A few months ago, any parties who might have inquired about whether the E.W. Scripps Company might have any interest in selling any of their 60-plus local TV stations would have likely heard that there wasn’t a lot of interest from the 102-year-old media company. Scripps’ “Local News Group" was seemingly poised to be a significant player in the expected wave of deals ahead in the broadcasting business. Exhibit “A” of this appeared back in July, when Scripps and Gray announced a swap of some of their stations. The deal would give each group owner better geographic “clustering” and, not coincidentally, new duopolies in some small markets.

Many saw that deal as an early “toe in the water” just to see if the FCC was going to open the floodgates and do away with (or at least, heavily cut back on) its station ownership rules, especially the idea of allowing new duopolies in smaller markets like Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Twin Falls, Idaho.

Since then, there has been a lot of news in the station dealmaking space, but Scripps hasn’t been part of any of those deals. It hasn’t even been mentioned in the ongoing speculation about any other scenarios, either as a buyer or a seller.

Then last week, the company announced that they were selling off “just one station.” (With apologies to our friends at WSVN)

That station was WFTX, the Fox affiliate serving the Fort Myers-Naples, FL, market. The price tag announced was $40 million, and the buyer was a local outfit called Sun Broadcasting. Sun already owns WXCW, the CW affiliate in the market, along with a group of radio stations there.

(Allow us to note here that one of Sun Broadcasting's radio stations in Southwest Florida is called—and we are not making this up—“Trump Country 93.7.” The country music outlet sports the call letters “WHEL" and its online address is “radiotrump.com”. No word on whether the station is paying to license the family name, which we are pretty sure is a bit of a trademark.)

The sale of WFTX deserves more than a passing glance. First off, there is the price tag that Sun Broadcasting will pay for the station. “Fox 4,” as it is branded locally, due to its cable channel position in the market, has changed hands four times in the forty years it has been on the air. Scripps picked up the station as part of its 2014 acquisition of Journal Communications. Sources tell us that Scripps found the station in need of significant capital investment. In 2021, Scripps acquired the former network and stations of the Home Shopping Network (HSN), which had been renamed as ION. The ION network service became a subchannel on WFTX’s channel 36 digital over-the-air signal. 

Having WFTX also allowed the nascent Scripps Sports to air the games of the NHL’s Florida Panthers on a digital subchannel in the Fort Myers market. That was just in time for the team to become the Stanley Cup Champions for a second time this past June. 

Why would Scripps unload the station now? Maybe it was just a strong offer. The belief is that the purchase price for WFTX came in at a multiple of over 9X. (A reminder for those of us who didn’t get an MBA—a 9X multiple means the purchase price would be nine times a financial metric, usually called "broadcast cash flow” (BCF) or the money made after expenses, averaged over a period of time, which is typically five years. If you followed that description, it means the price of $40 million would suggest that the station was making a profit of about $4.4 million a year. Frankly, that sounds a bit high to us.)  

For comparison purposes, Hearst bought Waterman Broadcasting’s WBBH-TV, the market’s NBC affiliate, for $220 million back in April of 2023. It also continues to operate WZVN, the market’s ABC affiliate, in a “local marketing agreement” with license holder Montclair Communications. Hearst rebranded the two stations’ news operations, which operate out of a shared newsroom, under the new names of “Gulf Coast NBC” and Gulf Coast ABC."

The other local station TV operator in market number 54 is the family-owned Fort Myers Broadcasting Company. It owns WINK-TV, the market’s oldest local station and its CBS affiliate. WINK has also operated the previously mentioned WXCW as the “WINK CW” under another local marketing agreement. It also produces 9 AM and 10 PM newscasts for the CW station under the WINK News brand. It is worth noting that Sun Broadcasting’s CEO, Joe Schwartzel, was once the General Manager at WINK-TV.

With Sun’s acquisition of WFTX from Scripps, the future relationship between WINK and WXCW will likely impact the news operation at WFTX. 

Whatever the circumstances in Fort Myers, industry observers now wonder whether what led to Scripps' decision to sell WFTX is merely a “one-off” transaction or an indication that the company may look to bring in more cash by selling additional stations.

In the company press release announcing the sale of WFTX, Scripps CEO Adam Symson is quoted as saying, "Scripps is able to use the transaction to reduce debt and improve our station portfolio’s financial profile.” He goes on to justify the sale by saying it "will put the station in the hands of a locally based company with deep roots in the Southwest Florida community.”

Of course, one might ask if Scripps doesn’t really think it has enough roots in the Sunshine State with its ownership of six other Florida stations, including WFTS and WXPX in Tampa Bay, WSFL in Miami, WPTV and WHDT in West Palm Beach, or even WTXL in Tallahassee? 

Whatever that logic, $40 million is still a nice chunk of change. And it probably buys the company a little breathing room on its bottom line.

We’re hearing that those interested parties who might have been getting the cold shoulder a few months back might now be finding a bit more receptive attitude about considering some deals about taking some other stations off Scripps’ hands. (You know, in those other places where they may not have “deep roots” in the local community...) Since late 2017, when Adam Symson took over as President and CEO, E.W. Scripps Company stock has dropped from $18.00 a share to trading under $3.00 a share as of the market closed last Friday. That means the current market capitalization of the company is roughly $260 million.

And just twenty years ago, in 2005, its market cap was $8 billion. (You don’t have to have an MBA to recognize that is a pretty significant decline.)

To wrap this up, we’re not suggesting that Scripps is considering selling everything, mind you. (Unless, of course, someone comes along with an outstanding offer.) But don’t be too surprised if perhaps it ends up owning a smaller number of stations sometime down the road.

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