About a year ago, Cleveland’s Fox affiliate, WJW, added an extra half hour of news starting at 4 a.m. That brought the total of live, local programming to 12-and-a-half hours a day—and more than 14 hours including repeats. “During the time you’re awake, pretty much we’re in local news,” says WJW general manager Paul Perozeni.

The station’s expanded lineup is part of a broader effort by owner Tribune Media to increase local newscasts. The goal? To grab advertisers looking for live programming during which viewers might be more likely to see commercials, especially those from the political campaigns and super PACs collectively pouring billions into television advertising.

In 2012, WJW collected more than $30 million in revenue from political ads, about a fifth of Tribune’s total annual revenue from such ads. Perozeni wants to do better this year. “No one is going to DVR the morning news and watch it at 10 o’clock at night,” he says. “From an advertiser’s standpoint, that makes a station like WJW very appealing.”

In the past three years, Tribune’s 42 stations have added 170 hours a week of local news programming, for a total of more than 80,000 hours annually. Tribune executives said in a May earnings call that they expect to increase political ad business by 20 percent this year from 2012.

Other media companies are following suit. David Amy, chief operating officer of Sinclair Broadcast Group, told analysts that his company has added 33 hours a week of local news during the past 18 months at some of its 173 stations, including in West Palm Beach, Fla.