This past Monday afternoon, Sinclair Broadcast Group President & CEO Chris Ripley sent an all-hands email telling the employees that “our Board of Directors has begun a process to explore strategic opportunities for the Broadcast division and to evaluate a possible separation of our Ventures division.” The email went on to explain how “this review is about unlocking new opportunities through innovation and scale” and about how the company has expressed in the past “the standalone value of our ventures and broadcast assets exceeds what the market has historically recognized."
Ripley tried to address the obvious fears that his email would generate amongst the workers with an encouraging “As far as what that means for us all, it’s business as usual.”
The industry press lit up with the headline that Sinclair was undertaking a "comprehensive strategic review" of its business.
Checking in with our universal BS translator device to decode this swirl of corporate PR puffery, we were greeted with the response: “Reply hazy, try again.” So we put down our “Magic 8-Ball” and began scratching our heads in puzzled bemusement.
Why on Earth would anyone put out such a collection of words posing as informative and helpful, but with the obvious meaning of "we don’t really know what we are going to be doing, and we don’t know how long it will take. And when we are done, we may be buying, selling, merging, or doing something else, but don’t you worry about it.
In essence, the proverbial "Nothing to see here, folks--so just keep moving along."
We’d guess there also is nothing to wonder out loud about—except there are the billions that were pissed away in that whole Diamond Sports Group fiasco, when Sinclair spent $10.6 billion to buy Fox Sports’ former group of regional sports channels. That bet is now worth (checks notes...) yes, it is worth absolutely $0 today, Sinclair even had to spend $500 million just to settle lawsuits that came in trying to extract itself from the business.
Now comes Monday's announcement that left everyone shaking their heads.
Here’s what we think it means: Sinclair needs to find some room to maneuver, especially as the deluge of real--and rumored--deals for local television stations begins. It has a large portfolio of local TV station assets that still have some value in the current marketplace. And there has been much speculation that Sinclair would like to be in any of the conversations for the local station properties that are—or soon will be—up for grabs. That’s all in their Broadcast division. As for the Ventures division, things like the company’s "digi-networks” (like Comet, Charge, and TBD) and Tennis Channel would likely prosper more if they weren’t tied to all the “questionable long-term prospects of local television stations.
Sinclair, which began life as a technology company, selling UHF television transmitters as Dielectric, still has that business along with interests in various firms deeply involved in the slow-moving transition to “NexGen TV” which is the ATSC 3.0 television standard. It also has investments ans real estate holdings, according to the company’s website.
That “comprehensive strategic review” would seem to mean that the company is going to try to figure out what it needs to do from a list of possible options that includes too many conceivable (and maybe some inconceivable) options to list here. By Tuesday, the company announced it was spinning off its “NewsOn” app, which provided streaming of local newscasts from over 275 stations from over 135 markets. NewsOn was a promising marketplace for local news that never reached its potential. It will now be part of the streaming technology company Zeam.
But the truly puzzling thing, to us at least, is the timing of Sinclair’s announcement. For weeks, Sinclair’s name has been popping us as being involved with everything from being a possible buyer for the Cox Media Group stations that Apollo Global Management wants to sell—to thinking about selling off some of their own smaller markets where they presently own stations. Then there is the persistent chatter that Sinclair might be willing to finance some sales of those smaller stations. That’s not a crazy idea, given that financial institutions aren’t as interested in writing loans for someone looking to finance their acquisitions of those stations.
All of these potential moves would seem to position SBGI as still the hunter, rather than becoming the hunted.
We were trying to decode the cryptic tea leaves coming our the company’s headquarters in Cockeysville, Maryland, when a couple of readers started asking if we believed that there may be some major “head fakes” going on in the industry, given all of the recent “hot takes” on who is (and isn’t) going to be buying stations in the near future.
Sure, the whole Wall Street Journal article last Friday about Nexstar being in talks to acquire TEGNA’s portfolio of stations got everyone talking, including us. But what if that story was strategically leaked to disrupt other negotiations that were quietly going on? What if TEGNA were a company buying rather than selling TV stations? One line of purely speculative thinking involved the idea that if TEGNA acquired another group or a package of stations, it could become to big for anyone else to swallow up. Certainly, the executives in the C-Suite of TEGNA’s Tysons, Virginia offices may not be ready to turn over the keys to the company and just walk away. Taking on an acquisition of more stations could act as a “poison pill” to hold off any potential acquirers of TEGNA itself.
As we said before, this particular game of "musical chairs" for the largest owners of local television stations may just be getting started, and every CEO is likely trying to figure out if there will be any chairs left open whenever the music stops.
So there probably are a whole bunch of “comprehensive strategic reviews” going on right now. Our advice to those of you still working as if “it's business as usual?” Keep those resumes and reels updated, friends.
Our experience is that those “comprehensive strategic reviews” rarely lead to plans to keep the same number of employees.
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In this past Saturday’s special edition on the still-developing news that Nexstar is in talks to acquire the television stations of TEGNA, we initially noted that there weren’t many markets where Nexstar might have run afoul of the current FCC limitation on owning two or the “big four” network-affiliated stations. Our eagle-eyed readers quickly began pointing out that we had missed some obvious markets where our original observation was in error.
We had fully disclosed our somewhat impaired state at the original time of publication. We don’t make excuses for our errors. Even if we had a really good one, which we certainly did. But we don’t, so we hereby acknowledge our oversights. In this case, all 31 of them.
Now that we have had some additional time to recover, we can assure you that we have diligently compared both companies' portfolios and can accurately report all of the 30 markets where Nexstar’s current 201 stations will have duopolies when they add in the 64 stations that TEGNA currently has. In some markets, there could be “triopolies"—or perhaps even more?
Of course, as we have stated before, this amalgamation is still a theoretical one until there is an official announcement. And then there is the small matter of when the FCC will decide to announce its promised reform, rejection, or even retention of the agency’s television ownership rules. Surely someone in the commission has given Perry Sook & Company some assurance that by the time they are ready to close this multi-billion dollar transaction, there will be a more receptive environment than what the deal would face under the long-time rules from “a different era."
Here are the 31 current markets where a merged Nexstar and TEGNA station group would have overlaps between the so-called “big four” network affiliates. We’ve also noted the CW stations that will be included in those markets, as Nexstar owns that network as well. Other call letters are either affiliated with other networks or are independent. (And one more note--yes, we know some of the full market names are hyphenated with multiple cities, but we just used the first city to make this list fit a bit better on a page and be easier to read.)
Indianapolis, IN WTTV (CBS), WXIN (FOX), WTTK WTHR (NBC)
Knoxville, TN WATE (ABC) WBIR (NBC)
Little Rock, AR KARK (NBC), KLRT (FOX), KASN (CW) KTHV (CBS)
Memphis, TN WREG (CBS) WATN (ABC) & WLMT (CW)
Midland, TX. KMID (ABC) & KPEJ (FOX) KWES (NBC)
New Orleans, LA WGNO (ABC) & WNOL (CW) WWL (CBS)
Norfolk, VA WAVY (NBC) & WVBT (FOX) WVEC (ABC)
Phoenix, AZ KAZT (CW) KPNX (NBC)
Portland, OR KOIN (CBS) & KRCW (CW) KGW (NBC)
Sacramento, CA KTXL (FOX) KXTV (ABC)
San Angelo, TX KLST (CBS) & KSAN (NBC) KIDY (FOX)
San Diego, CA KSWB (FOX) & KUSI KFMB (CBS)
St. Louis, MO KTVI (FOX) & KPLR KSDK (NBC)
Tampa, FL WFLA (NBC), WTTA (CW), WSNN WTSP (CBS)
Washington, DC WDCW (CW) & WDVM WUSA (CBS)
Waco, TX KWKT (FOX) & KYLE KCEN (NBC)
Wilkes-Barre, PA WBRE (NBC) & WYOU (CBS) WNEP (ABC)
And that’s it. Just 31 markets where owning two of these stations was once unthinkable. Now, it seems like it won't be a big problem. And given the size of this would-be television group behemoth with 265 stations under its control, one starts to wonder if anyone would try to get bigger than 265 local stations under one roof.
But it is only Monday, and the week is still young. Who knows what might happen next?
One thing is for sure. We will definitely be drinking again. And long before this week is over.
We'll spare you the ubiquitous "Breaking News" animation here, and our apologies for interrupting your weekend with a special Saturday edition of "The Topline."
But much like the childhood game of musical chairs, the music has started in the real-life game of television station acquisitions--and already the chairs are filling up. One wonders who will be left standing when the music stops. And oddly enough, it might just be the group that everyone thought would be the first one taken in this breaking wave of deals.
We'll return to that thought in just a moment.
Honestly, we thought that yesterday's big announcement about Gray picking off ten of the beleaguered Allen Media stations would be the only big industry news for a Friday in August. So we got on a plane to attend a private family celebration--and didn't check our iPhone frequently for the rest of the day, thinking the weekend would get off to a quiet start.
Then we woke up on this Saturday morning to the Wall Street Journal's reporting late Friday afternoon--that Nexstar is in talks to acquire TEGNA. (Thanks once again to our friend Rick Gevers' email list for the heads up on this story. Yes, you really should be subscribed to his updates, if you aren’t already!)
We'll second Rick's rare use of the word "seismic" in categorizing the word of this potential transaction. Admittedly, we had heard from a couple of people speculating in the past few weeks that perhaps such a billion-dollar deal was in the making. Still, we were too quick to dismiss it as being "much too big of an early test of the FCC's appetite to seek approval for."
Looks like we were too short-sighted in that analysis, at least for the moment.
Sure, we can understand the appeal of putting the 64 TEGNA stations in the Nexstar portfolio of 201 stations, which is at present the television industry's largest group. We haven't done the market-by-market analysis yet (Candidly, we're still nursing a little hangover from last night's celebration.) At first glance, it doesn't seem like there are any obvious markets where the possible union would run into significant problems.
In Dallas and Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C., where both Nexstar and TEGNA own stations, the existing Nexstar properties aren't "big four" network affiliates. However as a sharp reader pointed out to us after we initially published this item, in St. Louis, Nexstar owns both KTVI, the Fox affiliate and KPLR, the CW affiliate already. Would the FCC allow adding TEGNA’s KSDK as an NBC affiliate to that mix? Would that concern the FCC any less than the Gray-Allen Media deal announced earlier on Friday, in terms of market consolidation with station duopolies.
We are curious about the fate of Tegna's newly expanded corporate content staff, particularly those who have just been hired or promoted to VP roles. Once upon a time, not that long ago, Nexstar had its own regional content leaders. Those folks were scattered into other positions with the company when Susan Tully arrived as Nexstar's SVP of Local Content Development some six years ago.
By contrast, Adrienne Roark just arrived in her gig as Chief Content Officer at TEGNA back in March after decamping from her three-year stint at Paramount-CBS. She just installed her group of content VPs in the past couple of weeks. Those half dozen or so news director positions that are currently open at Tegna may have just gotten a bit harder to fill.
However, the reality on the larger level is that the Brendan Carr-led Federal Communications Commission still hasn't announced its long-awaited deregulation of the television ownership rules. All this activity that is underway is seemingly what casinos would call "a bet on the come." Meaning it is a wager on a hand that is not yet completed, but has the potential to improve into a winning hand.
And there are billions of dollars at stake, and unfortunately, many jobs are suddenly uncertain as well.
That brings us back around to what we noted off the top of this column. Not to put too fine a point on it, but where the heck are the Cox Media stations in all of this dealing? Many industry observers—us included—thought that a deal to acquire those primo properties was going to be the first blockbuster deal to get done in this new wave of station swapping.
Yet, so far, nothing but crickets have been heard from Atlanta and Cox's majority owners at Apollo Global Management in New York City.
Sure, the music is still playing, and there are chairs still open. But for just how long?
Barring any more shifts in the tectonic plates of the television business for the rest of this weekend, we'll be back on Monday with some more thoughts on what's next for the local television industry. Hope to see you then.
And since we have your attention at the moment, can we respectfully ask that you please subscribe to TVND by clicking that subscribe button at the top of this web page? It's absolutely free to do so; we won't charge you anything beyond the opportunity to be among the first to read our dispatches in your email. If you are already reading us from your inbox, we sincerely thank you for your support.
That word being “duopolies”(as we earlier wrote.) And they must have a decent line of credit available to keep buying up stations.
Today, it’s ten of the Allen Media stations—which from all accounts have mostly been stripped down to being just a license and a bunch of leases for everything else. Hopefully, Gray got a good deal to add seven more duopolies—looks like they paid an average of about $17 million per station, for a total of $171 million. (Of course, some were worth more than others.)
Here’s the press release. A tip of the TVND fedora to our friend Rick Gevers for reporting this update via his excellent email list.
The Walt Disney Company has been very busy lately with its property located not in Central Florida, nor in Southern California, nor even in some exotic International location, but rather in the once sleepy town known to sports fans everywhere as Bristol, Connecticut.
Just this very morning, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (the original meaning of the letters ESPN) announced it had signed "a landmark deal" to bring the mega events of professional wrestling giant WWE to the new direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service that ESPN is just about to launch. The agreement, which begins in 2026, is reported to be worth over $1.6 billion.
Leaning a bit more into the “E for Entertainment" side of the business on that one.
But that announcement comes just one day after the ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro and his team in Bristol announced an even bigger “landmark deal” when it rocked the sports television world by giving up 10% of its equity to acquire the National Football League’s media assets, including the NFL Network and popular “RedZone” channel.
That transaction, which is far more in the “S for Sports” side of the business, as the NFL is far and away the most popular sport in the country. That deal is valued “in the neighborhood of" $3 billion.
Busy times in Bristol, indeed.
Those business deals were an essential part of Disney’s third-quarter financial results that were reported this morning before the markets opened on Wall Street. Make no mistake, though, the headline on the company’s revenues wasn’t ESPN or any other part of the media business but rather those folks pushing through the gates of Disney’s theme parks around the globe. Income at the theme parks grew by double digits to contribute to the $23.7 billion the company made in the period ending June 28th. Income from what Disney labels its “conventional entertainment TV” dropped by some 28% and the movie business actually suffered a loss.
So much for “The Fantastic Four” saving the “House of the Mouse."
Back to ESPN, Disney Chairman Bob Iger made it clear in this morning’s earning call that the streaming business is a key part of the future of the company, as it will rely on the two pillars of the existing Hulu platform and the new ESPN one that will launch in time for the return of football of all sorts, on August 21st. Streaming is already profitable for Disney, with the company reporting a quarterly profit of close to $350 million in that part of the business.
The new monthly ESPN streaming subscription will set sports fans back $30 a month when it launches, including all the ESPN channels from the original to Ocho and promised new interactive features. The ability to split your TV screen and watch up to four things at once is a must-have for hyperkinetic sports watchers already. We assume the ability to add live gambling data from the ESPNBET service might be forthcoming. If you’d like to add Hulu and Disney+ so the children have something to watch when you are not gambling away their college money, that will only be another $6 a month.
Those numbers explain why ESPN was typically the largest part of the programming cost of your monthly cable bill for many years.
Speaking of costs, the NFL media acquisition sheds some light on precisely what ESPN is worth these days. By our calculator, if 10% of ESPN that the NFL will own is worth $3 billion, then the whole company must be valued at about $30 billion. A reminder that Disney only owns 80% of ESPN. The other 20% is owned by Hearst, which acquired that minority position from RJR Nabisco in November of 1990. At that time, the initial purchase by Hearst was reported to be around $170 million. That would mean that the investment has grown to be worth $6 billion today.
A pretty decent return for Hearst by any measure.
Bloomberg reports that the deal to give 10% of ESPN to the NFL, in exchange for the NFL Network, RedZone, and some international games that aired exclusively on the NFL Network, was equally split between Disney and Hearst, the former giving up 8% of its share and the latter parting with just 2%. In other words, each gave up an equal 10% of their total equity in ESPN to take in the National Football League as the company’s third owner.
What this seems to set up is that Disney will probably follow the lead of Comcast and Warner Bros.-Discovery and seek to spin off ESPN in the next 12 to 18 months into a separate company. Rich Greenfield, the respected media and technology analyst at Lightshed Partners, said just that on Bloomberg TV this morning. We think he is correct with that analysis.
Greenfield included ABC in his prediction of a stand-alone entity for ESPN. Pairing the declining revenues of those “conventional entertainment TV” assets with the very profitable “Worldwide Leader in Sports” makes sense. It would allow Disney to focus on the “intellectual property” pipeline between its movie studios and theme parks. (We’d include the Disney Cruise Line as basically “floating theme parks.”)
Just what that will mean for the Disney-owned American Broadcasting Company and its owned and operated stations is anybody’s guess. Among the guessing would surely be the affiliates of the ABC network, who have to be wondering what will happen to their sports programming, which is all under the “ESPN on ABC” umbrella, including the simulcast of Monday Night Football games that has been a bright spot in the broadcast network’s primetime schedule.
Not sure that getting axe-throwing or cornhole championships from “The Ocho” would be quite the same thing.
When we were working at ESPN in its first decade, way back in the mid-1980s, ABC Sports wanted as little to do with the nascent sports network as possible. One wonders if the opposite is the case, some forty years later.
Because we sure don’t expect the folks in Bristol to be singing “Be Our Guest” anytime soon.
Here we are at the start of another work week. What this week will bring in the business of television is anybody’s guess. But in this week or the ones soon ahead, we expect a growing number of deals to be announced, with more local TV stations being sold or traded--and more local duopolies being created. Today, however, we’d like to focus on this modest idea we had, to see if it makes sense to anyone other than those of us trying to think up an idea to start a new column for a new week.
You see, our recent travels have had us jumping back and forth between US time zones. Since we live primarily in the Central Time Zone, we find it is always a slight adjustment to be in the Eastern Time Zone, where the late news starts at 11 pm, rather than the 10 pm hour that we are used to. That’s likely true because we spent our first half-century living in the East. But that shift in thinking about time got us to thinking: It is time to consider the radical idea of shrinking TV’s primetime?
Back in 2009, NBC faced the interesting problem of having too many late-night hosts, with both Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien on its roster. In 1992, NBC picked Leno to replace the legendary Johnny Carson over David Letterman. Letterman, who had been waiting in the wings with his 12:30 pm show for NBC, then decamped for CBS, where he successfully hosted “The Late Show” for 22 years. Fast forward to 2004, when Leno had told the network that when his five-year extension expired in 2009, he would be ending his time behind “The Tonight Show” desk. NBC was ready for that move, having signed Letterman’s 12:35 pm replacement, Conan O’Brien, to take over “The Tonight Show."
When the 2009 deadline arrived, Leno had a change of heart. But NBC had already committed to elevating Conan O’Brien to “The Tonight Show, in large part because he was drawing a substantially younger audience in the later time slot. The network was anxious to keep Leno on the air because his ratings were still substantial. So NBC announced that they would be putting Jay on with his own hour-long show that kept almost every identifiable trait of “The Tonight Show" (brilliantly named “The Jay Leno Show.) It would air each weeknight at 10 pm, starting in September of 2009, and at the same time, Conan would take over “The Tonight Show” in its traditional time of 11:35 pm following late local news on the NBC stations.
Shockingly, audiences felt they didn’t need two very similar talk shows on each weeknight, and both Leno’s and Conan’s overall audiences fell significantly. NBC realized its blunder and scrapped the 10 pm exercise in January of 2010, reinstating Leno as host of “The Tonight Show,” and saying goodbye to a blindsided Conan O’Brien.
We bring that chapter in TV history up because it suggests that the idea of a major broadcast network thinking that the 10 pm hour isn’t as sacrosanct as it might have been in the pre-cable and pre-internet days. Fast forward to July 2025, when the story breaks that CBS is pulling the plug on Letterman’s “Late Show” successor, Stephen Colbert, next May, due to that program now reportedly losing millions of dollars a year. The network says nothing about what they might air in its place at 11:35 pm each weeknight.
We offer this free, unsolicited idea: Consider reducing Network Primetime to two hours a night from 8-10 pm, down from the current three hours.
Then, let your affiliates air their late news at 10 pm. You can start your late-night programming at 10:35 pm, or even allow the affiliates to program a full hour of late local news at 10 pm, and start network late-night programming at 11 pm.
Sound familiar? Of course it does, the FOX network has produced a two-hour primetime schedule since its birth in the late 1980s. Its affiliates have produced their local news at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific (9 pm Central and Mountain), and most have done very well for themselves. With no competition at 10, at least in the majority of markets they are in, they have an opportunity to attract a news audience that doesn’t necessarily want to wait another hour to get the latest news, weather, and sports before going to bed.
Assuming that network television is becoming a less profitable business--seemingly by the hour—— why stick with the legacy schedule that doesn’t seem to be helping anyone in the equation? Especially since there hasn't been a breakout 10 pm network hit in a very long time, especially in the era of streaming, where network audience levels have fallen faster than most people's retirement account balances.
Yes, we know all the reasons why this isn’t likely going to happen anytime soon. The loss of the network ad inventory is considerable. But the savings of not having to program seven hours of original network programming each week would be significant as well. Not maybe as cheap as running the best of “Saturday Night Live” episodes at 10 pm on Saturdays, but much more affordable than new episodes of “High Potential” for one example. It’s been one of the few bright spots at 10 pm in recent memory.
Plus, having a level playing field for local news at 10 pm would be an opportunity for the affiliates, especially with a mid-year political cycle just ahead. We’re just saying that if the adage is ever true that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” our idea doesn’t seem as desperate as those housewives were at 10pm on ABC, back in 2004.
Of course, that was before housewives in primetime got real. But they appeared on basic cable. On Bravo, no less.
Maybe the times really are desperate enough in television right now.
We come to you today from that haunt of frequent flyers, busy executives, and TV station consultants alike—The Delta Sky Club. It is packed, as these airline club locations tend to be more and more these days. But we have managed to secure a small bit of workspace, allowing us to pull out our trusty laptop and bring you this Friday edition of The Topline.
Back in the early 1960s, the game show producing dynamic duo of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman brought a new game show to life on CBS. Creator Bob Stewart cooked up the show, which featured two teams of two people, a celebrity and a civilian. The object was to try to guess a mystery word based on single-word clues given by their partner. The twist was that the audience would know the word before the guesses began. Points were awarded based on the fewest guesses needed to determine the word correctly. "Password” became a hit, and the show ran in various forms on different networks for nearly three decades. In recent years, NBC’s “Tonight Show" host Jimmy Fallon brought Password back to life--first as a segment on his show and then as a stand-alone game show.
If we were playing the game for this column, this is where the announcer would tell you in a hushed voice what the password is for this round. You’ll have to see if you can guess it as you read along.
Last week, the Eighth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals issued an interesting ruling that received minimal notice by many in the broadcasting industry, but the decision stands to change that industry substantially in about 80 days from the time we are writing this. The court delivered its decision, in the matter of Zimmer Radio of Mid-Missouri v. FCC. Don’t let the name Zimmer Radio throw you off, as the Missouri-based radio station owner was just the first name as the petitioner on the case, which also included the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) as well as all of the four major television network affiliate groups, representing the local television stations affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC.
The case challenged the Federal Communications Commission’s decision in its 2018 Quadrennial Review, which retained the existing broadcast ownership rules, which include a prohibition against one company owning more than one television station affiliated with one of the “big four” networks in the same market. The Eighth Circuit court unanimously accepted that the arguments put forth by the NAB, which presented that “in many markets, combinations of the top four rated stations would increase competition.” At the same time, the court rejected the FCC’s argument that the top four-rated stations in a given market “are generally associated with the four major broadcast networks and that they are more likely to originate local news."
The Eighth Circuit didn’t find much else worth changing, so they left the remainder of the FCC’s current rules (at least as released in 2023) for both Local Television Ownership and Local Radio Ownership, essentially in place.
There is a lot to unpack in this seemingly narrow decision. You can read the full decision here. For those of you who haven’t passed the bar exam, we will examine this through the lens of its potential real-world implications, as the Eighth Circuit’s decision seems to mean that it will soon be open season for hunting duopolies.
To get a preview of what that may mean in practice, we needed to get on a plane and head south.
And so we did, non-stop to television market #41. That would be Jacksonville, Florida. It is a reasonably good example of a medium-sized television DMA, as determined by Nielsen, but with one unique aspect. The market’s 16 counties in Northeast Florida and Southeastern Georgia are home to some 688,000 television households, representing about 0.6% of the US television universe. Jacksonville is also the largest city in the US (by land mass), with some spectacular beaches along what’s known as “The First Coast. It is also the home to the typically disappointing Jaguars of the National Football League.
Football record notwithstanding, Jacksonville is a charming place that has seven full-power commercial television stations on the air. But for our professional purposes, the unique feature here is that there are three different “duopolies” currently operating in the Jacksonville market. The first was TEGNA’s WTLV, the market’s NBC affiliate on channel 12, co-owned with WJXX, the market’s ABC affiliate on channel 25. Cox Media Group’s “virtual duopoly” is the pairing of WFOX, the Fox affiliate on Channel 30, and co-managed WJAX, the Hoffman Communications-owned CBS affiliate on Channel 47. The third station duo is Graham Media Group’s WJXT, a news-heavy independent on channel 4, branded as “The Local Station.” It is co-owned with WCWJ, the market’s CW affiliate on channel 17. (Of course, these stations are broadcasting on different digital channels, but use their legacy channel numbers as their branding.)
This complicated situation is allowed under the current FCC rules (before the Eighth Circuit weighed in last week) because of the unique way the ownership of each station evolved over the years. WJXT was the market’s first station, signing on the air as WMBR-TV back in 1949 as a CBS network affiliate. It would remain one until 2002, when owner Post-Newsweek (the predecessor of Graham Media) got into a nasty network affiliation renewal battle, and it gave up the CBS affiliation to become the news-centric independent station it is today. That’s the same situation that will be happening soon in Miami to WPLG and in Atlanta to WANF. Both will become independent stations that are heavily focused on local news programming throughout the day.
WJXT is still usually Jacksonville’s most-watched newscast in most time periods. Because of that, the four network-affiliated stations are paired up in two duopoly situations. In the case of WTLV (NBC) and WJXX (ABC), the duopoly was permitted in early 2000 due to WJXX's complex history in getting on the air and securing the ABC network affiliation. When the FCC ruled in November of 1999 that it was permissible for one company to own two television stations in the same market, WJXX’s owner, Albritton Communications, announced it was selling the Orange Park licensed station to WTLV owner Gannett (predecessor to TEGNA) the very next day after the FCC rule change.
The other two network-affiliated stations, WFOX (Fox) and WJAX (CBS), are considered a “virtual duopoly” because of the remaining FCC rule that would prevent one owner from having both network affiliates. Thus, WJAX is owned by a different company (Hoffman) that contracts with WFOX's owner (Cox) to provide “shared services” and basically does all of the operating of WJAX. This kind of arrangement is in place in many markets where large group owners like Nexstar and Sinclair have so-called “sidecar” companies that own the license of a second station, but the stations are run in tandem by the larger group owners under what is known as a "shared service arrangement.”
What that means in Jacksonville is that only three local TV newsrooms are covering the market. TEGNA’s WTLV and WJXX are co-branded as “First Coast News,” and the same news programming runs across both stations in most time periods, save for weeknights at 7 pm when “First Coast News at 7 pm” airs only on WJXX (WTLV airs “Wheel of Fortune” in the access time period). Cox Media’s WFOX and WJAX operate in a somewhat similar fashion, both branded under the same “Action News Jax” name. Because of the Fox network’s smaller programming schedule, WFOX runs an additional two hours of morning news from 7 to 9 am each weekday and then a 10 pm hour-long newscast. WJAX is in CBS programming during those times, but it is the only station of the duopoly that airs a noon edition of “Action News Jax.” Long-time market leader WJXT airs some 59 hours of local news each week, more than any other station in the market, but sister station WCWJ carries no local newscasts.
The net effect of all this is that in any given time period each day, there can be five stations carrying local news, but only three different local newscasts are actually on the air. That’s because two of those newscasts (First Coast News and Action News Jax) are seen identically across two different stations.
So much for that premise of "increasing competition."
On the flip side, in a world where the economics of broadcast television have declined significantly, the idea of allowing two television stations to survive-and maybe even thrive-by teaming up to save on costs and personnel may make business sense. The industry argument is that it may be vital to save some stations from going out of business.
As we were writing this story, Gray Media announced that it will be seeking permission for new duopolies in Columbus, Georgia, and Lubbock, Texas. It plans to acquire stations in each market from Sagamore Hill under the existing FCC rule that allows for a waiver for an owner to acquire a second station in a market if it is determined that the station would not be able to survive on its own. This “failing station” provision was part of the 1999 rule changes that allowed for the first duopoly in Jacksonville that we noted above. That is in addition to the pending station swaps between Gray and Scripps that would create duopolies in Lansing, Michigan, and Lafayette, Louisiana, for Gray, and ones in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Twin Falls, Idaho, for Scripps.
Editor’s Addendum: Post our initial publishing of this article, Gray announced it was acquiring the stations of Block Communications. That will give Gray another market duopoly, this time in Louisville, Kentucky, where it has WAVE (NBC) and will add WDRB (FOX).
What Jacksonville shows us is that having six television stations can mean only having three choices for local news--albeit spread amongst the various network affiliates, along with one historically strong local news station that has held its own without a network affiliation. Look for the number of markets to get new duopolies to increase dramatically.
When the Eighth Circuit court’s ruling takes effect on October 23rd, the reality is that any two stations amongst “the top four” in any given market would be able to be co-owned. That assumes the Brendan Carr-led FCC won’t put forth its own plan to deregulate the local television ownership rules further, a move it has suggested was already in the works. Legal observers believe it's why the Eighth Circuit court didn’t make last week’s ruling effective for ninety days, to give the commission time to put its plan to change the station ownership rules in place.
Now the clock is running. One way or the other, the deals to create duopolies are likely to start coming faster than the lightning round of the original Password game show. And not just in the smaller markets. Some of the long-awaited major deals that have been waiting to get done, wondering whether the FCC would allow one company to own two network affiliates in a major market, may have just been given the green light.
So, in case you haven’t guessed it, from now on, the Password is… “duopolies."
We recently came across a Substack post that introduced us to an interesting concept. It’s called “compression culture,” and the TL;DR is that we, as a society, have come to value brevity more than depth. That in our always-connected, information-on-demand, perpetually switched-on world, we have replaced knowledge and understanding with information overload. We have tuned our attention span to be minimally focused at all times.
To attempt our best Rod Serling impression as he might open an episode of “The Twilight Zone." “Presented for your approval, the television newscast. A noble effort to inform, which has devolved into an effort to shovel out headlines, while for the most part, eschewing too much depth that could lead to context and understanding."
Yes, it is a depressing scene.
But examine the evidence presented nightly on your television screen (let alone the countless examples on every other screen you use). Television presents hours of news that almost universally follow a similar formula: The broadcast opens with a series of headlines crafted to draw your attention away from whatever else you might be doing. Each headline is seemingly more urgent and insistent than the one that precedes it.
If you need a good example of this principle in action, watch the opening few minutes of “ABC World News with David Muir.” Muir begins each broadcast with a few terse on-camera headlines, then he delivers as many as eight different stories (at least in our counting) with video clips. This opening segment of the broadcast can go on for two minutes or more. It’s finally punctuated with some story falling loosely into the “hopeful” category, usually under one of the jingoistic franchise names like “America Strong,” “Made in America”, etc. An opening animation finally rolls, and the camera swoops in on Muir at the anchor desk, thanking everyone for watching before telling us one more time about a story or two to come--before (finally) diving into the day’s lead story.
This isn’t some new paradigm to television news, and it isn’t even unique to the network level. The legendary anchor Jim Gardner, on perhaps the even more legendary Action News on Philadelphia’s WPVI, opened his broadcasts with a similar series of quick headlines before delivering the signature opening line: “But the big story on Action News…” And with that, the newscast would be off and running to mow down as many stories as it could in the minutes to come.
By the way, should you doubt the effectiveness of this attention-grabbing format, we would remind you that ABC’s “World News with David Muir” has been the most-watched program on television for nearly the last dozen weeks or so.
The producers of newscasts have been pressured to deliver “more news” in less time since the medium's earliest days. The pressure to “increase the story count” (meaning to up the number of different stories that are shown in the newscast, regardless of how short or compressed they might have to be) has been in place since the introduction of consultants and research to the business of television, and in turn, television newscasts.
We admit that we have been on both ends of that equation, both delivering and demanding a higher story count in newscasts we have been a part of for the last four decades.
But no matter how many stories we jammed into the eighteen to twenty or so minutes of each half-hour newscast, the audience has kept shrinking in recent years. We tend to write that off to there being so many more places to get news and information, and, of course, the personalization of receiving only the news we might care about most, driven by the rise of the algorithms that seem to know more and more about us with each passing day.
All of which goes to the point that our "compression culture" continues to squeeze out actual knowledge in favor of a never-ending stream of what we like to think of as countless "news nuggets”-dispensed each day from those ever-present slabs of glass and metal in our pockets. It has become something of a shared addiction when most of us can’t bear to be separated from these devices for any measurable length of time. Let alone placing the device face down while eating or even having a conversation with another person.
Consider for a moment that there were people who went to the polls last November who were surprised to discover that Joe Biden wasn’t on their ballot.
How do we know that this happened? Because the number of Google searches asking “Did Joe Biden drop out?” actually spiked nationwide, with notable increases in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Even though Biden announced his decision not to seek a second term on July 21st, he endorsed his vice president’s candidacy to replace him.
The fact that there is anyone who would not have known of Biden’s decision to drop out of the race should be shocking. The reality that enough people did to spike Google search trends should be considered impossible in our current information age. But as Substack author Maalvika Bhat brilliantly dissects the issue, "It's the logical endpoint of an attention economy that treats human focus as a finite resource to be optimized and monetized.”Her essay is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.
In local television newscasts, we “showcase” those instances where multiple reporters are covering the same story. The “team coverage” label implies a “team” of reporters has been deployed, and with the rare exception of severe weather coverage featuring those “how many boxes with live shots can we jam onto the screen at one time” intros, what is mostly being labelled as “a team” is usually two whole people. We delight in summaries of a big story with a “here’s what we know” bulleted point-by-point graphic, punctuated by the now-standard suffix “we have more for you on our website and mobile app."
Because we have led ourselves to believe that we can combat the march of "compression culture" by being, as Phoenix’s KTVK used to boast, “the place with more stuff."
Whether that “stuff" is of any value or if it helped viewers understand what was happening in their community, state, nation, or world--was somewhat beside the point. And so context has become the missing commodity. There are, of course, brief exceptions to this norm. We’ve seen stations lead their newscasts with lengthy investigative stories, going well over five minutes in length—an eternity in normal measure of ninety seconds as being a long story by television news standards.
While stations and groups are happy to tout their industry awards for producing and airing such stories, usually under the banners of “in-depth” or “investigative,” there seemingly is little appreciation for how those values can translate to any other story presented in the same news program. We have been intrigued by the recent retooling of the “CBS Evening News” to lean into a different playbook for its storytelling. Some notable things are being attempted in that broadcast. Unfortunately, any innovation worth considering is tied to other decisions that will likely doom the current version of the newscast that the storied Walter Cronkite used to anchor.
And that’s before the “ombudsman” promised by the network’s soon-to-be new owners shows up to monitor and address “bias” in the "CBS Evening News.” That was one of the final concessions Skydance offered to finalize their long-tormented deal to acquire CBS parent Paramount Global. It was necessary to overcome the various roadblocks posed by the current administration in Washington, DC. Hank Price, writing in TVNewsCheck, provides some excellent perspective on the likely “Death by Ombudsman” that awaits the legacy that once was CBS News.
Not that what happens to CBS News matters that much in the ongoing slide into irrelevance that is happening to broadcast journalism right before our very eyes. We can’t explain, let alone address, the growing trend of audience abandonment for watching whatever is trending on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Stations continue to try to appease the market forces at work, scrambling to be relevant on those digital platforms by creating content that might hopefully get noticed in the ever-widening sea of short-form videos. Should the force of "compression culture" not act as enough gravity in the downhill slide of the industry? In that case, the lubricant of “purely financial decisions” will be as effective as what Clark Griswold put on the bottom of his sled in that hilarious scene from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation."
We’d like to believe that someone would have the fortitude to buck the tide of compression culture and be brave enough to try leaning into news coverage that features delivering context and contrast over chasing clicks and views. That would be a laudable goal for all of the recently installed news executives who are supposed to be focused on “content" and “storytelling."
It might also be the only thing that stops the march of "compression culture” from turning us from an informed society to an ignorant one.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of another week in summer! Hopefully, you are not sweltering too much wherever you are, and you will do something fun this weekend. Before we let you get to that, a few things we wanted to share with you at the end of another week in the television biz.
The long road to merge Paramount and Skydance is finally at an end.
If you had the under bet on your favorite sports betting app that Brendan Carr's FCC would finally approve the union of Paramount and Skydance so Shari Redstone could get her billions and David Ellison could be the only Neo-baby with his own Movie Studio, Broadcast Network, TV Station Group and Cable Channel for the Resistance—then you were a winner! Last night, Carr announced that all those concessions offered up by Paramount would be adequate to assure a certain someone that it was OK to let the long “suffering” deal finally go through.
The lone Democrat sitting on the FCC, Commissioner Anna Gomez, pulled no punches in her withering dissent on the action: "Despite this regrettable outcome, this Administration is not done with its assault on the First Amendment. In fact, it may only be beginning."
Yet somehow, “South Park” is still on the air and continues to skewer pretty much everyone.
It remains to be seen if “New Paramount" does anything to reel in Comedy Central, the home to “The Daily Show” and “South Park”, but if last night’s season 27 premiere was any indication, the answer so far is seemingly not so much. We admit that it has been a few years since we watched the antics of Cartman, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny. But watching the first episode of the delayed new season, titled “Sermon on the Mount,” made us laugh out loud--more than once. The show remains as irreverent, profane, and shocking as it has always been. Maybe even a bit more than we remembered. We warn anyone easily offended by very satirical material on politics, religion, and the state of the nation to avoid watching (it streams on Paramount+). Everyone else should find some time over the weekend to sit down and laugh at ourselves.
The company that is dumping Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” next May somehow found an estimated 1.5 Billion to do five more years of new “South Park” episodes (10 new ones per year), plus bring all of the previous 26 seasons back to Paramount+ this August (they had been available on HBO Max) and make show creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone considerably wealthier dudes, with an extension of their “first look” deal with Paramount. (For you not fully plugged into Hollywood’s jargon, a "first-look deal” basically means that any new show is presented to the studio that holds those rights, and they can choose to acquire the show before anyone else can see or bid on it. It is a way to hold on to creatives who have successful shows or movies to their credit.)
Not bad for what the White House called a “fourth-rate show…that has been relevant for over 20 years."
TEGNA is looking for a few good…news leaders.
We noticed a posting in our LinkedIn feed this week from a recruiter at TEGNA about hiring five leaders for newsrooms of their various stations. Four of those positions were for News Directors and one was for a Director of Content. (Don’t ask us, we don’t know what the difference is either.) The post was titled with this pitch line: “We’re not just hiring, we’re rebuilding the future of local journalism.” We’ll resist the temptation to point out that they wouldn’t have to rebuild if the company hadn’t pretty much deconstructed itself in the last half-dozen years or so.
Speaking of rebuilding at TEGNA.
KARE 11, TEGNA’s NBC affiliate in the Twin Cities, was forced out of its studios and offices in Golden Valley, MN, earlier this week by a nasty electrical transformer fire that filled the place with the kind of noxious black smoke that is not conducive to normal breathing.. To its credit, the station only lost one 5 pm newscast on the day of the fire. It quickly got a temporary operation going at the station’s transmitter site at the “Telefarm" complex in Shoreview, MN, which is home to most of the market’s TV station transmitters. The station dispatched an anchor and meteorologist down to sister TEGNA station, WXIA-TV in Atlanta, where the duo fronted the station’s newscasts for a few days, while repairs were being made back in Golden Valley.
KARE has job postings available for both a “Head of Technology & Operations” and a News Director (which notably was not part of the five newsroom leader openings mentioned in the earlier referenced recruiter’s post on LinkedIn). Looks like both of those jobs will have a lot on the “To-do” list for whoever fills them.
Let that be an important reminder that your station needs a viable, up-to-date disaster plan.
The problem with situations like the one that hit KARE is that you never know when they will happen or how severe they will be. Disaster recovery plans are crucial and should be updated regularly. (Imagine if the fire at KARE had forced them out of the building during a January in Minnesota! There would be no standing outside of the transmitter building to anchor the newscast.) Our experience over the years is that these plans don’t get the regular reviews and changes that they really need. Start with the simple premise: If a fire forced everyone out of the building your station is in, how would it stay on the air? Continue to do newscasts? Yes, this is the kind of thing that the technological leadership (aka the Chief Engineer) of any station takes the lead on, but it impacts everyone. Much easier to practice this plan when it isn’t needed in real time.
And finally, something fun to read this weekend.
Yes, we know that Stephen Colbert’s name has been in the news a bit lately. (As well as in this space.) But we’d point you to the piece Colbert recently penned for The New Yorker magazine, as part of that publication’s 100th anniversary. During their centennial celebration, they are having people re-read some of the magazine’s seminal articles and write retrospective looks back. Colbert was asked to write his take on a 1978 profile of late-night legend Johnny Carson. Both the original article and Colbert’s current-day take on it are well worth a few minutes of your time before the new work week begins, when we hope to see you right back here again.
(A small reminder before we go that you can subscribe for free to this newsletter by clicking the subscribe button at the top of the page. Thanks so much if you already do so.)
If you are spending too much of your free time these days wondering what the fate of broadcast television in the near future is going to be, take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone. With the postings of people who are “getting out of the business” every day (whether by their own choice or as a result of never-ending cutbacks) you would.be forgiven if you felt that you might be the last person left in the building when they turn off the studio lights once and for all at some point.
Even if you feel reasonably secure in your current situation, there is almost always that nagging suspicion that things could just change with little or no warning. And though there is almost no line of work that isn’t in the same turmoil these days, it just feels more cataclysmic because it happens to be the one you are trying to make a living in.
We here at TVND.Com feel your angst and share your wondering about just how a business that once seemed relatively stable and had a bright future now seems to have precious little of both of those qualities.
One revelation that might be helpful came to us in digesting the continuing post-game analysis of CBS's decision to end “The Late Show” next May. We were watching the latest episode of the “Pivot” podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway via YouTube and the two hosts were giving their thoughts on whether they thought the move was strictly a financial one--or if there were other factors in play. Swisher at one point referenced the phrase “the fracturing of the monoculture” and that hit us like the proverbial “bolt from the blue.” (As an aside, we highly recommend the Pivot podcast as worth being on your playlist.)
Think about it. Nearly everything that is happening in the world may well be captured in that one phrase: “The fracturing of the monoculture."
Wikipedia, the online reference that has become this century’s replacement for the old World Book Encyclopedias that lined the bookshelves of many homes years ago, refers to term monoculture in this way: "The monoculture (also called global monoculture) is a concept in popular culture studies in which facets of popular culture are experienced by everyone at once, either globally or nationally."
Like any good theory, the monoculture one has supporters and those who write it off as being a myth. The Wikipedia entry on the topic does a solid job of providing a basic understanding of just what monoculture is. Like broadcast television, it is traced back to having roots in the 1950s and continuing on to the dawn of the 21st century. Also like broadcast television, the monoculture has been fractured by (and may possibly be ended by) the rise of streaming media, which of course has allowed everyone to both consume and create their own media, tailored to each individual's interests and beliefs. Compare that to a time when many people were part of shared cultural experiences, typically delivered or documented by what was euphemistically labelled as “the mass media."
One shining example of the monoculture era has been recently celebrated on its 40th anniversary. On Saturday, July 13th, 1985, the world witnessed the event known as "Live Aid." The music concert for charity was held simultaneously in London at Wembley Stadium and in Philadelphia at JFK Stadium. It was beamed via satellites to an estimated television audience of nearly 2 billion people in 150 nations. Raising funds for famine relief for Ethiopia was the primary goal of organizers Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. It was an effort that had started the previous holiday season of 1984, with the release of the hit record “Do They Know It's Christmas?” That effort would inspire the US recording industry to respond with its own record, “We Are The World” in January of 1985 and released for the domestic-based Ethiopian aid effort called “USA for Africa."
As a 24-hour long musical event, Live Aid’s star power is almost hard to quantify today. So many major recording stars of the day performed on the stages in London and Philadelphia, it would be easier to list those who were notable for their absence. Phil Collins was notable in appearing in both the UK and US venues, jumping on the supersonic Concorde after appearing first in London to make it to Philadelphia and perform there. As a television event, here in the United States, despite ABC carrying a three-hour primetime special on that Saturday night, it was upstart cable network MTV that truly planted its flag by airing all 24 hours of the concert. In the US, the television broadcasts on ABC and MTV contained commercials, whereas in the UK, the BBC aired it without commercial interruption.
The cultural impact of Live Aid has been dissected and debated for years. Performer Adam Ant came to regret his involvement and has been quoted as saying: “It was the end of rock n roll.” Live Aid's chaotic back story is the stuff of many accounts, and whether the funds raised actually helped feed the poorest victims of the famine has also been debated in the years since. A comment from Bob Dylan about the need to help US farmers at the event inspired the US charity concert “Farm Aid,” which was first staged and telecast a few months later in 1985. That effort to raise money for struggling US farmers has become an annual event.
There are, of course, many other events that might be identified as the largest examples of the idea of monoculture. But for our purposes, the timing of an event in popular culture where so many people witnessed it through the lenses of television cameras transmitted to screens all around the world is hard to equal. 1985 may also be seen by history as the zenith of television news. The broadcast network’s news divisions, anchored by Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings, had serious 24-hour competition from the still relatively nascent Cable News Network. Would-be competitor Satellite News Channel had come and gone in just 16 months, and it would be a decade before MSNBC or Fox News Channel would launch.
The mid-1980s also saw the rise of local television stations’ news departments into what we know them to be today.
Successful local stations had grown their operations with more hours on the air, larger staffs and the latest technologies such as their own weather radars, helicopters and satellite trucks, that vastly expanded their coverage abilities. The battles for the largest number of viewers in each local market were fierce and millions were spent to generate even more millions in advertising revenues.
It would be a decade and into the mid-1990s before “on demand” television would be delivered by cable television operators, and digital video recorders such as TiVO would become common. At the same time, the data technology that made it possible to deliver on-demand TV programming to many households via cable was being adapted to become “Broadband” and deliver something called the "World Wide Web” into homes as well. Crude web pages would evolve into the multimedia platforms that would come to feature the streaming of audio and video.
Much like the interstate highways that would criss-cross the nation, the so-called “information superhighway” would blanket America—and the world.
Which all roughly brings us to today. It is hard to imagine that a Live Aid-sized event could be pulled off some forty years later. (Even if the situation on the ground in Gaza might be as large as a humanitarian crisis as Ethiopia was in '85.) Few things rivet the world’s attention so widely, save for perhaps wars, sports, and sex. People have become more insulated and tribal around their beliefs and interests—and the technology of today’s media creation and distribution allows for anyone to find like-minded people who share their beliefs and interests to the exclusion of needing anything resembling “mass media” as we once may have known it.
Thus, the fracturing of the monoculture continues at an ever-increasing pace. With that fracturing comes the fight for ever-shrinking audiences. Not the size of the overall audience is smaller, but rather that the staggering overload of content, which we loosely call “social media”, forces the segmentation of the audience into ever-shrinking slices of the “attention pie."
It is hard to imagine what, if anything, might bring our nation--or our world--back to a singular shared vision for more than a few minutes or hours at a time. The news cycle is spinning faster than a child’s toy top—but it feels like we are reaching that point just before the top slows down enough and then falls over. But history has a way of defining each era and shifting our focus. We believe the news organizations that will survive (and hopefully thrive) will be the ones that lean into being as genuine and authentic as possible. If you follow creators on your favorite platforms, it is likely because you are interested in what they are sharing and you find them to be genuine and authentic. Local television stations must tap into that same zeitgeist to connect with their fractured audiences on more than just the traditional broadcast platform. Or just scattershot posting on whatever social platform seems hot at the moment. This will be difficult because the revenue models will not be the same, and there will be a period of transition that will be difficult.
Even the streaming giants are dealing with this very challenge.
As the monoculture fractures, we will need to find our own tribes of people--from all walks of life and deliver to them more of what they are looking for, where they are looking for it (currently that is more YouTube than anyplace else) and make it available when they want it (which is always right now.)
Call it “The rise of the minicultures.” Coming soon to a screen near you.
We admit that we probably spent more time this past weekend than we should have, consuming all of the coverage about the CBS television network’s surprise decision ending its production of “The Late Show” and its relationship with Stephen Colbert, after a decade of his hosting what has typically been the #1 network show in the 11:35pm time period.
As we suggested last Thursday night, there would be a lot of questions about the decision. And given the optics of it, studying how the story has been playing out has been a fascinating exercise in watching the intersection of journalism, the media industry itself, and America’s political landscape in 2025.
Before the story fully succumbs to the demands of the ever-spinning news cycle and is likely overtaken by whatever the hell the next major development in “The Epstein Files” will be, wewanted to examine a few more thoughts out there-as they apply to both the situation on the network level, as well as the one in the local markets across the country.
If the CBS executives believed that their Thursday night explanation would be satisfactory enough to address the instant and obvious speculation about the political forces that might be behind the decision, well, in the classic words of Vice Principal Ed Rooney in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” they were “sorely mistaken.”
Especially after details emerged that Skydance head David Ellison had visited the Washington, DC offices of the Federal Communications Commission just two days prior, trying to push for the approval needed to finally get Skydance’s long-suffering bid to takeover CBS corporate parent Paramount Global finally “off the schneid.”
Then the President of the United States-and frequent target of Colbert’s monologues- popped up on his Truth Social platform and bitcoin holding company on Friday with this opportunistic message: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.” Mr. Trump went on to praise the only late-night host he finds amusing, Fox News host Greg Gutfield, but that was before sister News Corp-owned outlet The Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster story about an apparent letter that Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein back in 2003. We’d link to it for you, but it’s behind a paywall.
Well, at least somebody is making money on their digital property!
(FTR: Trump denies he wrote the letter, says the newspaper’s report is false, and promptly filed another $20 Billion lawsuit against what he called another part of “the Fake News Media.” The WSJ says it will “vigorously defend any lawsuit.”)
CBS says that the decision to take Colbert off the air is positively, absolutely a financial one, and it has nothing to do with anything else that its parent, Paramount Global, may or may not be involved with.
As the story continued to reverberate, the would-be supporting financial numbers began appearing in much of the follow-up coverage. The production cost of “The Late Show” was reportedly around $100 million per year, including a $10-15 million annual salary for Colbert himself. Poor CBS was losing some $40 million annually on the program. The precipitous slide of late-night ratings and advertising revenues to streaming just made it impossible for the network to keep the show on the air.
Impossible, until at least, airing ten more months of it.
This is one of the biggest problems we have in looking at this whole storyline of being “purely a financial decision.” Puck’s Matthew Belloni did a great job of explaining the current economics of producing a network late-night talk show in 2025, in the latest episode of his excellent podcast, “The Town.” His interview with veteran late-night TV executive Nick Bernstein was very illuminating in breaking down the numbers in play, as well as the forces that may be at work. Keep the show going, lose tens of millions of dollars more, rather than pay off Colbert’s contract, give the staff two weeks’ notice—or maybe 30 days if they were feeling really generous, and pull the plug on the show sooner, rather than later?
Plus, CBS leaves Colbert on the air to continue to annoy, on a nightly basis, the occupant of the White House and his administration for nearly another whole year? What is up with that kind of timetable? Keith Olbermann, former ESPN, Fox Sports, MSNBC/NBC News anchor, has been vocal
both on X and his own podcast “Countdown” about his skepticism that the Colbert decision was made for political reasons, given the long exit ramp that CBS is providing.
Olbermann, who made it clear on his podcast that he is no fan of Colbert and considers him to be something far less than a gentleman, based on their interactions over the past few decades, believes this is evidence that the decision was not politically driven.
Fox News jumped on that take from the liberal leaning Olbermann with the improbable headline on its website: “Keith Olbermann pours cold water on claims Colbert was fired for political reasons.” When Olbermann is quoted on Fox News (at least on its website) then we may need to question if truly, the apocalypse is imminent.
Crack wise all we might, the underlying worry here is that the decline happening in the television business is much more terrifying than anyone is talking about out loud. The New York Times weighed in with a piece on Sunday from its “Critic-at large” Jason Zinoman that proclaimed that “Getting cancelled may end being the best thing that ever happened to Stephen Colbert. The same cannot be said for its impact on late night television.”
The article goes on to suggest that Colbert will be just fine in his post-CBS years, hosting a podcast and maybe writing a Substack, just like Bari Weiss, Terry Moran, and everyone else in the media who has lost their high-flying and higher-paying job in recent months.
Notably, some with more success than others. (We say that as we look in the mirror.)
That is of little comfort to our friends in the local television business who are trying to figure out just what the decision to cancel Colbert at some point in the future or at least by next May means in their world.
Is “network late-night TV dead as The New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and so many others had in their headlines? If so, what happens after the late local news ends at 11:35pm?
Here’s one thought we haven’t seen anywhere else. Why not expand those late local newscasts to an hour?
It’s been done before. KSTP-TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul took its 10pm newscast out to a full hour in 2013, delaying the start of the ABC network’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” to 11pm when the network moved the talk show up to replace “Nightline”.
Much earlier in its storied history, KSTP was the first in the nation to expand its late news to a full half-hour, when most stations still carried only a fifteen-minute late news update. That may well have started the long expansion of local news to seemingly every hour of the day.
Depending on what programming the networks offer to replace the now deemed “much-too-expensive” late-night talk shows they currently air (at the possible risk of incurring the wrath of upsetting those in power in Washington, DC) some local affiliates will certainly give serious thought to calling their network reps and using that favorite phrase heard in Congressional hearings, advising that they will be “reclaiming my time!”
Braver local stations may go all in on following the trend of WJXT, WISH-TV, WHDH-TV, etc. (and soon WPLG and WANF) in reclaiming all their broadcast day and placing their bet on even more local news than just an hour at 11/10pm.
After all, any local station can see what Byron Allen has in the Entertainment Studios program library just as easily as the broadcast networks.
Or whatever will be left of those would-be dinosaurs nearing extinction.
Buckle up, friends. This wild ride in “Jurassic Park” is far from over.
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We still remember where we were when we received the startling news. We were in Buffalo, New York, where the news arrived that would jolt every CBS affiliate to its core. The announcement stood to change the fate of their late newscasts and impact the bottom line, in terms of both ratings and revenue.
Frankly, we were a little gobsmacked when we heard it.
It was August 1993, and the big announcement was that David Letterman was leaving NBC to come over to CBS and host weeknights at 11:35 p.m. After decades of being a non-contender in late night, then-CBS President Howard Stringer had pulled off the big deal that NBC should have made (but it had already placed its bet on Jay Leno) and Dave would be moving into what long-time CBS staff knew as Studio 50, but the world would come to know as “The Ed Sullivan Theater.”
Allow us to take the opportunity to recommend one of the best books about the television business we’ve ever read. That would be Bill Carter’s “The Late Shift” from 2019. It details the backstage drama between Leno, Letterman, and the networks for the late-night audience. It is definitely worth the read if you are at all a student of the television business.
There was joy in the heart of everyone connected to the late newscasts at any CBS affiliate because now, folks would have a reason to watch those newscasts and stay up for Dave. In the same way that our parents watched the late news and stayed up for Johnny Carson on NBC for three decades, from 1962 to 1992.
Not to be too graphic about it, but many of you who were born during that period were probably conceived while Johnny was on the air. That was likely the real reason why your parents had a TV in the bedroom in the first place.
So when Letterman made the move from 30 Rock to Broadway in the summer of 1993, being at a CBS affiliate was to be filled with unbridled optimism about how your late news race could change.
And when Dave announced his retirement in 2015, there was concern that no one could really fill his shoes and keep CBS competitive in late night, which by then was a three-way race, as aside from NBC’s “The Tonight Show” there was also ABC’s up and coming offering with “Jimmy Kimmel Live” taking over the time period from “Nightline.”
CBS would turn to its corporate cousin at Comedy Central to draft its late night “conservative-satirist-in-chief” Stephen Colbert to take over the reins hosting “The Late Show.”
Fast forward a decade, and Stephen Colbert has just delivered the shocking announcement in the taping of his Thursday night broadcast that CBS will be cancelling “The Late Show” in May of next year. Ending the program’s 32-year run on the network and parting ways with its host.
Network executives, including CBS President George Cheeks, quickly put out a statement that stressed that it was “purely a financial decision–against a challenging backdrop in late night.”
Purely a financial decision? Perhaps like that recent $16 million payment to settle a lawsuit holding up CBS’s parent, Paramount Global, from closing its pending deal to merge with movie studio Skydance? The very same payment that was called out by Colbert on Monday night’s show, which was his first back from a two-week vacation–during which the settlement was finally announced.
In his monologue, Colbert labeled it just as many people saw it: “A Big Fat Bribe.”
Thursday night’s statement from CBS tried to add some damage control to head off the obvious questions. “It (the decision) is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” To put a cherry on top of that denial, the statement added: “Out admiration, affection and respect for the talents of Stephen Colbert and his incredible team made this agonizing decision even more difficult.”
If you find yourself booing at that paper-thin praise, just as the live audience in The Ed Sullivan Theatre did during Thursday night’s taping when Colbert told them of the news, take some comfort at Colbert’s response to them when waited a beat and simply said, “Yeah, I share your feelings.”
Being a class act, Colbert went on to praise his network, saying that CBS executives “have been great partners.” Just over a month ago, those same “great partners” also pulled the plug on “After Midnight,” the show that followed Colbert at 12:35pm each weeknight. To be fair, that was more about host Taylor Tomlinson’s desire to focus more on her continued success as a touring stand-up comedian. But CBS took the opportunity not to keep the show and replace her with another host. Instead, it has said it will fill the timeslot this fall with would-be media mogul Byron Allen and his “Comics Unleashed” series, which was last funny in its first airings some two decades back.
We at TVND.com are not unaware of the seismic changes occurring in the television industry. Last month’s numbers, showing that streaming video has overtaken broadcast and cable as the leading way audiences watch video, were a sobering milestone. The New York Times, in covering the cancellation of Colbert, reported that the ad revenue from late-night network shows has dropped by 50% in the last seven years.
But even if we are to believe the economic reason CBS offers for ending “The Late Show”, the reality is that the timing of dropping a voice criticizing President Trump, even a comic one, won’t likely sit well with a significant number of people. That includes some Democratic lawmakers, who were already on social media questioning the real motives behind the decision, a decision that Colbert himself was told of just 24 hours before announcing it at the beginning of his program on Thursday night.
Of course, issuing feckless threats on social media seems to be about all Democratic politicians are capable of doing with any effectiveness these days.
And as bad as we feel for Colbert, our fellow native Charlestonian who may be joining the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed next year, we also sympathize with all those local news directors at CBS stations who just lost a still reasonably decent “lead-out” for their late news offerings. Sure, what airs after the late newscast might not draw as much of an audience as it once did. Plus, the ability to watch the nightly monologue and best interview moments on YouTube whenever one might want to has certainly eroded any sense that one might have to stay up just to know what happened on any late-night show and still be “in the loop” for the office watercooler the next morning.
Assuming that anyone has a watercooler in their office anymore, and that anyone ever talks around it.
Maybe this news is just another indication that these seismic changes affecting the industry are intensifying as an existential threat to broadcast television. Maybe it is something far more sinister. We’ll let history write the final word on this particular decision, which does feel, to us at least, like it is far more than “purely a financial decision.”
The way things are going, maybe another future financial decision will be to cut the late news back to being just 15 minutes long. Just as it was back in television’s early years. That was just before many stations would sign off for the evening. Then, the late news expanded to “a full half-hour of news, weather, and sports.” Then, some stations discovered that running old movies appealed to a good number of insomniacs in the audience.
What title did many stations give to the newly discovered timeslot at 11:30pm?
Ironically enough, it was “The Late Show.”
Update: Author Bill Carter wrote on X Thursday night: “My first impression abt the cancelation of Colbert:
The financial side of that business has definitely been under pressure, as CBS release asserts, but if CBS believes it can escape without some serious questions about capitulating to Trump, they are seriously deluded.”
If you are finding that everything you read or hear about the television industry is as concerning as the telegraph messages that a young David Sarnoff was hearing in a Marconi receiving station at the end of Long Island on the evening of April 14, 1912, then trust us, Dear Friends, you are not alone. Each day seems to bring us more depressing news than the looming revelations for those unfortunate people who were ever in the vicinity of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
A few folks have asked why we have been doing this series about just who might consider some kind of corporate “hook-up” of their local television station groups in the weeks and months to come, and why we have framed it under the guise of a modern-day version of the old TV show, “The Dating Game.”
Obviously, the idea was to have a little bit of fun with the exercise. Additionally, the idea of making the convoluted dance of forming interpersonal relationships the basis for an entertaining primetime show was too irresistible, and television has been forever fascinated by it. From the fun innocence of “The Dating Game” in the 1960s to the not-too-subtle debauchery of “Love Island” today, the question of “Will they or won’t they” has always made for some memorable (and not-so-memorable) moments in television.
So let us return once again to asking the questions that everyone is wondering about in the soon-to-be-upon-us world of deregulation and subsequent open season for hunting deals in TV station acquisitions. Because much like on the Titanic on that fateful early morning of April 1912, everyone will be looking for a lifeboat, as the band will play on.
Just before we do, a reminder from our still-unhired legal department that what follows is pure speculation, based on the reading of tea leaves and listening to various sources of gossip. No actual financial advice is being given, and none of your money should be invested accordingly. Assuming you have any money to invest these days.
Couple Number Four – Some Network O&Os and somebody else?
If there were ever a station group that you might think would never be on the trading block, you’d probably say it was the owned and operated stations of any of the “big four” networks. These groups are the proverbial backbone of their respective networks, as well as being each network’s outlets in the largest local media markets. And while we don’t believe that these cash-producing engines are very likely to be up for sale in the very near future, there is at least one group of them that could be set adrift in the stormy seas that may lie ahead.
Most casual observers of the television business are surprised to first learn that the largest group of owned and operated stations is held by the newest of the four major TV networks.
Even though FOX didn’t come into being a network until 1986, it’s Fox Television Stations is the 5th largest group owner in the country, at least in terms of revenue and reach as of 2023 (the last year we could find complete data for.) Fox is only behind Nexstar, Gray, Tegna, and Sinclair in the largest groups ranking, using those metrics. The 18 markets where it owns stations gives it a reach of nearly 39% of the country’s television sets.
And despite the political leanings of the cable news network that also bears the same name, the FOX O&Os, as a group, are a well-run business, even if the quality of its stations is somewhat uneven overall. On the one hand, they have some very good stations in places like New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. But then there are the underwhelming stations in markets like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Seattle to consider. Given the fact that the slimmer FOX network schedule allows these O&Os to program more hours of local news (especially in mornings) and that the network has invested heavily in sports coverage, the $2.5 billion that the FOX Television Stations did in 2023 revenue would seem to cement a place in the Murdoch family-owned holdings for the foreseeable future.
That leads us to the smallest of the network-owned station groups. The Disney-owned ABC O&Os are only in 8 markets in the country, and as such have the smallest footprint of the four networks. But no group dominates their local markets the way that the ABC Owned Stations do. Typically, #1 in local news across all time periods and they have been so for decades. The billion dollars or so that this asset contributes to the Disney financial picture is a pretty reliable source of revenue and CEO Bob Iger has reiterated his backing of the importance of ownership of the local stations on more than one occasion.
Even if some industry observers were making a big deal about some recent cutbacks at some ABC-owned stations, that just proves that even long-time successful local stations could stand to do some belt-tightening in the shrinking overall television marketplace. Nobody is immune to what is going on in the real world.
In terms of markets covered, the NBC Stations group (technically part of NBCUniversal Owned TV Stations) is actually the largest of the four networks, due to its ownership of both NBC and Telemundo stations. In total, there are 31 markets where an NBC or Telemundo-owned station operates, and in the 11 markets where both are owned, a developing strategy is underway to consolidate those operations into a single facility, particularly in news operations. One example of this is the recently completed massive new newsroom in the Comcast building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, where WNBC and WNJU are now co-located. Given this one-two punch of having both English and Spanish-language local news and programming under one roof, it certainly appears that Comcast values the station group somewhat more than say the group cable networks it is setting adrift under the newly formed (and oddly named) Versant.
By process of elimination, you have likely jumped ahead of us and come to the fourth and final network-owned group in our considerations, and that would be the CBS-owned stations. Though this Paramount Global division is nearly the same size as the FOX group, with stations in 18 of the nation’s markets, it has been saddled for some time with having the weakest-performing stations in the largest of each of those markets, at least in terms of audience ratings for local news and programming. Even with that history, the CBS Stations have made a notable contribution to the Paramount Global bottom line.
But oddly enough, it may be that the very ownership of those stations that proves to be the biggest obstacle in the proposed multi-billion-dollar merger of Paramount Global and would-be acquiring company Skydance Media. Yes, there was the whole ridiculous lawsuit by the now-President, then-Candidate, Donald Trump against the network and its venerable “60 Minutes” newsmagazine for perceived editorial malfeasance. Rather than fight in court, Paramount’s chief owner, Shari Redstone, settled for the sum of $16 million and maybe some other concessions to come from the new owner. (There is still no clear answer on what those terms might be.)
The thing now gumming up the works is that the Brendan Carr-chaired FCC has to approve the transfer of the CBS-owned television station licenses from Paramount Global to Skydance. Everyone believes that it is likely to happen, even if there has been no public indication that the Commission is ready to do so, given its own review of the alleged sins CBS committed, which was broadcast over those local stations.
Former CBS News and Stations boss Wendy McMahon was ousted in the whole mess at “60 Minutes,” and by all accounts, she is not being replaced. The stations group has been through a painful series of cuts and reorganizations, even as it is trying to spin up a news operation from scratch in Atlanta, where the network is moving the affiliation from Gray’s WANF to CBS-owned WVEU on Channel 69, which many Atlantans have been blissfully unaware of until recently.
At some point in this convoluted process, one has to wonder if the CBS Stations become too much of a liability? Redstone and company definitely want to unload Paramount Global to Skydance. However, a clock is ticking on consummating the deal. In all fairness, Skydance really wants to acquire the movie and networks side of the Paramount business more than it wants to be a local station operator. (To be sure, everyone involved will say anything but that as being the case.) But it doesn’t take a lot of vision to see that at some point in this long voyage, the CBS Stations become more of a stuck anchor in the mud–and someone is going to think about cutting the chain that’s keeping this vessel stuck on the high seas, rather than in the safe harbor of being a done deal.
Which recalls the old joke about the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life? The day you buy the boat is the first. The day you sell it is the second. And as many boat owners will tell you, it’s usually the better of the two.
We’ll be here on the dock, with our boat shoes on, a cold beverage in hand, and a pair of well-worn shades on as we watch the horizon for the ships to come in. In the meantime, please take a moment from your busy day and click the subscribe link at the top of this webpage. It is cheaper than the cold beverage we crave, as in being absolutely, positively free.
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If you have been following along this week, you hopefully know the drill by now. (If not, go back and read this one first and then this one.) We are doing this series of hypothetically matching up group owners of local television stations that we think could be interesting. Our game is based on the coming-of-age game of “Spin the Bottle.” Yesterday we suggested the bottle might be an empty Jack Daniels one.
Today, we’re classing it up by suggesting using an empty bottle of the pride and joy of Austin, Tito’s Handmade Vodka. (Not sponsored, we’re just fans of the company and its product.)
Last bit of housekeeping to ward off any legal entanglements and a potential SEC investigation (and no, that’s not from the Southeastern Conference that we are talking about.) The disclaimer is that what follows is pure speculation, based on the reading of tea leaves and listening to various sources of gossip. No actual financial advice is being given and none of your money should be invested accordingly.
Couple Number Three: Gray Media and Graham Media (There is a joke here about two GM’s meet in a bar, but we’ll save that for another time.)
Gray and Graham. Well aside from being the far-too-cute names for the offspring of a far-too-hip couple, we are talking here about a real potential union of an industry David (Graham) and Goliath (Gray) in a combination that almost seems like an afterthought but would likely make a great deal of sense for both parties.
Both Graham and Gray are owners that began life under other names and eras. Graham Media of course is the descendant of the venerable Post-Newsweek Group, which was the broadcasting arm of The Washington Post company. The Washington Post newspaper purchased its first radio station, WINX, in 1944. It then did a joint venture with CBS to run WTOP radio in 1948. The joint venture bought WOIC television, Washington’s CBS affiliate, in 1950, and that became WTOP-TV. The Post bought out CBS’s interest in the WTOP, Inc. joint venture in 1954, when the FCC at the time forced CBS to sell it’s interest.
Meanwhile, The Post outside of the WTOP joint venture, had purchased WMBR-AM/FM/TV in Jacksonville, Florida (back when local radio and television “trifectas” were commonplace.) WMBR-TV became WJXT and The Post rolled all of its broadcasting interests under the new company named “Post-Newsweek Stations” in 1961, as the newspaper had acquired Newsweek magazine.
Post-Newsweek Stations (PNS) would add stations in Miami (WPLG) in 1969 and Hartford, Connecticut (WFSB) in 1974. By 1978, the company was worried that the FCC’s dislike of cross-ownership of newspaper and television stations in the same market was going to force it to sell WTOP-TV, given the dominance of The Post in the nation’s capital. A swap was orchestrated with the owners of The Detroit Evening News to moved ownership of WTOP-TV to that paper, while Post-Newsweek Stations acquired Detroit’s WWJ-TV, which was renamed to its current WDIV.
By 1994, another deal with another newspaper family, the Hobby family that then owned The Houston Chronicle in Texas, would bring KPRC in Houston and KSAT in San Antonio into the Post-Newsweek Stations group. In 1997, PNS would spin Hartford’s WFSB to Meredith for Orlando’s WCPX, which became WKMG, in honor of legendary Post publisher Katharine Graham. After The Washington Post Company spun off Newsweek magazine in 2010 and then the namesake newspaper in 2014 to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. With neither the Post or Newsweek owned, Post-Newsweek Stations became Graham Media Group in 2014. It’s last station purchase was in 2016, when it acquired WCWJ in Jacksonville (giving it a duopoly there) and WSLS-TV in Roanoke, Virginia from Nexstar’s acquisition of the former Media General stations.
Gray Media also began with newspaper roots, when founder James H. Gray bought The Albany Herald of Albany, Georgia, along with its WALB radio outlet. Television was added in 1954 with the launch of WALB-TV. The company would expand with the purchases of WJHG-TV in Panama City, Florida in 1960 and then KTVE in Monroe, Louisiana in 1967. The descendants of James H. Gray would accept an offer to sell Gray Communications Systems to Georgia financial and insurance businessman, J. Mack Robinson in 1992. Over the next decade, Gray began to grow its television station portfolio from a small group of Southeastern stations to a more of a national player with acquisitions in Nebraska and Wisconsin. In 2002, Robinson would become Chairman and CEO of Gray with his son-in-law Hilton Howell as Vice Chairman. That same year, Gray would buy 14 stations from Benedek Broadcasting when the latter was in bankruptcy proceedings.
Gray would add additional stations slowly over the next 15 years, until it made its major move to acquire Raycom Media in 2018 for $3.65 Billion. Raycom’s sprawling portfolio of some 142 stations in 92 markets helped make Gray the third-largest owner of television stations in the nation, trailing only Nexstar and Sinclair, after subsequent acquisitions of the Quincy Media stations and Meredith Corporation’s television group in 2021.
Which brings us to today, and the question: Why would Gray with now 180 stations in 113 markets be interested in Graham Media’s 7 television stations in 6 markets? And would Graham be willing to sell?
As we have noted here more than once, in a brave new world where the FCC actually delivers on promised deregulation of television station ownership, the size of a group owner’s portfolio will matter more than ever. Small groups, like Graham, will have a tougher time with major parts of its business such as network affiliate negotiations and declining retransmission consent revenues. Graham has first-hand experience with the shifting economics and loyalties of networks. In 2002, the CBS network took a hardball stance during affiliation negotiations with WJXT in Jacksonville, offering a deal that would end the network’s paying for carriage on WJXT and ultimately resulting in being paid by the station in a model known in the industry now as “reverse compensation.” WJXT declined the offer and announced it would become an independent local station in July of 2002. (CBS moved to then UPN-affiliated WTEV in the market, then owned by Clear Channel, now part of Cox Media’s duopoly there.) To its credit, WJXT has done well in the nation’s 41st market as “The Local Station” with a heavy local news schedule.
The Graham stations would fit well into the Gray portfolio of stations, with only Roanoke, VA being a market where both companies currently own stations. Whether the FCC would let Gray keep Graham’s WSLS-TV, an NBC affiliate, along with its current WDBJ, a CBS affiliate would depend on the retention of the current policy that has prohibited a single owner from having more than one station affiliated with the “big four” networks of ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC.
But for Gray, picking up three stations in the top 20 largest markets (Houston #6, Detroit #14, and Orlando #15) along with stations in southern markets like Jacksonville and San Antonio, would be a very attractive addition to the company’s stronghold in markets south of the Mason-Dixson line. Gray announced last week its revised financial guidance for the company’s 2nd Quarter of 2025. In that announcement it noted that that it was taking a $29 Million “non-cash impairment charge” resulting from its Atlanta station, WANF, losing its CBS affiliation in August of this year. Wait, where have we heard that kind of a story before.
On the same day, Gray announced that it was pricing a round of private offering notes at $900 Million, which would allow the company to refinance some shorter-term debt. While we are no financial analysts, that sure sounds like some cleaning up of the balance sheet to put it in a more favorable position for attractive future acquisitions.
Would Graham Media sell? Could Gray Media buy? These questions fall into our folder marked “never say never.” We’ve all seen surprising relationships start with far less certainty and end up very successful.
Our bottle keeps spinning. As Major Bowes said it best: “Round and round she goes, where she stops…nobody knows!”
We’ll be back soon with another “couple” to play our game. In the meantime, please consider taking a moment and click that subscribe link at the very top of this webpage. It is, as our accountant tells us regularly, “an aggressively priced offering”—as in it’s absolutely free. And if you are already reading this in your email, thank you! Please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.
As we began detailing here yesterday, the dealmaking in the local television station business is poised to heat up faster than the cast members on “Love Island.” As the nation awaits the promised major deregulation decisions of the Federal Communications Commission (hoping that those files weren’t sitting anywhere near those Epstein files that disappeared right off the US Attorney General’s desk), we decided to do some good old-fashioned, journalism-adjacent speculating and throw out some potential pairings of would-be station buyers and sellers.
We labelled this being a big money version of the coming-of-age game known as “Spin the Bottle.” You’d be forgiven if your immediate thought was that it was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels that was doing the spinning. Our first installment looked at the suitors for the television stations of Atlanta-based Cox Media Group. That is a deal that everyone is seemingly expecting “any day now.” But as of this writing, it still hasn’t happened.
Today, we’re going to look at a deal that no one seems to be speculating about. Except uniformed speculators, like us.
Once again, let us run the disclaimer from our fictional legal team of Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe, who ask us to let you know that what follows is pure speculation, based on the reading of tea leaves and listening to various sources of gossip. No actual financial advice is being given and none of your money should be invested accordingly.
With the fine print out of the way, let’s meet today’s contestants!
Couple Number Two – TEGNA and Hearst
We can hear your surprise or is that just a snort of derision? Could be either. Of course, TEGNA is a strong candidate to be in the circle around the spinning bottle once again. The company was this close to being acquired by Soo Kim’s Standard General in a $8.6 Billion deal (including assumption of debt) that cratered in May of 2023, right after those fun-killers at the FCC slow rolled the deal into a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge. That was never getting on the docket, and TEGNA terminated the merger agreement. It also pocketed a $136 Million termination fee that we sure hope is helping to cover the salaries of all those new Vice Presidents of Content they are hiring.
Our AI chatbot, “ClosedFOS” (not a real AI startup) tells us this helpful bit of spin about the deal’s collapse: “The failed acquisition is seen as a cautionary tale for private equity and hedge funds seeking to take over local media companies, especially when public interest concerns are at stake.”
So instead of some other private equity hedge fund acquiring TEGNA, why not consider a marriage with an actual media company, based in the United States? One that might know a little something about running successful television stations. We know, we know-the word “successful” is key there. But it would be hard to argue that Hearst Television, the broadcasting subsidiary of Hearst Communications, is deinitely (again according to our AI chatbot) “a major player in the broadcasting industry, known for their local news leadership and diverse programming.”
That description is actually pretty accurate.
Hearst Television owns a total of 34 local television stations across 28 markets. It is one of the top ten largest TV groups, and is the only one to be privately owned, in this case by the Hearst family trust that descended from the newspaper empire built by William Randolph Hearst, beginning in the late 1800’s. It became the biggest media conglomerate in the world by the 1920’s, when it began adding radio stations and later, in 1948, beginning its television ownership with WBAL-TV in Baltimore.
The parent company of Hearst Communications hasn’t given up on its newspaper roots. Just last week, it agreed to acquire the corporation that owns The Dallas Morning News for $14 a share in cash, representing a 219% premium for what the shares in DallasNews Corporation had been trading for, prior to the announcement. Hearst will fold the Dallas Morning News into its existing portfolio of newspapers, which includes in Texas, the Houston Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman, and the San Antonio Express-News, and smaller papers in Beaumont, Laredo, Midland and Plainview, Texas, as well.
DallasNews is the last remaining part of the A.H. Belo Corporation, which used to be a substantial television station owner. Belo would sell its portfolio of TV stations to newspaper giant, and USA Today publisher, Gannett, back in 2013.
Two years later, Gannett followed Belo’s move of splitting itself in two, the newspaper and publishing company retaining the original name and the broadcasting entity becoming a new company with the anagram-based name of TEGNA.
TEGNA now has 64 television stations in 51 markets across the country. In 2023, the company had revenue of just under $3 billion dollars. Its stock was trading north of $17 a share at the time this article was written. If the price of $8.6 Billion ($24 a share, plus debt) was valid in 2023 when the stock was also trading in the same range, the price to buy TEGNA would hopefully now be within the same ballpark?
Why would Hearst want TEGNA? The only place where both already own a television station is in market number 49, Louisville, Kentucky. (WLKY, the CBS affiliate is Hearst’s there and WHAS-TV, the ABC affiliate is TEGNA’s) That’s a market with no major network duopolies, aside from Block Communication’s Fox affiliate WDRB also owning CW affiliated WBKI, so it might be possible to keep both under one roof. Even if not, a Hearst-TEGNA hookup could result in a major group with 100 stations, across some 79 different markets.
(Erratum post-facto: A faithful Topline reader notes that there is another market with both Hearst and TEGNA stations. In the Triad of Greensboro/High-Point/Winston-Salem, Hearst owns NBC affiliate WXII and TEGNA owns CBS affiliate WFMY. We regret the original oversight.)
And not to be crass about it, but in the coming era for local television station ownership, size will definitely matter. Would it be the worst thing in the world to own some television stations in markets where you also owned the newspaper?
Wait, maybe you are thinking there might be some government restriction on that kind of media consolidation? Well, once upon a time, there was. In 1975, the FCC under the administration of President Gerald Ford instituted a ban on a single entity owning both a newspaper and broadcast stations in the same market. The FCC proposed lifting that long-standing ban in November of 2017, but there was a slew of legal challenges to the proposal. The Supreme Court of the United States ultimately upheld the FCC’s decision, and the FCC formally implemented the changes that ended “the cross-ownership ban” in June of 2021.
Could a Hearst-TEGNA hookup happen in the future?
As Major Bowes, who had a wildly successful radio show featuring amateur talent acts (think the great-great-grandfather of “America’s Got Talent”) back in that medium’s heyday before television arrived, would say as he spun his own “Wheel of Fortune” (before Pat Sajak was even born): “Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.”
So too for our “Spin the Bottle” scenarios for “the big deal of the day” perhaps forthcoming in the TV station business. (With apologies to Wayne Brady and before him Monty Hall, both hosting “Let’s Make A Deal.”) We’ll be back with another potential deal to discuss tomorrow.
Like Amazon’s Prime Day, we’re stretching it out to nearly a week.
Until then, might we ask you to please subscribe to our dispatches by clicking the “subscribe” link up above, if you are now reading this on our webpage? If you arrived from LinkedIn.com, the algorithm over there no longer places a premium on showing you the latest content posted, so to get these articles as soon as they are published, sign up for them to be sent straight to your email. We appreciate you considering doing so. And if you are already a subscriber and reading this via your email, please accept our thanks for supporting our efforts.
It’s been a week since the folks at Gray Media and Scripps announced their rather benign sounding plan to swap some stations in smaller markets and so far, there has been no white smoke emerging from the FCC offices in Washington, DC. There is little belief that the Brendan Carr-chaired commission won’t approve these license transfers, but given the inscrutable nature of proceedings before the FCC these days, who knows how long it will be before these transactions are given the official stamp of approval so they can be consummated?
While that waiting game continues, the entire television industry is waiting to see if this deal will be the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” signalling if it will be open season for the deregulation that the National Association of Broadcasters has been longing for, seemingly forever. Tom Sly writing in TV NewsCheck today details the playing field pretty well in this article.
All of this anticipation has led us to spend some time conjuring up what might be the possible pairings to come in the multi-million dollar corporate version of the childhood game known as “spin the bottle.”
So, without further ado, let us give you some of our handicapping what might be the big announcements to come in the months following the FCC throwing the chains off the television industry. (Our lawyers would insist that we mention here that what follows is pure speculation, based on the reading of tea leaves and listening to various sources of gossip. No actual financial advice is being given and none of your money should be invested accordingly.)
As the late Jim Lange used to say when the three bachelors were introduced in the old television game show “The Dating Game,” Here they are! (Cue the Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass music!)
COUPLE NUMBER ONE: Cox Media and…everybody?
The waiting game on the announcement that Apollo Global Management, the investment company that manages over $750 Billion of various assets, is selling its stake in the television stations of Cox Media that it acquired at the end of 2019, has gone on for quite some time. The list of would-be buyers has seemingly included every major group name and then a few new names that don’t currently own any media properties. Check all the names in that TV NewsCheck article linked earlier.
But the main focus of speculation always comes back to two of the largest group owners, Nexstar and Sinclair.
The Cox portfolio of some 12 full-power television stations in 9 markets is an attractive prize for either company, though not without some issues to overcome in either case. The Cox group represents a major footprint in the Southeastern portion of the country, still one of the fastest growing areas. The speculation is that flagship WSB-TV in Atlanta could be worth a billion dollars on its own. Add in Orlando and Jacksonville in Florida, along with Charlotte, North Carolina and you have a seven-station nucleus of strong stations that would be very attractive to either Perry Sook or David Smith, who are buyers with access to the financial capital needed to cover the big check for the Cox group. For both companies, there would be some challenges to swallowing the entire portfolio that Apollo wants to unload. For Nexstar, those challenges would be their current ownership or management of stations in Charlotte (Fox affiliate WJZY and My Network affiliate WMYT) and in Dayton, Ohio (NBC affiliate WDTN and CW affiliate WBDT.)
It stands to be seen whether an FCC embracing deregulation more than a couple making out in a daytime soap opera would go so far as to allow one owner to have four over-the-air signals in one market. That would be the case in Charlotte, where Cox owns ABC affiliate WSOC-TV and independent WAXN. In Dayton, Cox has WHIO-TV, which is so dominant in that market, it probably could count as two or even three stations on its own, at least based on its annual billing.
Sinclair would face similar concerns in Dayton, where it owns the ABC affiliate, WKEF and the Fox affiliate WRGT. Other markets with potentially too many stations to keep would be Seattle, where Sinclair owns KOMO-TV, the ABC affiliate and KUNS, the Univision outlet there, and Cox has KIRO-TV, the CBS affiliate. Pittsburgh is on that list as well, because while Cox has NBC affiliate WPXI-TV, Sinclair already has WPGH (Fox) and WPNT (My Network.)
The other big question on the sale of the Cox television stations is whether they will all go in one neat package, or will they be sold in a different configuration, across multiple buyers. While we’d bet that Apollo would want a single transaction to keep it simple, the lure of a higher total sales price could lead to multiple transactions with different buyers.
However, minor speed bumps like having too many stations in a market aren’t really concerning. Multiple buyers appear to be standing in the wings for any potential spin-offs that might need to happen quickly. The wait continues for the reality that the once-storied Cox television group is going to be “under new management,” any day now.
But we’ve been hearing this for weeks now, so your guess is as good as anyone’s on when somebody is getting the ring.
Wondering what to do if you might happen to be working in one of the stations that might be acquired or spun off to another company? Industry veteran Hank Price offered some advice on that very topic last week
. Definitely worth your time to read, if you haven’t already.
Tomorrow, we’ll reveal our second couple that could be headed down the aisle to the merger altar. Not to be too big of a tease here, we can tell you that we were shocked to even consider that these two group owners might get together. But after all, it is only a quick Acela ride between their corporate headquarters.
So as Jim Lange said as each episode of “The Dating Game” ended: “We’ll be back with more girls, more guys, more fun and more games. Until then, remember Dating can be lots of fun!”
A quick epilogue: The name of the theme song from Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass that played in each episode of “The Dating Game”? That would be “Spanish Flea.” Go play that title on your Spotify or Apple Music account to be taken back to 1965. It was a simpler time, some sixty years ago, when a group owner could have a whopping total of seven television stations!
You made it to Friday. Congratulations on surviving another week!
To celebrate this monumental achievement, we present you with our now infamous sampling of things you might want to read, listen to, or perhaps even spend a few bucks on. (Though the latter is completely optional, if you are like us then your Amazon Prime Week spending may have gotten a little out of control. So maybe just focus on the free stuff if your wallet needs a rest!)
One of the big business stories of the last week that doesn’t include the word “tariffs” in the headline was the news that Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X/Twitter, is leaving the Elon Musk owned company after just two years in the position. Given the unpredictable nature of Mr. Musk, there was only a modicum of surprise to this move, even if the timing of her announcement came on the day after X’s artificial intelligence chatbot called Grok spewed out some pretty antisemitic remarks and praised Hitler. The New York Times reported that she had discussed her plans to leave the company before the Grok problem arose.
Yaccarino, who had been on the fast track at NBCUniversal before May of 2023, was recruited by Musk to manage the social media giant’s business operations. The key performance indicator, or KPI, as the tech companies prefer to call it, was for her to bring advertisers back to X after the wild start to its post-Twitter existence under Musk had sent most companies seeking safer harbor for their advertising.
What followed and what led to Ms. Yaccarino’s departure makes for a really interesting case study on how such a news story can play differently across multiple media outlets. So, we’d suggest reading a handful of stories about it to get an interesting perspective on the way the news “spectrum” is working these days.
First off, there is the full New York Time Story which you can read by clicking here.
The tech business publication Ars Technica dives deeper into the Grok aspect of the story right here.
Entertainment trade publication Variety does a great job approaching the advertising aspects of her time at X in this story.
And Tom Jones of Poynter.com weighs in with an interesting opinion piece further dissecting the media coverage of the departure Yaccarino’s departure and some other journalism headlines of the week on this webpage.
If this sampler hasn’t fully satisfied your curiosity on how large the spectrum of coverage really is, just do a quick Google search on “Linda Yaccarino leaves X” and you can choose from a lot more coverage from a lot more outlets.
From the “what to watch” department, we would direct you to check our author Daniel Pink’s YouTube channel, @danielpinktv. We’ve been big fans of author Pink since his 2006 classic titled “A Whole New Mind.” For anyone working in the media business, we’d suggest checking out his new title from earlier this year titled “Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself.” (A reminder that those are Amazon affiliate links, so we will receive a few pennies if you choose to purchase the titles after clicking on them.)
But Daniel Pink’s YouTube channel @danielpinktv is free, and it features a ton of videos that we can’t get enough of. From summarizing “21 Life-Changing Books in 18 Minutes” to “5 Easy Ways to Make Better Choices Every Day” his messages on what motivates us and what persuades others are definitely our kind of “Must See TV.”
And finally, if you are looking for a refreshing beverage to enjoy at some point this weekend, we invite you to discover (or rediscover, as the case may be) this two-year-old clip of Tom Hanks on with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert as they try out Hank’s unlikely combination of Diet Coke and Champagne.
There are many follow-up videos of other folks trying the concoction, which is cheekily dubbed as “a Cocagne” (it’s a phonetic joke.) Thus, you can also have some fun going down the video “rabbit hole” on this–as you sample the idea (should you choose to do so.)
As for us, we just prefer our Coke with regular sugar and caffeine, thank you very much. And we wonder why you would ruin that amazing taste with anything else? Beverage choices, notwithstanding, here is wishing you cheers to your weekend ahead.
As a former network news anchor used to say, “We hope to see you right back here on Monday.”
Our assumption is this: our invitation to the annual gathering of media moguls happening in Sun Valley this week was lost in our overstuffed email inbox. Probably in there along with our still missing invite to the recent Sanchez-Bezos nuptials in Venice. Maybe that spam filter in Outlook is working a bit too hard sorting out the emails offering us countless “work-from-home” opportunities to become “rich and famous.”
Can we just say how much we miss Robin Leach in times like these?
Like the proverbial “Swallows to Capistrano,” the current crop of actual “rich and famous” types are making their annual pilgrimage to Idaho to attend the Allen & Company retreat where deals get done, or these days the deals not being held hostage by some part of the administration in Washington, DC.
Even if we can’t be there, the fine folks at Deadline.com have some solid reporting on those in attendance. Plus, CNBC is there and covering the event like it is their version of the NFL Draft. Some reporting that Shari Redstone is not in attendance, as she is dealing with both her thyroid cancer diagnosis and any signs that the $16 Million deposit to a certain presidential library fund is going to move her merger deal for Paramount Global with Skydance off Chairman Brendan Carr’s desk at the FCC more expeditiously than say, the Epstein client list moved off the Attorney General’s desk over at the Department of Justice.
Fortunately, CBS Mornings anchor Gayle King is on the guest list at Sun Valley. Maybe she can include Shari on her texts with Oprah so they all can keep up with who is saying what there on the mountain.
But Sun Valley’s reputation as the place where “deals get done” (according to WarnerBrosDiscovery chief David Zaslav) may take a bit of a hit this year. Even if Disney and Hearst conveniently dropped the notion this morning that they might be willing to unload their “shotgun marriage” assets in A&E Global Media. Notably, there was no indication that such a deal to dissolve that union might include that longstanding 20% of Disney’s ESPN that Hearst has been getting a nice check from since 1990. (It’s probably worth a little more than the $175 million that Hearst paid RJR Nabisco for it some 35 years ago.)
One deal that probably won’t get any discussion over the fine dining in the mess hall at Sun Valley is the just-announced small station “swapalooza” between Atlanta-based Gray Media and Cincinnati-based Scripps. While we speculated here weeks ago about the potential dam in station trading finally bursting, this deal feels more like a small leak to test whether or not the aforementioned FCC is ready to clear the decks to approve the avalanche of duopoly-creating deals that are just waiting to get done.
Wall Street seems to believe that linear cable networks are going to get shoved off the balance sheets at Comcast and Warner Brothers Discovery faster than those water taxis probably left the docks on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, after last call was announced at the “modest” Sanchez-Bezos reception, back on June 27th.
If those “SpinCos” aren’t fully up and running by Lauren and Jeff’s one year anniversary, then some presents are definitely getting returned.
One fewer television station owner in the designated market areas of Lansing, Michigan (DMA 113); Colorado Springs, Colorado (DMA 86), and Twin Falls, Idaho (DMA 189), will probably not find much of an unfriendly audience inside the FCC’s offices on L Street in the nation’s capital. Any concerns from those nagging public interest groups about there being one fewer TV newsroom in each market will be swept away by the usual promises that there will be bigger news staffs in the single newsroom that will be serving multiple stations after the approval of these trades. Certainly it will be framed as needed to “protect the economic viability of all the stations involved.”
Or some other well written language from the lawyers and public relations teams involved.
Meanwhile, back in Sun Valley, we are hearing that a hot topic on the agenda is this thing that the Secretary of Education refers to as “A-1.” No, wait-that’s what we put on our well done steak at the Waffle House. The moguls are hearing all about “AI” and undoubtedly how they will be able to use that to control the world. Or at very least, help trim those pesky debt loads by having ChatGPT (or whatever other “chatbot” that comes along) replace some of those benefit-needing employees on the payroll.
Fortunately, all those private jet pilots that steered in the couple of hundred aircraft that landed at Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey, Idaho with the invited guests for the Sun Valley shindig onboard, probably have more job security for the immediate future, given that the just enacted “One Big Beautiful Bill” from Congress has restored the 100% bonus depreciation for private jets.
Well, that’s probably why we didn’t get invited! Our financial planner hasn’t been able to make the numbers quite work for that Cirrus Vision Jet that we have had our eye on.
If there was a Mount Rushmore of local television news directors, just whose faces would be on it?
A few names immediately come to our minds. From the nascent early years of local news on television, a notable figure might be Miami legend Ralph Renick, who served as both the news director and main anchor at the original WTVJ (then on Channel 4). From the 1960s, legendary news director Al Primo, who invented the “Eyewitness News” format, first introduced it in Philadelphia and then achieved long-term dominance at New York’s WABC-TV.
The groundbreaking Jill Geisler, at Milwaukee’s WITI, is certainly deserving of being in this group. Perhaps also Joel Cheatwood, for his innovations and success at Miami’s WSVN in the 1990s and later at co-owned station WHDH in Boston.
Another name that might be on the list for “the giants” of the local TV news business was also occupant of the news director’s office at WABC-TV, arriving there in the mid-1980s. Bill Applegate passed away a week ago while we were out on vacation. Still, we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge his career and contributions to local television in this space.
William Joseph Applegate, born in 1946 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, would cut a wide swath through the many local television stations where he worked. After serving in the Army in Korea in the early 1960s, he entered television news, first as a reporter in Detroit, and he first became a News Director in Eugene, Oregon, at KEZI, where he also anchored the news. That would be followed by news director roles in Buffalo, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and finally, in New York City. He would then move into the General Manager ranks, making his way back to Chicago, then to Los Angeles, and finally arriving at his final post as VP and GM of then Raycom Media’s Cleveland duopoly of WOIO and WUAB, where he worked for some 13 years before retiring from the business in 2014.
Bill, as he was known, was often referred to by only his last name during his career. Usually revered, sometimes feared, but always a force in any market he worked in. He would make every newsroom where he practiced his trade a competitive force, never being afraid to shake things up or push his troops to do even more in the quest to move each station he led up in the ratings and revenue.
He was usually successful in that quest, each time he undertook it over the years.
The admiration for the man was evident in the many professional remembrances posted online since his passing. One common theme we observed was that each person who spoke about Bill Applegate would do so in terms of how much they had learned during their time working with him.
But he was not always respected by everyone. Those who shake things up as much as he did will always have their share of detractors. Legendary Chicago anchorman Walter Jacobson would call Applegate “a purveyor of garbage.”
He would be criticized often for embracing a more “tabloid” style of news on his stations. Chicago television critic Robert Feder said that Applegate was “willing to try almost anything to draw a crowd.” Newscasts that Applegate oversaw were never dull and usually had an emphasis on stories “about crime, sex and celebrities.” In other words, stories that television viewers seemed to care about and watch. He would emphasize on-air style for his anchors and their newscasts, bringing the production values of fast-paced formats, accentuated with flashy graphics and high-energy music. Applegate would not apologize for embracing these values, once telling critic Feder: “We have to push on to find an information form that is interesting enough and compelling enough to attract news audiences. We have to take risks, and we have to accept the slings and arrows of our critics.”
Funny how that quote is still as accurate about local television news in 2025 as it was when Bill Applegate said it in the early 1990s.
What critics may have missed about the newscasts that he put on the air is that they covered the news. Yes, perhaps more aggressively than others. They would typically be first on the air with breaking news and usually the last to go off. They reflected an understanding of the unique qualities of the cities they covered and worked to be part of those communities. Bill Applegate, the reporter, understood that being a good reporter meant being embedded in the community —and, dare we say it, fearless.
Applegate, the news director, was fearless himself. Stories of him jumping up on a desk in the middle of his newsroom and using his booming voice to get everyone’s attention are legendary. Later, as a general manager, he would use the same voice to deliver on-camera editorials that were never afraid to take a strong position on issues of the day, big and small.
To quote Robert Feder again, “But Damn if it didn’t work.” Much like in Chicago, where he was able to take WBBM-TV from being an also-ran in the ratings to being tied for first place at 10 pm, albeit briefly. Applegate would move Cleveland’s WOIO into its era as “19 Action News” and make the once home of reruns (as an independent station identified as “Nineteen”) a true competitor in the market.
His son, William Applegate, Jr., wrote of his father last week: “In the end, he hired, fired, and mentored some of the giants in local and national TV. He was loved, feared, hated, and every past participle of a verb you can think of. But undeniably, unquestionably…admired.”
Married to his wife, Kathy, in 1971, the couple had four children: William Jr., Brian, Elizabeth, and Matthew, as well as nine grandchildren.
Bill Applegate was 79 years old.
He definitely left his mark on this business.
The search for the missing victims from the July 4th flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas isn’t over, and the toll of fatalities has risen to over 100 as of 6pm on Monday, June 7th. 27 of that number, including children, were in attendance at an all-girls Christian summer camp, are among the dead. There are no words, including offering the requisite “thoughts and prayers” that can suffice in this moment of heartbreak for the families of those victims and the missing still being sought in the aftermath of the torrential rain that would raise the Guadelupe River by some 22 feet in a matter of hours early on the morning of July 4th.
Any lack of words has not extended to local and state officials, who were apparently quick to begin pointing fingers towards what they characterized as a lack of any warning about the flooding, or at least a lack of a forecast that specified just how much flooding there would be. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said last Friday that he “didn’t know this flood was coming.” Austin’s KXAN reported that Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice reiterated that apparent lack of awareness, telling the media Friday: “This rain event sat on top of that and dumped more rain than what was forecasted.”
KXAN’s Investigative team detailed the timeline of notifications from the local National Weather Service office in New Braunfels that covers the Austin-San Antonio area, which includes Kerr County. The first notification from that office of a potential for flash flooding was issued as an outlook on Thursday morning, July 3rd. There were updates throughout the day, including two messages in the 6pm hours that used language indicating the potential for flash flooding from “an excessive rainfall event.” The NWS issued a Flash Flood Warning, which triggered emergency notifications on NOAA Weather Radios, Mobile Phones and Broadcasters at 1:14am on Friday morning, July 4th. By 4am, the National Weather Service had issued a “Flash Flood Emergency,” its highest level of notification, across those same outlets for portions of Kerr County.
It’s believed that the Guadalupe River flooded over its banks by 5:00am on Friday morning, sweeping everything in its path downstream from cars to homes to the many still missing.
The National Weather Service has been working shorthanded since 800 or so employees were fired from the NWS’s governmental parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, earlier this year as part of the sweeping DOGE reductions in the governmental workforce. Most National Weather Service offices had been hiring to replace positions that were open in the past few years. Anyone hired by the NWS in the past two years was considered “probationary” in governmental parlance and were the bulk of those terminated by the current Washington administration.
In the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service, they presently have 6 vacant positions on their normal staff of 26 people. So a bit under a quarter of the staff isn’t available at present. KXAN’s Investigative Reporter Josh Hinkle detailed the fact that State and Local emergency officials did not go so far as to implicate any personnel or financial cuts in their criticism of the lack of forecast details which might have prompted them to be more prepared for the devastating flood waters. The station has requested records of communications between state and local officials as well as asking additional questions of both the National Weather Service and the meteorologist from the Texas Department of Emergency Management.
July 7th evening update: The NWS has acknowledged that while it has open positions in the Austin-San Antonio and San Angelo weather offices (both were involved in alerting the area of Central Texas that experienced the July 4th flooding) the service employed a “surge staffing” model to bring in more personnel than would be normally scheduled during the warned period last Thursday and Friday. It believes that its performance was not impacted by any staff shortages. The political impact grew on Monday. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York, called for a congressional investigation into whether staffing cuts at the National Weather Service had “any correlation into the level of devastation.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt challenged that narrative on Monday, flatly stating that “Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning.”
Which brings us back to our original question: “What if there wasn’t a National Weather Service anymore?”
Before you scoff at that notion as political rhetoric, let’s return to the much discussed “Project 2025 playbook” that has seemingly been the blueprint for the actions in the first months of the second term of the Presidency of Donald Trump. Aside from the DOGE-implemented staffing cuts, the Project 2025 document details some four pages worth of actions targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”
One of the parts of NOAA that current budget proposals suggest could be cut is the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. The OU Daily reported last week that the NSSL and an associated center at the University of Oklahoma are set to be gutted and 220 more people would join the unemployed. Rock on, student journalism!
Of course that budget proposal does represent what might be considered “a two-fer” by whacking a government program that hasn’t done much except radically improve the warning times on severe weather events over the past fifty years it has been in existence AND a higher-education research program committed to the same goals. Government Efficiency in action!
Before we stray too far out of our lane of covering the local television news business, let’s focus on why we keep asking the same question about what happens if there is no National Weather Service? Local broadcasters, like every other institution that is involved in tracking and forecasting the weather, depend on the National Weather Service for the core data and information that is the foundation of their meteorology operations. No matter what vendor they may contract with, what the National Weather Service does each day is what everything else is built on.
So what happens when that foundation crumbles after being weakened by a proverbial “death by a thousand cuts?” On the one hand, you have rivals such as AccuWeather who wasted no time in putting out a press release touting that they provided “most advance notice and most accurate warnings” for the destructive flash flooding in Central Texas to their business customers. No word on whether the State of Texas is an AccuWeather Business customer, but AccuWeather did acknowledge in a statement to SkyNews that warnings from both the State College, PA based company and the National Weather Service “should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety”.
Not to be too crass in the midst of what is still an unfolding tragedy, but we want to strongly suggest that every local television station with a weather department needs to spend some time thinking about–and maybe even advocating more strongly for–the future of the National Weather Service. As the scope of the Texas flooding was being determined over the weekend, the National Hurricane Center-another part of NOAA that is on the budget chopping block-was putting our warnings about Tropical Storm Chantal that quickly spun up off the South Carolina coast. Growing up in that part of the world, we have seen the ability to track and warn about Tropical Storms and Hurricanes save countless lives, thanks to the work of the National Hurricane Center and local National Weather Service offices on the coastlines of this country.
The threat to the National Hurricane Center prompted veteran broadcast meteorologist John Morales of NBC O&O WTVJ in Miami to post a scorching opinion piece on his station’s website about the proposals to cut the NHC and multiple programs within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
He posted his opinion piece last Thursday, July 3rd. The day before the flash flooding in Central Texas.
One more Monday update to this article: John Morales of WTVJ weighed in on Monday about the question of NWS staffing levels in Central Texas last weeksaying “I don’t think any of the cuts going on with NOAA and the National Weather Service had anything to do with the quality of the forecast [or] the advanced warning of the potential for flooding and damaging rains.” But Morales also added “I’m on the record as stating that I think this degradation in particular in regard to the coordination is going to be a slow degradation.”
As we said in the original version of this: That countdown clock in the control room isn’t the only one ticking down to zero.
It is a move that Carmine DePasto would have admired. $16 million to settle a lawsuit that many legal minds believe wouldn’t have had much of a chance of succeeding if it had gone to court. However, there was no time for that, as a multi-billion-dollar deal needed to be finalized, and the lawsuit was threatening to derail the agreement.
So, as Carmine would have put it succinctly, “You have to pay.”
That’s precisely what Carmine, in his position as Mayor, would tell Dean Vernon Wormer of Faber College when the two were meeting over plans to hold the annual homecoming parade. “If you want to have a parade in my town, you have to pay.”
Dean Wormer would balk at this demand, stating, “Carmine, I don’t think it’s fair of you to extort money from the college.”
It is at this point that Carmine, as both owner of the town’s Oldsmobile dealership and Mayor, sets Wormer straight.
“Look, as Mayor, I’ve got big responsibilities. These parades are expensive. You’re using my police, my sanitation people, my free Oldsmobiles. So if you mention extortion again, I’ll have your legs broken.”
It’s reported that Dean Wormer then offered to arrange “a nice honorarium from the student fund.” Because that’s how you got things done back in 1962.
And it appears that it is also how you get things done in 2025, with today’s news that Paramount has settled a 10 Billion dollar lawsuit from the current President of these United States over the baseless claim that CBS News, and its “60 Minutes” program “deceptively” edited an interview with then candidate Kamala Harris in the runup to last November’s Presidential election. In his lawsuit, Donald Trump claimed that the editing was intentionally done to interfere with the election.
In case you have forgotten, CBS made the editorial decision to air two parts of the same answer that candidate Harris gave to a question about Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. As detailed in the transcript of the entire raw interview with Harris, the first excerpt, all of some 21 seconds, aired first on CBS’s Sunday morning staple, “Face The Nation.” In the following “60 Minutes” broadcast, a different 7-second clip from the same answer was included in the story, which presented the longer interview with Harris, who was then the sitting Vice President.
Mr. Trump alleged in his lawsuit that this presentation of two different parts of the interview amounted to “news distortion” and was done intentionally to tip the election in favor of Harris, the Democratic Party’s candidate, and his opponent.
Also, in case you have forgotten, Trump won the November election with 49.8% of the popular vote. His margin of victory was 1.5% over Harris’s 48.3% or just over 2 million votes out of the over 152 million cast. The electoral college total was 312 to 226 in favor of Donald Trump, who is now serving as the 47th President.
There will be much written today, and in the days to come, about the decision by Paramount to make its contribution to a future Trump Presidential Library to the tune of $16 million, which the NY Times reports also includes legal fees incurred by Mr. Trump in the pursuit of the claim. If that $16 million figure sounds familiar, it is because it is the same amount that ABC News, and its parent Disney, paid to settle a defamation claim made last year by Mr. Trump against the network and its anchor George Stephanopolus.
The reason given for the “contribution” to the still-unannounced library being the same amount, is that while Paramount’s board of directors was willing to pay to clear the way for its announced merger with Skydance, it had concerns that shareholders of the company might bring legal action over the terms of the settlement as being “bribery.” Be prepared to hear that term more in the future, as US Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont (both Democrats) have threatened to hold congressional hearings over the matter.
Inside CBS News, the whole matter has taken on Shakespearean proportions. The internal struggle over the question of settling, rather than defending what would have been a landmark First Amendment case, led to the resignation of Bill Owens, the longtime Executive Producer of “60 Minutes,” and then the firing of the President of CBS News and Stations, Wendy McMahon. There will be anticipation that more personnel changes may be forthcoming, including the possible departure of some correspondents from the top-rated news magazine.
The palace intrigue within the offices along West 57th Street is likely to continue into the fall, whenever the merger finally takes place and new corporate management assumes control. That isn’t a given as it turns out. Despite the lawsuit being settled, the Federal Communications Commission still has to weigh in on the merger, as it includes the transfer of the television broadcast station licenses owned by CBS. The Commission, under Chairman Brendan Carr, is conducting its own review of the “60 Minutes” interview, though he claims that its review is “not linked” to the lawsuit brought by the now-President.
Despite the money that will ultimately be paid, perhaps the most interesting detail of the settlement to be revealed so far is the agreement by Paramount/CBS that in the future it will be mandatory to release the full, unedited transcript of any interviews with presidential candidates. Fox News reports that “people involved in the settlement talks have referred to this as the Trump Rule.”
Speaking of the President, a spokesperson for his legal team hailed the announcement of the settlement with the predictable rhetoric of “holding the fake news media accountable.” The person went on to pronounce that “CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle.”
Well, of course, Paramount did have a choice. It could have gone to trial and fought for the journalistic independence that CBS has shown since the days of Edward R. Murrow and later Walter Cronkite. However, instead, the chairwoman of Paramount, Shari Redstone, decided that she had billions of reasons to follow the simple advice of Mayor Carmine DePasto to stage her own version of a “a nice homecoming parade.”
For those who may not recognize the name Carmine DePasto, he is the character played by actor Cesare Danova in the 1978 movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Aside from his meeting with Dean Wormser (brilliantly portrayed by the late John Vernon, while a dead horse is being removed from his office), Carmine also appears later in the movie in the aftermath of the climactic Homecoming Parade scene when the wife of Dean Wormser delivers what may be the most appropriate line of dialogue to end this particularly odious chapter in the history of American Journalism:
“You can take your thumb out of my ass anytime now, Carmine.”
We’ll spare you our standard rant on why saying “Coming Up” should only be done in song, and should only be done with the words “everything” and “roses,” before and after.
But it’s Friday, and we’re going to aim for a perfect score of posting each day this week by bringing you something from our new tradition of sharing interesting things you might want to read and a few more things you might want to spend time checking out this weekend. (Of course, you can choose to look at these things any time you wish to, especially if you work on weekends and have more free time on other days!)
We have selected several selections related to a single theme this weekend, and that theme is AI, also known as Artificial Intelligence.
We consider ourselves to be reasonably intelligent and decent learners of new things. Candidly, we have not made significant progress on our path to achieving a basic mastery of AI. Now specifically, we are talking about using a “generative AI” chatbot tool, and not something that is “AI-powered” such as Grammarly, Notion, Jasper or the like. Instead, we are referring to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, CoPilot (now available on many Microsoft Windows computers in some form), and similar services.
And thus we have been on a quest to learn more about “prompt engineering.” This is simply the skill of interacting with the AI service (and by interacting, we actually mean typing out on a keyboard) and asking the precise question you want. The more precise and understandable your question, the more likely you are to get the AI to do exactly what you want.
Sounds simple enough, but it is anything but. There are a large number of rules, let alone tips and tricks, that are involved. We receive multiple offers daily from online services, coaches, and charlatans who promise to make us AI masters in no time at all. We haven’t spent our money on those, well, not many of them at least, and you shouldn’t either.
In fact, you don’t have to spend a dime, because the good folks at Google will teach you how to become a “prompt engineering ninja” for free. Yes, the search giant offers a free online course to help you learn “AI Prompting Basics” with “Google Prompting Essentials.” Click here to go to their website.
Full disclosure: this is a basic-level course, and there may be an effort to “upsell” you to take other online Google courses via the online class provider Coursera. But we haven’t spent anything yet, and are learning a lot from this free offering. Worth checking out.
Speaking of checking things out, we’ve found some real revelations in the new versions of one of the most widely used tools on our computers. That tool would be the web browser. Like many, we use Chrome on Windows PCs and Safari on our Macs. Microsoft tries to force its Edge browser on us from time to time and we tend to curse at it being so intrusive. Besides, aren’t we living in the world of AI now? Shouldn’t we be able to type in whatever we need to know and have it answered for us, rather than just mainly getting pages of links? Yes, we know that Google is incorporating more AI-style answers into its web search results, but that feels like it is in addition to the old-school style of searching the web.
A startup called “The Browser Company” has been tackling this issue, and they have two browsers you might want to download and try on your own computer. WARNING: On behalf of IT staff everywhere, we caution you not to install this on your work computer without getting approval from the tech team that it is safe to do so. Many organizations have policies on downloading and installing any software that isn’t “approved for company use.”
Don’t get on the bad side of the IT peeps. Trust us, it never ends well.
The Browser Company developed an alternative to the Chrome web browser that seemingly everyone uses. It’s called the Arc browser, and it’s worth trying out. Arc is the company’s initial browser software that transforms the way you use a browser into an experience centered on multitasking in a much easier way. Arc is available for both Windows and Macs, as well as the Arc Search app for your Apple or Google-powered smartphones. You don’t have to be a super geek to give Arc a whirl and see if it makes the online experience of using the web a bit easier. Did we mention that it’s free and does a great job of blocking ads and tracking of your browser history? Yes, it does all that too.
However, we know some of you out there are more “Geek Curious” than others, and aren’t afraid of trying things that are more on the “bleeding edge” of what’s new. For you, there is The Browser Company’s newer browser offering, which is still in beta release and requires an invitation to participate. (Don’t worry, we can help you get in — if you’re interested.) This new browser is called “Dia” and it can best be described as… well, it’s not easy to explain. The Browser Company team created this video to help explain it.
OK, so they may be software geniuses, rather than great makers of explainer videos. Our answer is that if you could hook up a web browser directly to an AI service like ChatGPT, and then that one bit of software would learn what you want to know and just how you want to know it–whenever you have a question that you go to the web looking to answer. It is hard to explain, but shockingly easy to use what they have created.
A few caveats, the Dia browser is currently in beta, as we mentioned, and is currently only available for Macs. If you have a Mac and you’re interested in being invited to the beta to give it a spin, shoot us a quick email to editor@tvnd.com with a subject line that just says “Dia Beta Invite,” and we’ll send you an invite that should get you past the waitlist to try it out. We believe that if you conduct extensive online research or simply want to explore how AI can enhance a journalist’s work, trying Dia will be worth your time.
One final caveat, we don’t love the name “Dia” especially as the letters DIA can also stand for the Denver International Airport or the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is probably not a website that you accidentally want to wind up on if your current level of paranoia runs as high as our may from time to time.
Another thing for you to read this weekend is more of a potential “rabbit hole” that you might end up going down. With the whole AI boom, there are new developments every day, if not every hour in the tech space that are worth keeping up with. Doing so is no simple task. Even for the people who lean more into their “Supergeekyness.” Not that we are talking about ourselves, but “other” people we know quite well.
We find that Techmeme.com is our secret weapon for staying up-to-date on tech news. In a format that can best be described as “information dense” in much the same way that “Drudge Report” is for general news. It’s free, but supported by clearly marked “Sponsor posts.” If you want an even more streamlined way to keep up with tech, the Techmeme folks offer an outstanding daily podcast that is worth listening to on your drive home. That’s probably why they cleverly call it “The Techmeme Ride Home.” Available wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.
We would like to inform you that we will be taking some time away from our computers next week, and therefore, new articles will not be posted here daily. How will you know when you have something new for you to read? Well, you could subscribe to “The Topline” by clicking here and never miss anything from us going forward. That’s because each dispatch we publish would be automatically sent to your email inbox. The best part is that we do this for free, which seems a bit prudent given that, despite the notion that every journalist is heading to Substack to make millions on their own, a Pew Research report released this week states that only 1% of Americans paid for any news last year. Click to read their report.
And with that bonus item available for you to read, we’ll wrap this up by wishing you a great weekend doing whatever it is that you want to do. Cheers!
Right from the start of this, we should acknowledge that we probably missed the opportunity to make that title much more television-centric. We could have used memorable coffee spot names from TV, rather than lazily naming the global behemoth of high-falutin' and higher-priced coffee. It would have been so easy.
Perhaps “When your television station decides it wants to become “Central Perk” would have been better. Or substituting the name, “Luke’s Diner.” Or maybe “Cafe Nervoso.' (That one, like Starbucks, was at least based in Seattle, for the TV show where it frequently appeared.) Perhaps even a more esoteric reference, such as “The Peach Pit.” Or an obvious one for real television junkies: “Monk’s Cafe.”
If you recognize each of the five shows referenced above, congratulations. If you did so without even thinking about it, it may be time to turn off the set and take a break outside for a bit. Spoiler alert: We’ll name those shows at the end of this article.
In any event, we are here to discuss the announcement by Graham Media Group’s WDIV in Detroit, which has announced that it will be entering the coffee shop business this September. Listen, it would be easy to greet this news with “a haughty snort of derision” as we are known to do occasionally. (And by occasionally, we really mean a few times every day.)
Let’s process this news together, shall we?
A successful network-affiliated television station in the 14th largest television market in the country has decided, after at least some amount of thought and planning (we assume), to announce that it will be teaming up with a local coffee roaster to create “Fourgrounds”, a new spot for java and more in the trendy Motor City suburb of Plymouth, Michigan. The place is described as “a friendly, close-knit suburb known for its lively community events and small-town charm.” Color us disappointed to learn, in researching the place, that it is NOT named for the brand of car in which our fathers might have dropped “the f-bomb” for the very first time in front of us, many years ago. No, it turns out the town had the name many years before Chrysler slapped it on an automobile for the first time in 1928.
The wisecracks almost write themselves, without even needing to ask ChatGPT! Our future stand-up comedian self will absolutely say one day: “We didn’t know the local television business was in such bad shape!” (Anyone over the age of fifty should instinctively be speaking in their head right now: “How bad was it?")
Forgive us, but as we are typing this following line, we are reading it out loud in an almost perfect (to our ears) imitation of the great Johnny Carson saying:
“It was so bad that a guy running a Detroit TV station agreed to open their own Dunkin' Donuts!”
“Clearly, he did so after spilling a large Dunkaccino in his lap, leaving the drive-thru!”
And cue Ed McMahon shouting off camera, “HEY-YOOOO!”
A few historical notes are now needed: First of all, we know that Dunkin' dropped the “Donuts” from its name in a Sean Parker-esque name change a few years ago. Having lived in Boston for a few years, we say it was “wicked stupid” and refuse to use the shortened name. Second, we also know that Dunkin Donuts dropped the amazing Dunkaccino from their menu back in 2022, which only proves that they could be “even biggah chowdaheads”, as the faithful in Massachusetts might say.
We could write many more paragraphs trashing this “station coffeehouse” idea, and trust us–we already have in our heads. There is just one thing that keeps us from doing so: After chewing on it for a little bit, like a two-day-old cruller from…(well, you know where we’re going to say)–the truth is, we think it is a really fascinating idea.
Dare we say it? It might even be a little bit inspired.
Hear us out, because we have seen over many years just how interacting directly with your audience is a great way to connect with them. You know, the real people who (hopefully) watch your station? A prime example of this working we saw firsthand over the past few years, when we attended the Minnesota State Fair. That’s the second-largest state fair in the country (only behind Texas) in terms of attendance, with roughly two million people passing through the gates each August except for the six times since 1859, when it was cancelled due to minor problems such as wars and pandemics, including the most recent one way back in 2020.
The four major network affiliates have a significant presence at the state fair. Three have permanent buildings on the fairgrounds, and all produce a ton of live programming from the fair each day. We’re talking entire broadcasts, including anchoring regular newscasts at their locations. And fairgoers line up to sit in bleachers and be part of the live audience or to spin a prize wheel and win a branded trinket to take home.
Regular people who would be, as our favorite research director loves to say, “right in the freakin' demo, my friend!” God bless him, you can’t take the New York City out of a guy who analyzes ratings for a living.
Yes, the stereotypical answer would be to say that a local television station may not have any business opening up a community space that serves coffee to the locals. What are they trying to do, copy the whole “Capital One Cafe” idea? At least you can do your banking there, even if you can’t meet the “Capital One Guy” in person.
Maybe it’s enough to have a chance to see your local TV news anchors in person. Perhaps the idea of creating a real personal connection with your audience is more than worth the effort. We’re not suggesting that a station should embrace the premise that Nexstar’s Rockford, IL duopoly made into a morning news promo a few years ago.
The planned “Fourgrounds” is predictably drawing enthusiasm from the Mayor of Plymouth. According to WDIV’s web article announcing the venture, Mayor Suzi Deal is quoted as saying, “This will be more than just a coffee shop — it’s a gathering place.” WDIV, branded as “Local 4”, quotes its VP and General Manager, Bob Ellis, as saying: “We will be more local than ever before, and we believe that means something special.”
No immediate word was available on whether there will be daily specials at “Fourgrounds.”
Snarky comments aside, if a station is going to claim it is truly local–or in the case of all the Nexstar stations who had their own catchy song about “Loving Living Local” then maybe having a storefront on Main Street is a great way to connect with viewers doing something other than watching television or even looking at their phones. Indeed, there will be free WiFi at their caffeine “hot spot”, right?
At least patrons of “Fourgrounds” will be able to enjoy witnessing live daily broadcasts of the station’s “Live in the D” program.
We have always been fans of “streetside studios” for local stations. We have even worked on building a few of them for stations over the years. The idea has worked well every day for NBC’s Today show since Dave Garroway launched the morning staple back in 1952. Why Disney decided that its “Good Morning America” needed to move from its prime location in Times Square to a basement studio in Hudson Square is a question we can’t answer. However, we strongly suspect that money played a role in the decision-making, as well as pulling WABC-TV’s “Eyewitness News” out of its streetside digs uptown in Lincoln Square.
But if stations in the Twin Cities can be live daily from the Minnesota State Fair, we see no reason why WDIV can’t serve up both a cup of joe as well as its promised “Coffee with the Newsroom” events, featuring our Local 4 anchors and reporters.”
We do wonder whether those will include any sort of drive-thru option? (Give us a rimshot there, Ed Shaugnessy!)
If you made it this far, you deserve the answers promised earlier–which are “Friends”, “Gilmore Girls”, “Frasier”, “Beverly Hills 90210”, and of course, “Seinfeld.” Jerry even turned the whole “getting coffee” idea into his hit streaming series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”
Don’t ever say “shows about nothing” don’t do well.
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We have published fifty original articles on “The Topline” so far, and none of them has generated the level of feedback that our Monday edition has about the lack of attendance at the annual RTDNA convention, held last week in New Orleans. Much of what we heard was in agreement with our genuine concern for the event’s future, if not for the organization itself.
We have also gained additional insights from individuals with direct knowledge of how things may have reached this point.
A reminder that our concern stemmed from the word that the attendance at the 2025 RTDNA event was reported to be considerably less than 200 people. Our initial figure came from Rick Gevers' weekly newsletter, which is typically published on Sunday nights. Gevers chose not to attend the annual RTDNA event for the first time in some 47 years. We found his decision noteworthy because he has supported the organization for such a long time, both as a former News Director and as a talent agent serving the industry.
Since our Monday item, we have heard from some who did attend the convention and found themselves surprised by more than just the low turnout. Especially since the RTDNA was reportedly offering free conference registrations to local TV newsrooms across Louisiana, in an effort to encourage more in-state attendees and boost the attendance total slightly. We have no idea how many people took up the RTDNA on this offer. (To be clear, we don’t begrudge those who may have accepted–it probably made the difference for those folks being able to attend.)
Speaking of being able to attend, we’ve heard from others concerned that the RTDNA has been selecting pricier hotel venues in recent years to host the annual convention. For example, the New Orleans convention hotel, the Hotel Monteleone, was charging nearly $250 a night for a room. Certainly, hotel rooms everywhere are more expensive these days. However, we’ve learned that the hotel was charging only $150 a night for a room booked through the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters to attend their annual conference, held just last month in the same location.
The cost of hotel accommodations has been a pain point for the past few years. We heard mentions that the expense of staying in the convention hotel was “a bit pricey” for previous events in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and prior locations. This cost may have also reduced some journalism students' participation at the convention, which typically has made up a decent percentage of the attendees.
Our original article hypothesized that the annual convention was a significant source of revenue for the organization. However, multiple sources indicate that the RTDNA’s primary source of revenue is now the administration and awarding of the Edward R. Murrow awards each year. The Murrows are reported to have generated over half of the organization’s revenue in recent years. It is unclear whether the RTDNA is losing money on its annual convention. Still, with no exhibit floor to speak of, only a few corporate sponsorships, and dwindling attendance, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that is the case.
Monday’s post also drew a comparison between the turnout for the RTDNA convention and that of the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), which was also held in New Orleans last week. Multiple readers pointed out that the IRE’s agenda is strongly focused on practical topics and hands-on sessions. As one news director put it to us, “People go to the RTDNA mostly to be seen. They go to the IRE to learn new things and bring that knowledge back to their newsrooms. So if I only have room for one in the budget, the IRE is a much better investment.”
Those looking to recruit for their news organizations also note that the IRE’s annual convention is way more beneficial for that purpose as well. That may explain why there were nearly ten times as many registered for the IRE event as for the RTDNA.
While we were only half-serious in proposing that the RTDNA hold its annual convention concurrently with the IRE, more than a few people asked about revisiting the idea of holding the RTDNA event in conjunction with the big NAB show each April in Las Vegas.
As we wrote back in April, we think News Directors should absolutely attend the NAB show. Having the RTDNA adjacent to that event made a ton of sense when it was done for a few years in the past. We’re told that two factors led to the end of the arrangement: the first was that the NAB stopped offering financial incentives to do so, and that some members of the RTDNA board at the time weren’t happy sharing the spotlight with the larger industry event. This same sentiment may have also led to the end of partnering with the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and other groups of journalists during the annual conferences that were held under the “Excellence In Journalism” banner.
Whatever the reasons, and whatever egos may have been involved in the seemingly fateful decision at the time, it is apparent to many that the time has come to reconsider the merits of even holding an annual conference in the future. As long-time news executive Jacques Natz replied to us on LinkedIn, “There are too many other ways to get professional growth sessions and leadership connections. Change the name and mission: focus on the Murrows.”
While we haven’t reached the conclusion that would be the best course for the RTDNA, Natz does have a point. If the association isn’t providing the opportunity to grow the next generation of newsroom leaders through an annual professional development event–whomever it can be held in conjunction with–the RTDNA board of directors needs to carefully examine, in the words of Murrow himself, “the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive.”
And for that, a great deal more than just “good luck” will be required.
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.