, participants encompass all major TV-related companies, but, unlike the big market and conference, few attendees hail from stations or station groups.

That's a missed opportunity because all that fresh blood attracted to the LATV Fest is the very thing stations need most — young producing talent with a gut-level understanding of what up-and-coming audiences want to see and how.

What's worse, few of these bright young wizards ever think of TV stations as a viable market for their wares, let alone a place to find a rewarding job.

But coincidentally, I may be able to do something about that. It's my privilege to produce and moderate the kickoff session on the first day of the LATV Festival, which is Digital Day, focusing on "all aspects of creating new media."

Our panel is entitled "Follow the Money or Just How Screwed ARE We?" Panelists include Kevin Klowden, managing economist for the Milken Institute and lead author of their definitive study of the economic impact of the writer's strike, Howard Homonoff, director, entertainment, media and communications adviser for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and attorney-writer-new media exec Tom Smuts, who during the writer's strike launched the writer-owned Founders Media Group.

The panel's purpose is twofold:

• First, as the title implies, we'll assess the short- and long-term economic fallout from the writer's strike, and examine what the writers and the studios ultimately won and lost by revealing some "real numbers" about who's-paying-what for new media content.
  
• Second, we'll advocate a healthy skepticism about new media hype, especially the notion that Internet publicity equals profits, and then highlight the true opportunities afforded to producers by digital technologies.

Now granted, these topics are slanted towards the bottom line needs of new media producers and distributors. But make no mistake: As growing numbers of viewers opt to watch your programs and advertising online or over mobile devices, your problems become inseparable from those facing Hollywood and the Silicone Valley. Unless broadcasters have a death wish, they've got to drive the conversation.

Here are just a few of the reasons.

• The timing is right: Despite the economic downturn and even because of it, stations have got to look ahead to where future revenues are coming from. That's going to require new and creative models for local programming with concurrent ad revenue. Nobody has yet discovered that magic formula, but whoever's not leading that search, is going to end up with the smallest slice of the new media pie.
  
• The talent is out there: As former Clear Channel President Don Perry observed in a recent MarketShare column, "In every market there are ... kids with editing equipment as good as ours. Let's turn those music video editing skills into good journalism and story construction." Who better to create hot new takes on such proven genres as talk, magazine and variety shows?
  
• Stations are great places to learn: Orson Wells once famously said that the movie business was "the greatest set of toy trains a boy ever had." That was before every studio executive felt compelled to play conductor. These days a TV station can offer far more freedom to experiment. Besides, are you doing anything better right now with Studio B or C?
  
• Stations offer the gifts or time and audience: Local TV is the ideal venue for refining on air talent and polishing the product — that is, if corporate management is smart enough to remember that really big hits often need time to improve and build audience.
  
• Stations make great test markets. The openness of the Internet makes it tough to get real world user feedback and still keep a new project under wraps. A limited trial on a local station is not a perfect solution, but still a attractive option.

These are some of the points I expect to be made in just the first fast-moving hour of three jam-packed days at the Festival. And already I can hear the skeptical questions.

Will any of this be easy? Of course not. Will there be missteps? Absolutely. But given half a chance at a station, quite a few of these producers will strike gold.

And what about the TV veterans working alongside these young upstarts? Well, they're going to experience a feeling that's been missing from stations during almost two decades of gradual budget cuts. They're going to have a hell of a lot of fun.

Needless to say, not everyone will agree with these views. And we'll highlight those alternative perspectives in a future Market Share column.

Market Share by Arthur Greenwald showcases innovative station projects every Monday in TVNEWSDAY. Share one of your own success stories by writing to Arthur at greenwald@tvnewsday.com.