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.

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